Earlier this month, I finally upgraded my aging installation of Microsoft Office 2003 to Office 2010. Better late than never, right?

There are a lot of similarities, and the familiar Office programs, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, seem to have reasonably seamless compatibility with most documents created in the older versions of the programs, but there are some striking differences.

For those of you who didn’t make the transition from Office 2003 to Office 2007, the feature that’s going to cause you the most confusion is Microsoft’s “ribbon bar,” first introduced in the 2007 product, and carried forward in the 2010 upgrade.

Instead of the toolbar familiar to users of most Windows programs, and particularly the pre- 2007 versions of Office, there is now a wider “ribbon” across the top of the screen that separates the former tool buttons into tabs by function area. If you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can point the cursor at the tool bar and switch between the tabs by using the wheel.

In Word 2010, the tabs include Home, Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, View, and Add-ins. Above the ribbon is a Quick Access Toolbar where you can add a series of frequently used commands like Save, Quick Print, Email, and others. You can also place the Quick Access Toolbar below the Ribbon Bar.

If you are a regular user of the Styles feature of Word for applying font types, sizes, and formats to your text, you’ll probably like the way the Styles have been incorporated into the ribbon bar with small visuals of what each style looks like. If you select a block of text in your document and then point the cursor at one of the styles, it changes the highlighted block of text temporarily so you can see if it’s what you want. Move the cursor, and the text goes back to normal.

One subtle but very helpful update for serious writers is the appearance of a word count indicator in the status bar at the bottom left of the Word screen. In Word 2003, finding out how many words you had written involved several mouse clicks.

Perhaps one of the most confusing changes Microsoft has made in Office 2010 is the reorganization of the file management functions for each program into what it calls Backstage. Microsoft explains that the Ribbon includes the functions you use while working in a document, and Backstage is where it has placed the set of commands “you use to do things to a document.” (That’s Microsoft’s emphasis. You can read more about Backstage at http://bit.ly/sMbaKW.)

All of the Backstage functions are on a separate tab called “File” that’s common to each Office program. This is where you will find the Save, Save As, Print, and other file operation commands.

For millions familiar with the dropdown menus of earlier programs, it’s a bit of an adjustment, but Microsoft more than makes up for the changes with the broad range of functionality it has added to these programs.

In PowerPoint 2010, presenters using a laptop computer and external monitor or projector can display slides on the external monitor, and a special presenter mode on the laptop showing the last three slides, your speaker notes, and other information useful for your performance. These don’t show up on the screen the audience sees.

Outlook 2010 has hundreds of little convenience improvements. If you hover over the name of the person who sent you the email, a small contact card pops up, providing rapid shortcuts to contact information and scheduling links. At the bottom of an email in the Outlook reading pane, thumbnail images of all the people involved in an email conversation provide more information about your activities with those people with a single click.

Office 2010 also has marvelous links to integrate it with Office Web Apps and Microsoft’s new Office 365 cloud-based service for small and medium businesses. More information on Office 2010 is at office.microsoft.com.steve@compuschmooze.com