The “ribbon” UI works fairly well and actually exposes some features that were always there in the application but never really noticed or easily findable. The help system is also quite in-depth and useful. Some things have changed relatively dramatically. Making PowerPoint templates doesn’t require the tedious “editing” master slides. Rather you now create, edit and save themes – it’s really a flexible system which is quite nice and more intuitive. Excel will now create prettier “chart junk” and also has some nice table features, allowing users to sort rows and columns the way they want to view the information while not changing the underlying data. Word’s quick-edit toolbar that hovers around text that you’ve selected, really makes it easy to quickly format text. Very handy. I’m liking it so far. The only issue I had was after installation/upgrading my spell-check not working. After checking the help files and the online help, the solution turned out to be deleting a certain registry key.
Verdict: Surprisingly good.