Office 2010 Review: Inside Microsoft's Newest Suite

Outlook 2010

To the existing panes (folders, messages, reading, and calendar), the default mail view adds a people pane that shows your recent interactions with the sender of whatever message appears in the reading pane. The people pane is one of the benefits of the most interesting new feature in the beta, Outlook Social Connector, which also lets you view updates from popular social networks for contacts who are members. That function, however, works only with networks that support it with a downloadable add-on (at this writing, only Linked­In and MySpace provide add-ons; Microsoft says that Facebook and, oddly, Windows Live add-ons are due soon).

I liked Outlook's new Quick Steps feature, which is basically an easy way of creating rules and applying them to specific messages (as opposed to filters, which perform actions on a set of rule-defined messages). The app comes with several predefined Quick Steps, but creating a new one took only a few seconds and a couple of clicks.

Myriad other tweaks simplify setting up meetings from within e-mail, creating a team calendar, finding a room for a meeting, and other routine tasks. As with the other Office apps, clicking the OneNote button in Outlook's ribbon sends the item at hand (contact, e-mail message, or the like) to whatever notebook you specify.

OneNote 2010

I was particularly impressed by One­Note's ability to record audio while you're taking notes--and then to let you use the notes to play back the audio it captured as you were writing them. On the other hand, I found the program's new layers of note organization confusing: You can now create tabs and sections on three of the application window's four sides, but their hierarchy isn't immediately obvious.

Next: Microsoft's Web Apps