Office 2010 is the best software in the world

The only other option was to worm in via Outlook Web Access, but because there’s no Linux version of Internet Explorer, you were forced to use the horribly rudimentary stripped-down version, which was spitefully designed to punish people who had the barefaced cheek to run Chrome or Firefox. The old version of Outlook Web Access made Lotus Notes look cutting edge: even basic tasks such as creating a meeting were akin to a colonoscopy, and you could literally make a cup of tea in the time it took to perform a basic keyword search of your inbox.

Recently, however, the aforementioned Dennis IT manager upgraded us to Office 2010 Professional. This means we now have access to the sparkly new Outlook Web App, which is like trading in a Datsun Cherry for a BMW 5 Series with alloy wheels.

It’s not as sophisticated as Outlook 2010, but it’s not far short. Performance is excellent: there’s no more waiting 15 seconds for an email to open, search returns results a second or two after you hit Enter, and you can open attachments without having to right-click and save the file to a folder. You know, all the things other webmail clients (such as Gmail and even Microsoft’s Hotmail) have been doing since the dawn of the 21st century. It looks good too: the interface is attractive and uncluttered, although strangely doesn’t use the Ribbon interface that is now found in all of Microsoft’s other Office apps, both client and web.


As Jon Honeyball noted in a recent column on Office 2007, the Outlook Web App might well be the only email client many people need. The only problem I had is that it doesn’t automatically fetch new email using Chrome in Ubuntu in the same way that it does when accessed via the same browser in Windows. Why, I simply do not know.


While I was experimenting, I decided to give the other Office Web Apps another go, having not used them in anger for the best part of a year. I had a 3,000 word feature to edit, so cut and paste it into the Word Web App and set about the task. The last time I tried the online version of Word, performance was a little sluggish when dealing with hefty documents. There was a slight lag between typing and seeing the words (some of them spelt correctly) appearing on screen, which was just irritating enough to put me off. Now, performance appears much smoother, even if the feature set is rudimentary compared to rivals such as Zoho. The Word Web App’s spellcheck, for example, is an unusable mess.