Thread: 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 somuch 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 screens hots. translations and sharing.

Excel 2010:

Sparklines let you create small graphs within a single cell to quickly analyzea 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.



PowerPoint 2010:

Image. video and audio editing is now built-in. 0 need for 3rd party tools! A ton of new animation effects and display options also round out this app.


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. fontformatting. 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 on line edition and cheap for its desktop equivalents.