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I like free stuff.  Free stuff is good.  Good free stuff is better…

Right now, Microsoft is running BETA tests on MS Office 2010.  And it is a public BETA, so ANYONE can download and install the total MS Office suite.  This includes:

• Word
• Excel
• PowerPoint
• One Note
• Outlook
• Access
• Publisher
• InfoPath
• SharePoint Workspace
• Communicator

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This depends on exactly which version you download.  I didn’t get InfoPath, SharePoint Workspace or Communicator.

And there certainly are some things to keep in mind.  To start with, these are only going to run until October of 2010 (I have been told…).  Also, they are BETA releases, and so there may be bugs.  Microsoft has some specific instruction for trying it out.

Outlook 2010…

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The reason I even ran across this is that I needed a calendar.  I have been sifting through a

PILE of calendar solutions over the last couple of weeks and not found a single one I liked as much as my old Outlook Calendar.  And I like the new one, too.

I haven’t even opened the rest of the software, nor have I set up Outlook to handle my email… I am using Thunderbird 3… but just having the calendar function makes it worthwhile for me.

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In the coming weeks I will likely dive into Publisher, and One Note has long been something I like to use with my Tablet PC.  I will also try to compare the functionality of Word and Excel to their counterparts in Open Office.

In  the mean time, they are free to try.

One last thing to keep in mind, this is a BIG download.  Expect it to take quite a while to download…

Here is the download link…