That's a great question! We've toured Microsoft Office 2010 in videos and screenshots, highlighted its killer features, and explained how to get the lowest price on the productivity suite. But between all the solid free alternatives and previous versions of Office, is it worth upgrading?

The answer is, of course: It depends. The fact of the matter is, many of us don't need the insanely powerful feature set offered by Office 2010 (or even older versions of Office) for the basic document creation and spreadsheet editing we do from day to day. (Hell, you can even tackle mail merge with Gmail and Google Spreadsheets.) What's more, absolutely free, open-source tools like OpenOffice.org provide many of the more powerful features you'd want from a desktop office suite.

So why would you upgrade to Office 2010? Really, you'd do it when you want the best of all worlds. If you need every powerful number-crunching, presentation-making, email-managing, document-creating feature available only in Office, you rely on tools like Outlook or OneNote, you need rock-solid offline support (big one), or you have to traffic in Office documents for the work you do (alternatives like Google Docs will export to Office formats and import Office docs, but it's not perfect), then definitely upgrade. The upgrade comes with plenty of perks, including improvements to the ribbon, some integration with Microsoft Office Web Apps (Microsoft 's lackluster version of Google Docs that syncs with your desktop files), and plenty more. When it comes down to it, though, the only reason to upgrade to Office 2010—or pay for a suite like Office at all—is if it's the only tool capable of doing what you need done, and it does it how you prefer it's done.

Me? I'm taking the Google approach of sticking with Office 2007 + Google Apps. Of course I'd be happy to have a free copy of Office 2010 if anyone from Microsoft wants to try to win me over, but something tells me I'll be sticking with my original plan...