Parallels Desktop 10 gains experimental support for Office/Windows 10 Technical Preview

Parallels Desktop Windows 10 Technical Preview

Our own Jeff Benjamin showed you earlier how anyone can try Windows 10 Technical Preview on their Mac for free, using VMware Fusion.

But if you use Parallels’ award-winning virtualization software, you must check out its most recent update.

Announced today, it enables experimental support for running both Office 10 and Windows 10 previews on your Mac.

The latest release of Parallels Desktop for Mac (10.1.4, build 28883), which can be downloaded from parallels.com/desktop, is required for experimental support for Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 9926) and Office Preview for Windows 10 which includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The included wizard will even download the Windows 10 Technical Preview directly from within Parallels Desktop and create a virtual machine for your copy of Windows 10 Technical Preview.

As we previously detailed, Windows 10 Technical Preview includes features like the new Start menu, Photos, Maps app, Cortana and Windows Store beta which offers Office Preview for Windows 10.

The software giant promised to make Windows 10 a free upgrade from Windows 8.1, Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 7, “for the first year after Windows 10 is available.”

Shown on the top screenshot: Windows 10 Technology Preview and Word Preview for Windows 10 running in Parallels Desktop 10 on a Mac running OS X Yosemite.

And here’s Jeff’s video walkthrough about installing Windows 10 Technical Preview using the free VMware Fusion virtualization software.

In addition to running Windows 10 Technology Preview alongside OS X using free virtualization software like Oracle’s VM VirtualBox and the aforementioned VMWare Fusion, or paid ones with more features like Parallels Desktop, you can now try out Office for Windows 10 yourself.

According to a post on Microsoft’s Office Blog, folks signed up for the Windows 10 Technical Preview can download the universal Word, Powerpoint and Excel apps from the Windows Store Beta, with the universal editions of Outlook and Calendar expected at a later date.

Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar for Windows 10

Like in iOS, universal Windows apps combine in a single binary the code and assets needed to render its user interface properly across variously sized screens, ranging from touch-friendly smartphones and tablets to desktop computers.

With Parallels Desktop, you can run OS X and various operating systems side-by-side on your Mac. While this results in a slower performance versus dual-booting, virtualization gives you the flexibility to choose whichever operating systems best fits your needs, be it OS X Yosemite / Mavericks / Mountain Lion, Chrome OS, Android, Windows 8 or 7 or one of the many flavors of Linux.

The app costs $80, or $40 if you’re a student. A free two-week trial is available.

Source: Parallels