Microsoft Office 2010 Starter Is Not Worth The Price
June 22nd, 2010 by K. T. Bradford 
Now that Microsoft Office 2010 has hit the streets, new netbooks and notebooks will no longer come with Microsoft Works and a limited free trial of the Office suite. Instead, users will have the option to purchase or activate one of the full versions of the program or roll with the pre-installed Starter edition.
We’ve known for a while that this was coming and that Starter would have some limitations. I myself predicted that this “choice” would send consumers running for free alternatives like OpenOffice. After having used Starter, I’m sure of it.
Office 2010’s Starter Edition is meant to give users a taste of the new suite while taking away enough features to ensure they’ll want to upgrade. The moving ad in the corner, the even more annoying ribbon on top (I know, I didn’t think it could get more annoying, either), and the sidebar taking up way too much space in my work window are definitely enough to annoy me away from the program. Then there are these lists of all the things Word Starter and Excel Starter won’t do. My favorites:
- No Ribbon customizations
- No footnotes/endnotes
- No citations or bibliography
- No comments
- No Track Changes
- No document protection
- No PivotTables/Pivot Charts
- No connections to external data
- No changing column and row headings
There are a few other differences to note here. Users can still open documents with these and other features, but Starter won’t create or modify any of them. It’s like Microsoft took a list of things students were most likely to need and made sure to hamper or disable them all.
The most annoying aspect in my eyes is the sidebar on the right. It takes up a lot of pixels. So many that, when on a standard 1024 x 600 netbook screen, there isn’t always enough room to see a full page horizontally at 100 percent zoom. You have to take it down to 90 percent unless you like wider margins.
This sidebar is persistent because that’s where the ad unit is. Right now it appears to only run Microsoft ads, though that will change soon, I’m sure. Thing is, the MS ads are bad enough — they won’t stop moving. The animation is limited to slides that change too often right now, but it doesn’t fill me with confidence for the company’s ad quality control. Are we going to get animated ads next? Will random music start playing?
This, of course, distracts from whatever you’re trying to do. In a word processor, it’s a safe bet you’re likely writing. Try concentrating on that with an ever changing image in the corner annoying you for attention every 3 seconds.
Via this ad I learned that right now Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student is only $119, down from $149. That’s nice to know. However, if I’m a college kid on a budget, or the parent of a college kid on a budget, or just a person in the world on a budget, and I’ve just paid hundreds of dollars for a computer, I might not have $119 for an office suite. Especially if the computer in question is a secondary device, like a netbook.
If I were the people behind OpenOffice.org I would find some way to scrounge up the money to advertise the fact that your product offers far, far more functionality than Office 2010 Starter but is just as free. And doesn’t come with ads! There’s a huge opportunity here, especially with the Back to School season around the corner.
I’d offer the same advice to Mozilla, who really hasn’t done enough to promote Thunderbird 3.0 as a viable alternative to Outlook for consumers and businesses.
My advice? Don’t even bother with Starter if you don’t intend to buy the full version of Office 2010. Just download OpenOffice and get on with life. If you’re not a fan of OpenOffice, you’d still be better off finding inexpensive (and unopened) older versions of Office still lingering on the Internet then settling for this free alternative.
Our Related Content
- Top 10 Office 2010 Tips
- Embed YouTube Videos in your PowerPoint Presentations in Office 2010
- Use Outlook Social Connector to See Your Contacts Network Updates in Office 2010
From Other Sites
- Get Microsoft Office Starter 2010 for Free (Notebooks.com)
- Remove A Photo's Background Using Office 2010 (Notebooks.com)
- How to Reinstall or Repair Microsoft Office (Notebooks.com)
June 22nd, 2010 at 1:25 pm
You got a choice….
You got alternatives…
Its OpenOffice! Its free. Its a very good alternative.
June 22nd, 2010 at 3:46 pm
There si much better choice now. It is called Kingsoft Office 2010 from BinaryNow. No advertisement and better compatibility with docx, xlsx, pptx than Openoffice and mainly, small, fast, no ribbom, perfect option for netbook users. It is not free, but I gladly paid $40 for it, after I got chance to test the trial from:
http://www.binarynow.com/products/kingsoft-office/
June 24th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
The alternatives you all suggested still needs Java to run on. That’s an extra 250 Mb of lost hard drive space, not even to mention all the RAM it eats.
Now who needs bloatware on their systems?
June 24th, 2010 at 12:41 pm
On a system with a 160GB or 250GB hard drive, 250 extra MB isn’t going to harm you. And I’ve been running OpenOffice on my Samsung NC10 with 1GB of RAM and haven’t noticed any undue sluggishness.
June 26th, 2010 at 11:03 am
Well… not all people are as lucky as you.
Some still have very old systems to work on.
July 8th, 2010 at 6:32 pm
Openoffice wont need Java to run. The only things which may complain about java, are some useless wizards. Openoffice itself works perfectly without java.
There’s another thing, which Excel Starter cannot do – unfreeze frozen panels.
July 21st, 2010 at 3:41 pm
What if Starter comes free already installed on a netbook? would you trash it? sounds to me as if I would end up pissed off after about 10 minutes… I hate intrusive ads in products for which I pay.
August 20th, 2010 at 1:01 am
Office Starter Edition costs OEMs about US$5 to install on your nice new PC/laptop/whatever; so in essence it costs you absolutely nothing.
If you dont like it, uninstall it; that process takes maybe 2 minutes? If you want to upgrade to ANY other Microsoft Office 2010 Suite; your computer has the files installed already, just punch in the serial number & all of the features of your suite will be made available…
“Not Worth The Price”? but its basically free?! Honestly K. T. Bradford; I wonder if anything would make you happy.
Oh, and who’s PC has a screen res of 1024×600 these days? sounds like a complaint that will not be shared by an overwhelming majority of the population.
August 22nd, 2010 at 3:09 am
I’m confused??
What do you mean that you can put in a serial number and get all the features unlocked for Office starter?
And will that silly advert go away? where do I get the serial number from?
And I thought that you had to pay to get the serial number, which is okay if it’s not so expensive. I swear it costs half of what some netbooks go for!!!
November 24th, 2010 at 11:00 am
Wouldn’t it be funny to see Open Office and Mozilla purchase ads to run in MS Office 2010 Starter promoting Open Office and Thunderbird?
January 12th, 2011 at 11:59 pm
To Matt Harding:
1024×600 is the standard resolution on the latest small netbooks. All those 10.1 inch screens. Personally I love OpenOffice for my PC but what should my kid use on his new netbook?
February 13th, 2011 at 10:36 pm
An excellent free alternative to the OpenOffice.org suite is the forked code of the LibreOffice Suite managed by The Document Foundation. Runs on Windows, Mac OS-X, and Linux platforms. Both the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice packages are full featured office suites that import and export Microsoft formatted files quite well.
Also, there is the free cross platform AbiWord package for really simple word processing work. Small (7.9 Mb), fast and lots of features.
All of above are Free Open Source Software (FOSS) without any adware or significant licensing issues.
February 22nd, 2011 at 10:51 am
Office starter 2010 works fine on my 1920-1080 monitor (desktop computer) and offers the basic functionality that myself and most home users need. It might be a poor product for notebooks, but for free on my desktop I”m not complaining. I’m so used to banners and adds as part of my computer experience that I don’t even notice them.
October 22nd, 2011 at 4:40 pm
Have just bought a netbook with Office 2010 starter. Am busy deleting it. No space left to to work! Will try Open Office and if I don’t like it, then back to good old Office 97 professional – designed for adults who don’t like stupid colours – that works brilliantly with Vista and XP on my other machines and will probably work with 7. Can’t believe the amount of pre-installed trash on my new netbook. it’s so irritating to lose an evening’s work just making the thing comfortable to use. Why do I want ebay and amazon pre-installed, for pity’s sake? It’s like buying a fridge and finding it comes full of junk food and thing you’re allergic to…
November 23rd, 2011 at 10:11 am
what your referring to is the STARTER!!!! of course its going to have ads and not have full access to all its features. its to try to persuade you buy it. If you went out and bought the full version, you wouldn’t have ads and you would have access to all of the features. I have tried both Open Office and Libre Office and when trying to make a collage, it freezes and you can’t move forward with your project. I would Highly recommend getting Office 2010 or an older version.
November 23rd, 2011 at 1:32 pm
Let’s be real. When it comes to the average college kid, they’ll have no problem pirating the full MS Office suite. On their computers, you’re also likely to find Adobe CS5 and 2TB of music and video they didn’t pay for.
My point is that I don’t see any victims here at all.