For those of you who found yourselves breathless with anticipation after watching the Office 2010 Movie Trailers, you might just be the perfect candidate for the technical preview. Currently Microsoft is looking beta testers who fall into the home, or student category, and are willing to fill out a short survey via the connect website. The survey will ask for basic information about your PC, your OS, and what you currently use for an office suite, nothing overly personal. You will need a free Windows Live account (or Hotmail), and it sounds like they are looking for plenty of volunteers.

People with Office 2007 probably won’t notice much of a difference, but I highly encourage curious users with older versions of Office, as well as Open Office, to give the new ribbon UI a try. It takes some getting used to, but does a pretty good job of exposing functionality that was previously hidden to novice or casual users.

Hit the jump to watch one of the official Office 2010 Movie Teasers.

Open Office has been around in one form or another for over nine years now. But the once little known productivity suite known back then as StarOffice has evolved considerably over the years. Today the Sun Microsystems freebee is admittedly a fairly full featured alternative to Microsoft Office. Open Office in fact has become so useful that Maximum PC Editor and Chief Will Smith has admitted its open source charm (and free price tag) has finally won over his home PC for casual word processing. Fans of the platform have another reason to get excited these days with the impending launch of version 3.0. The new version will further improve compatibility when working with Microsoft Office files and will include additional support for the open file format OpenDocument which is to be integrated into Office 2007. For those looking to give version 3 a try, a public beta is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. But for corporate users looking to implement Open Office you should follow the links instead to the version named StarOffice. The retail version will cost you about $69.95, but it includes technical support and intellectual property indemnification. For those keeping track Open Office 2 launched on October 20th 2005 and the latest stable version is 2.4.1 which was released in June.

So are you ready to abandon Microsoft Office?