Microsoft Reveals Office 2010 Requirements

If your company uses Microsoft (News - Alert) Office, as most do, then you may be contemplating an upgrade to Office 2010 when that version is released the first half of this year. Microsoft recently published the requirements for the new edition to help organizations determine whether or not they can run Office 2010.

 

In a nutshell, Microsoft says that if you can run Office 2007, you can run Office 2010. The memory and processor requirements for Office 2010 are the same as those for 2007. But - yes, there's always a ‘but’ - PCs with a multi-core processor and dedicated graphics will be better equipped to take advantage of certain new features in Office. And those of you still running Office 2003 may bump into an issue or two, but more depending on the age and configuration of your computers than on your Office edition.

 

Acknowledging that its customers hate upgrading PCs just to support a new version of Office, Microsoft said its goal with Office 2010 was to keep the requirements light, virtually the same as for 2007. The folks in Redmond also changed to just one set of requirements. In the past, the company typically published both minimum and recommended requirements. But Microsoft claimed this confused many customers. I'm not sure why—I always found the distinction useful. But for whatever reason, the company decided to just advertise minimum requirements for Office 2010, which are:

 

- Intel (News - Alert) Pentium III processor, 500 MHz

- 256 MB PC100 SDRAM

- Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3

 

Now those specs would cover just about any computer less than ten years old. That's why I've never found minimum requirements particularly helpful without also adding in recommended requirements.

 

But on Microsoft's end, the Office team responsible for testing the suite found that the minimum requirements would be sufficient for basic tasks like editing a 20-page document in Word, creating simple pie charts in Excel, and putting together a few slides in Powerpoint. These specs would also let you run two separate Office applications at the same time. In other words, the minimum requirements are meant for what Microsoft considers a typical user.

 

To derive the requirements, the team said it put Office 2010 through intensive testing on machines with the minimum specs. The testers found that the PCs were a bit slower at running Office 2010 than the average machine, but still quite usable. The minimum requirements also pave the way for Office 2010 to be used on netbooks, which generally run with a 1.6GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM (News - Alert), still more than enough.

 

The only requirement higher for Office 2010 than for 2007 is disk space, which now requires an extra 1GB to 1.5GB. But that shouldn't pose a challenge for most corporate PCs unless they're already overloaded with apps and low on space.

 

Office 2010 will run under all current versions of Windows, both client and server, specifically Windows 7, Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3, Windows Server 2003 R2, and Windows 2008. Unless you're still running Windows 2000 or another OS around the same age, these requirements shouldn't present a problem either.

 

Office 2010 will offer another change—it'll be the first version to come in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. As with most 64-bit apps, the 64-bit flavor of Office 2010 will make better use of memory and most likely be speedier than its 32-bit cousin. But I don't see this having much impact in the corporate world, at least not yet. Except possibly for IT folks, most business users are not likely to be running a 64-bit operating system. Unless a computer holds 4GB or more of RAM, there's not much benefit from it at this point. And a 64-bit OS opens up a hornet's nest of hardware and driver compatibility problems that most IT pros wouldn't want to deal with.

 

But as new computers increasingly come with 4GB of RAM, vendors are equipping them with 64-bit versions of Windows. So the move to 64-bit is something you'll want to keep an eye on, not just for Office 2010 but for all the other software and hardware you run at your company.

 

Finally, PCs with a dedicated graphics processor will deliver more oomph if you're creating sophisticated charts in Excel or populating your Powerpoint slides with videos and cool transitions.

 

Overall, whatever OS and Office version you currently run, it looks like Microsoft tried to keep the requirements for Office 2010 in check, certainly a good sign. But if the new Office is on your horizon and you want to get a jump on testing, your best bet is to download the beta from Microsoft's Office Web site.