Microsoft confirmed that Office 2010 has reached the Release Candidate stage

Microsoft officials have confirmed that it has recently released a Release Candidate (RC) build of Office 2010 to private beta testers.

In January this year, an early Release Candidate builds began leaking to the web , as Microsoft was preparing for the RC release to Technology Adoption Program (TAP) testers.A Russian site also confirmed that build 14.0.4734.1000 is an RTM escrow build that Microsoft is testing internally.

Some screenshots of the build were leaked  out last week and a download of it was made available on some downloading sites early this week.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed: “Microsoft made a release candidate available to members in the Technology Adoption Program (TAP). This is one of Microsoft’s planned milestones in the engineering process; however they do not have plans to make this new code set available broadly.”

This January Microsoft announced the pricing of Office 2010. The professional edition will price for $499 boxed. Office 2010 will be released in at least five different flavours, which is also including a free version that includes Microsoft Word and Excel, but it comes with limited functionality and includes advertisements.

The editions of Office 2010 will include Starter, Home and Business,Home and Student,  Professional and Professional Academic. Microsoft is expected to hit the RTM milestone in the coming months with a general availability date of June 2010.