I initially resisted the upgrade from office 2003 to 2007 because i really hated the ribbon interface and i did not want to spend valuable time learning what I considered to be an awkward, counter-intuitive, even dumbed-down interface, and to be forced into making additional mouse clicks for functions whose location I already knew instinctively following 15 years of Office use.
However, I recently needed to replace my old laptop with a Windows 7 one. I tried to install my old copy of Office 2003 on it. Unfortunately MS made sure it did not work 100%, in particular Outlook with Connector would not access hotmail and live email accounts. MS always seem to do this, they eventually frustrate the user and force them to spend money on an upgrade. I had no option but to upgrade because my email refused to work properly despite my best technical efforts.
The price of Office 2010 at the time of purchase was discounted quite significantly, so that helped the decision to buy. You can install it on 2 computers, not 3 as someone else mentioned. But this can only effectively be 1 desktop and 1 on a laptop. I did not fully read the license but my guess is that you cannot actually run both concurrently, but that's not a problem for me.
When Office 2010 arrived i feared the worst in terms of function confusion and the horrible ribbon interface, but i was really very surprised at seeing a much more logical and improved ribbon. Sure, it took a few days to get used to it after office 2003, but eventually you realise that it is quite logical and I found some functions readily accessible that were previously buried away. Unfortunately though some other readily accessible features are located an extra one or two mouse clicks away.
The best improvement for me is in Outlook 2010 with the improved task management and calendars. On the downside IMAP connections to gmail are strangely much slower, in fact painfully slow, compared to 2003. This is especially strange since the free Windows Live Mail simply flies through each email in Gmail IMAP. Similarly with Connector and live hotmail. I also like the ability to preview the content of email attachements within the window of the message, very useful.
I could write a whole detailed review but simply do not have the time now, but I thought that i would share my personal general impressions with anyone interested in hearing how an experienced IT user who was highly sceptical but then became pleasantly surprised by this quite decent upgrade. Well done MS...finally. It would get 5 stars had I not been forced to upgrade.