Publisher 2010 Public Beta Now Available

Today, the Publisher 2010 Public Beta is as the name suggests, available to the public. This means that you can now go download it, along with the rest of Office 2010, from www.microsoft.com/2010. Go ahead. Go download it. I’ll still be here when you get back.

In my July post about the Technical Preview, I called out the feature areas at the core of this release. They are:

- The Office ribbon

- Lots of enhancements to the core document workspace

- Some great picture enhancements

- Cool new typography features

- An integrated Print and Print Preview experience

Read more about each of these in the original post or check out this list of the top 10 benefits of Publisher 2010. With this Beta, you’ll also see more online content coming from the beta Office.com site. In many template categories of the New experience in the Backstage, you’ll see fresh content from Office.com at the top.

We’ve fixed a whole lot of bugs since the Preview and made a number of changes based on user feedback. In direct response to your feedback, we now show you more pages in the Page Navigation pane by default, the Review tab is back and PDF’s can be password protected at generation time. How did we know how you felt about these things? One of the ways is the Send a Smile tool that is included again with the Public Beta. This lets you send us comments and a screenshot of what you are doing.

Enough talk for now. Go download the beta and send us a smile or frown to let us know what you think.

About the contributor: Jeff Bell is the Group Program Manager for the Publisher & Text Services team in Office.