Microsoft Office 2010 hits retail today

The latest installment of Office, Microsoft's long-running productivity suite was slated for a June release, and today is the day it lands in retail.

Yesterday, popular office supply store Staples sent out a mass email saying "Microsoft Office 2010 is Here!" with a link to a pre-order site, but we checked three local Staples stores in the Baltimore metro area, and none of them had the software stocked on shelves yet.

This morning, however, Microsoft made the Office 2010 retail launch official, and the software is now available in more than 35,000 retail stores worldwide; including Best Buy, Office Depot, Fnac, Harvey Norman, and PC World.

Office 2010's beta phase was dramatically larger than it had been with previous versions, with some 9 million downloads from MSDN and TechNet.

Some highlights of Office 2010: