As regular readers will know I’m a big Microsoft fan, even if sometimes for no other reason than to annoy all my friends that use Macs. For the last month I have been testing out their new version of Microsoft Office 2010 and thought I would share what I think are the top ten new features. Office has more than 100 new and improved features, and has already been downloaded over 7.5 million times for the beta version alone. Office 2010 is now on general release at all computer shops everywhere, click here for a price guide, or here to go the Office 2010 site and try it out yourself.
Top 10 Office 2010 New Features
- Web Apps: Office 2010 has full integration with Microsoft’s new online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote allowing you to save, share and edit documents online. Microsoft has given 25 Gig free storage space to all users on its skydrive service. All you will need is a free hotmail or windows live account. This is a huge rival to the likes of Google docs. Click here to give web apps a try for yourself.
Backstage: when you now click the file tab Office 2010 brings up a new window called backstage. Its kind of like the command centre for Excel, Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, where users can send, save, share and see print previews and info about their documents etc without closing out the current doc.
Picture editing in word: Word now has a great picture editing suite built in. Its not going to rival Photoshop but for editing pics in Word its pretty impressive, you can choose from a ton of different effect options, and even remove the background from a photo, and capture screen grabs without having to leave Word.- Powerpoint video editing: You can now import a video clip into PowerPoint and then trim the clip, compress it, and even change video colours etc etc. This is a great time saving device and much better than the original method of having to link to video files in presentations.
- Office 2010 Speed: I noticed the speed of the programmes has sped up pretty considerably, especially in Outlook. Now all the programs start up quickly and even basic functions like saving files, importing data, and previewing edits have been optimised for speediness.
- Ribbon bar: The ribbon bar that shows you all a programs functions has now been extended to the entire Office line-up, and it can be fully customized. This was always a feature I loved in Word and now its available in Outlook too, making navigation and editing way faster.
- Outlook Quick Steps: Quick steps lets you define common tasks that you perform on a regular basis and wish to have them done with one click. i.e. you could setup a quick step to move all e-mails from joe@blogs.com to your friends folder with just one click. You can also assign keyboard shortcuts to each quick step as well. Once created, the Quick Step appears in its own section of the ribbon on the first tab.
- Outlook Conversation View: Put simply, it lumps all replies to a message into a single item in the message list, eliminating the inbox full of “Re:” this and “Re:” that. If you need it you can see every message in the thread with a single click. It’s even more intelligent and capable than the Gmail equivalent.
- Outlook Social Connector: Social networking site feeds from Facebook, Linkedin and Myspace can now be linked to your relevant contacts in Outlook. You can also click on one persons name and you will see a panel that shows all email correspondence, and social network updates for that person as well as their picture.
- PowerPoint Broadcast: PowerPoint Broadcast lets you broadcast a PowerPoint presentation on the web, live. The cloud-based service is free, all you need is a Windows Live/hotmail ID. All you do is save your presentation the Broadcast service, grab the generated URL, send the link to the relevant people, then when the viewer clicks the link, it launches the presentation in their browser so they can view the presentation along with the your instructions all live.
There are a whole host of other upgrades and features, such as being able to preview copy and paste edits. To put it simply though, if you are looking for a full office suite then Microsoft office is still the only way to go and with 2010 they have just made it better and more user friendly. Click here for a video look at the new Office.
To find out more on Office 2010 click here.
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