Microsoft slates Office 2010 public beta for November

Microsoft will launch the public beta of Office 2010 next month, company CEO Steve Ballmer said on Monday.

In a keynote that kicked off Microsoft's SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas, Ballmer announced that the public beta of Office 2010 will be made available in November.

When pressed for details, a Microsoft spokeswoman said the company did not have a specific timeline beyond Ballmer's pinning the beta to next month.

So far, Microsoft has offered a preview of its next desktop suite only to a relatively small group of testers. It has also opened the online edition , Office Web Apps, to a similar preview. Office Web Apps includes lightweight versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint and will be made available to millions free of charge in the first half of next year, the only timetable Microsoft has set for Office 2010's ship date.

Anyone will be eligible to test drive the Office 2010 beta, said Microsoft today. However, the company declined to answer questions about whether the number of copies of the beta will be limited -- as it tried to do with the Windows 7 beta earlier this year -- or be available only for a limited time, as was the Windows 7 release candidate.

Last summer, Microsoft said that it expected to distribute millions of copies of the Office 2010 public beta.

In April, Microsoft said that it would not offer users the chance to test Office 2010, as it had done with other editions, including Office 2007. The company quickly backtracked , saying that it had simply given "the wrong impression" about its plans.

Also unknown is whether Microsoft will charge users to download the beta, a tactic it used with the second beta of Office 2007, when it let customers try out the suite from within their browsers for free, but charged them $1.50 to download the preview. The latter move, Microsoft said in July 2006, was because "the beta 2 downloads have exceeded our goals," prompting it to "implement a cost-recovery measure."

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