Microsoft Project Professional 2010

Project Professional 2010 is the latest incarnation of Microsoft's project management package, which this time around gains a fresh new look and some extremely useful features.

There's a new timeline view that's automatically displayed above other views, for instance. It makes a neat visual summary of your entire schedule, but that's not all. You can add tasks to it directly, print it out, even paste the timeline into an email for a quick and easy report.

Data entry is improved in many ways. It's now possible to add columns by entering data directly into the cells, no need to select a data type. Row height adjusts automatically to display the contents of a cell, and enhanced copy and paste allows you to transfer data between apps without losing your outline levels or formatting.

A new Team Planner helps manage your resources, displaying at a glance everything that your team are doing, unassigned work and more. Moving tasks from one person to another is as easy as dragging and dropping.

New SharePoint Foundation 2010 options include the ability to convert your task lists into a Project schedule, or publish your project schedule to a SharePoint Foundation 2010 task list (the two will automatically be synchronised).

And a host of other tweaks include more flexible user-controlled scheduling; the ability to make tasks active or inactive; extended colour palette and formatting options to ensure important tasks stand out; new alerts to warn you of scheduling concerns; and the ability to share your project plan with others by saving them to PDF or XPS files.

Please note, the download link will take you to the Microsoft Office Online site. Click the "TRY IT FREE" link, create an account if you don't have one already, and you'll be given the download link and product key necessary to activate the trial software.

And don't worry, you can install and run Project Professional 2010 alongside previous versions without their being affected. Although if you want to protect yourself further then you could always install it into something other than the default \Program Files\Microsoft Office folder. Launch the Setup program and choose a Custom installation for the options you need.

Verdict

Microsoft Project Professional 2010 sees many improvements to task management, scheduling and general ease of use. We suspect it's probably going to be a worthwhile upgrade for most people, but at this price there's no substitute for finding out for yourself - so go download the trial version immediately