Microsoft Office 2010 was a big star of today’s opening keynote at Microsoft’s WPC 2009 event, and boy did it shine brightly! The new version of Office is always exciting and there have been some features leaking out recently, mainly around Outlook with it’s “mute button” and conversation threading etc, but the video demo’s today were amazing.
Unfortunately the keynote video isn’t available on demand yet is available on demand now at www.digitalwpc.com (as I couldn’t get over to N’Orleans), so I’ll have to try and remember the new features that I saw for now 🙂
Word 2010: One new feature of Word is an improved Copy & Paste function. At first glance you wouldn’t think you could do much with it, but it is actually a great new addition-it gives you a live preview of what you’re about to paste…clever eh? I often hit “Ctrl + V” only to find that it’s something completely different than I expected so this will definitely come in handy… as Stephen Elop (MS Business Division President) says, the aim is to get users away from the pattern of “paste, oops, undo”.
Powerpoint 2010: Two big additions to Powerpoint 2010 are Photo Editing & Video Editing. These give you the ability to crop the image/video, change colours and hues, add borders etc all within Powerpoint; that will definitely make creating slide shows quicker, easier and more enjoyable!
Another great feature is the ability to “broadcast” your slideshow via a Live-Meeting style effort so people can see it in real-time. This feature extends to users of mobile devices and not just Windows Mobile-iPhones too!
Excel 2010: Many of the new features in Excel 2010 are centered around Business Intelligence (BI). One such feature is Sparklines: these give a snapshot of data trends in a single cell, which makes charting many different data ranges in one datasheet much easier, and much more attractive for readers 🙂
Outlook 2010: Outlook now has the ribbons interface to bring it in line with Word, Excel etc and also contains many new features. Namely the “Mute Button” which will allow you to remove yourself from the “Reply All” floods that occue when someone accidentally puts the addresses in “To” rather than “Bcc” and everyone, for some reason, decide that they need to “Reply All” each time. This quite quickly makes your inbox a joke…now however with a simple click of the mouse they’re all gone…plus it also keeps any future replies from appearing too 🙂
Another new Outlook feature I’d forgotten about is Mail Tips, which provides info & hints to help prevent you making daft mistakes! Just added 250 names in the “To” field-it’ll tell you…sending a mail to someone who’s out of office-it’ll tell you…added people outside of your organization-it’ll tell you (to help prevent confidential info leaking out) and much more 🙂
Conversation View lets you group emails by conversation helping clear up inbox clutter. This is a BIG one for me!
Sharepoint 2010: This wasn’t really demo’d during today’s keynote so I don’t have much to say (yet) other than it has the ribbon interface and “embraces” social media/web 2.0.
Office 2010 now supports co-authoring, this means that multiple people can work on the same document at the same time without users receiving the “this document is already in use” error…this is really something and gives a pretty big middle finger to other pretenders to the crown such as Google Apps and Zoho.
So far I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen of Office 2010 and by the end of the week I expect to be even more impressed!
A great top 10 features list can be found here, props to Sarah for this 🙂
Thanks to Techcrunch for the pics…
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 