Preview : Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft Office is arguably the most widely used application in the world

today. Its latest version, Office 2010 has a number of new features. The Ribbon

is now all pervasive and finally applications like Outlook, OneNote and Visio

also get the ribbon interface which makes working with the suite so much

simpler. Another major change all around is the inclusion of a new feature

called BackStage. This is viewed in each application by clicking the Office

Orb-the replacement of the File menu. Instead of a menu popping up, there is a

full screen window that displays all the different tasks that you can perform.

For instance, the Print menu not only shows you all the print options, but the

Print Preview is built-in too! Let's look at the changes in the key software.

Outlook 2010: The Ribbon, ability to manage multiple Exchange accounts in a

single profile, the Quick Steps bar which allows you to perform common

multi-step tasks in a single click, and viewing mails in a new 'Conversation

View' which not only groups messages, but also shows the latest messages and

senders in a single line. There are many other new features as well that make

managing mails and schedules much easier.

Word 2010: Built-in image editing tools that let you perform most common

tasks from within Word itself, tons of new SmartArt, a completely new Search

mechanism which makes looking for anything very intuitive, lots of new visual

effects and built-in tools for putting screenshots, translations and sharing.

Outlook finally gets the Ribbon control along with other apps.

Excel 2010: SparkLines let you create small graphs within a single cell to

quickly analyze a series of data while Slicers allow you to drill into your

important data in a PivotTable. The software provides more detailed conditional

formatting and tons of new data visualization options.

The mail conversation view shows you the latest mails as well as the reply threads using the small orange icons.	The BackStage view lets you perform common tasks on documents.

PowerPoint 2010: Image, video and audio editing is now built-in. No need for

3rd party tools! A ton of new animation effects and display options also round

out this app.

The new print menu has a built-in Print Preview mode.	Advanced video display and editing tools in PowerPoint. Notice that the video is also rendered with a reflection on the slide for great looking presentations.

Sparklines let you quickly analyze data in Excel.

Office over Internet



The single biggest feature of Office 2010 is the ability to view and edit

your Office documents through a Web browser, if those are stored on the

Internet. All you need is a Windows Live account and you will be given space to

store Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files. All your rich graphics, font

formatting, SmartArt, headers & footers will be retained as is and any changes

you make to the online version will be automatically synced back to the desktop

version or vice-versa. As of this writing, the Office Web version is still under

wraps and is expected to come out by the end of July. So should you go for this

new version? Well it completely depends on your productivity suite usage — and

the best part is that you can use some of the new features even for free. For

instance, even if you have Office 2007, you can use the Office 2010 Web suite,

but will miss out on the auto-sync capability. You can use the online suite to

get most — but not all of the extremely cool features available in the desktop

edition. For students and individuals, the features would be good enough given

the price — free for the online edition and cheap for its desktop equivalents.

Features for corporates



For corporates, the story changes slightly. Office 2010 will allow for

central management and deployment as earlier versions. What you can do is also

share out documents across teams in a central SharePoint server and get access

to even more features in the Web version than the free suite. This makes using

the Office Desktop + Web suite even more attractive for corporate users. For

instance, you can actually reduce costs of Office deployments by having only

certain Office desktop clients installed for most people and let them use

features off SharePoint in the Web version instead. You will however not want

Office 2010 if your document needs are very basic. For instance, if you do not

need to create visually rich docs or complex pivot tables, you can stick with a

cheaper or online only alternative. The cost of the software versus the cost of

lesser productivity or poorer impact is something that you will need to

evaluate.