Tag: office 2010

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Office 2010 New Feature Videos


One of the main things I did in preparation for BETT 2010 was create a bunch of videos showing some of the new features in Office 2010. I can talk about them ‘til the cows come home, but it’s always better to see things where possible. The videos were very well received and Office 2010 got a LOT of positive feedback…June should be an exciting time 🙂

Anyway, I thought I’d put the videos up on here too and hopefully you’ll find them just as interesting & useful as our stand visitors did last week…enjoy!

Background Removal:

This is a great feature in Word 2010, making in nice and easy to remove all or part of a picture’s background.

 

Broadcast PowerPoint:

This feature lets you “broadcast” your presentation over the net by giving you a link to share with whoever you need to…allowing people to see your .pptx as long as they have an internet connection:

Insert Web Video:

Inserting videos from sites such as YouTube has always been a bit of a pain in Powerpoint…but no more! Powerpoint 2010 makes it super easy…teachers loved this at BETT.

Edit video inside Powerpoint:

Inserting videos into Powerpoint has been available for ages, but any editing you needed to do-even basic stuff-has required a 3rd party product. Again, Powerpoint 2010 makes it easier by enabling you to edit the video without leaving the program. Here I’m trimming a bit of Shooting Stars 🙂

Powerpoint Video Effects:

More built in video editing here with shadows, borders, reflections and more being easily applied within Powerpoint 2010.

Create a Video:

You’ve made a presentation and now you need to make it available as a video file, rather than a slideshow. I believe most people use Windows Movie Maker to do this currently but, with 2010, it’s again all done inside Powerpoint.

Save to Skydrive/Sharepoint:

This is a great new feature. It lets you save to your Live Skydrive (25GB free storage!) directly from the Office applications…no more save to folder then upload to Skydrive…it’s all one nice, smooth action 🙂 I don’t do it in the video but you can see there is also exactly the same thing to save to Sharepoint, which should really help drive adoption of Sharepoint in schools. From various discussions I’ve had, many people see Sharepoint as an extra step so:

Create Document > Save to Folder > Upload to Sharepoint

and this leads to many people just not bothering as it’s more work and they perhaps don’t see the point of it. Having the ability to save directly to their MOSS site will cut that out and make it just as easy as it’s always been 🙂

Word Navigation Pane:

This is quite a small new feature, but I love it! The navigation pane picks up all the  headings, sub-headings etc and enables you to use them to navigate documents; making large documents much less painful!

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Office 2010 line up revealed


Office 2010 is a little bit closer as today Microsoft announced the FPP (Full Packaged Product aka Box Copy) SKU lineup, along with US retail pricing.

The Tech Preview & Beta have been very well received with the current beta being downloaded over 2,000,000 times already! Now consumers & small businesses can see what versions are available and which Office products they will contain.

Office Home & Student:
This version has proved very popular on Office 2007, giving great flexibility for home users & students while also offering great value for money. The 2010 release includes:

Word 2010
Excel 2010
PowerPoint 2010
OneNote 2010
Office Web Apps

It will continue to allow installation on three PCs in one house; which is a huge draw for everyone 🙂

Office Home & Business:
This is aimed at small businesses and includes all the above plus Outlook 2010.

Office Professional:

This is the top level version of Office available outside of Volume Licensing, and is comprised of:

Word 2010
Excel 2010
PowerPoint 2010
OneNote 2010
Outlook 2010
Publisher 2010
Access 2010
Office Web Apps

You’ll notice that Sharepoint Workspace (the new name for Groove) isn’t included…that’s included in Office Pro Plus on Volume Licensing.

Office Professional Academic:

This contains the same products as the regular Office Pro but with Educational pricing, so around 1/5 the cost! The inclusion of Outlook et al make this a great offering for more advanced students such as those in Higher Education.

Although not mentioned in today’s announcement, Standard & Professional Plus will still be available in Volume Licensing with Office 2010. Don’t forget that we will also have Office 2010 Starter as the free, ad supported replacement for MS Works!

I’m excited for Office 2010 both as a user and a partner…how about you?

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Office 2010 coming in June


Office 2010 will be with us in June. This was confirmed by a (now vanished) MS web page, stating that Office 2010 would be released in June 2010. I nearly didn’t bother posting this as it doesn’t seem, to me at least, to be news. I’ve been stating to colleagues and customers that Office 2010 will be here around April/June for a while…based on info already released by Microsoft.

However, I thought I’d better mention it so I don’t look like I’ve missed something 😉

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Office 2010 Background removal


The new background removal tool in Office 2010 is fantastic!

I hadn’t played around with it before but I just saw a tweet about some of the technology inside it, and my interest was piqued! This new ability is inside Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook and helps bring out the part of the picture that you actually want to use in your document. It’s pretty clever, methinks a demo is needed:

Original Picture:

Insert the picture into Word (in this example) and hit the “Background Removal” button:

image

Which brings up the “marquee”:

image

The rectangle can be moved, stretched and extended to cover the exact area you need and then it cuts away all the background to give you:

image

That is pretty amazing how it’s taken out the sea etc in the background but there are a few issues…there’s that patch under it’s flipper that’s still there and you might notice that he’s now missing his tail!

That isn’t the end of it though, there are a couple of extra tools that enable you to correct the above:

image

With these you can mark specific areas to be included/removed despite what the algorithm might suggest 🙂

image

You can see the markers on it’s flipper and the tail and now the picture looks like this:

image

Perfectly formed turtle with none of the background…nice 🙂

I did however discover that simply tightening up the rectangle in the original picture caused the missing/extra bits of picture to correct themselves!

This is a great addition and some really clever work from Microsoft Research-well done guys!!! 🙂

You can see the original MS post here.

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Microsoft Office 2010: New offerings


Microsoft Office 2010 will be with us next year and there are lots of great new things happening with it. I’ve been running the technical preview for a couple of months now and there are countless new features that I love – you can see more on that here and here.

There are 3 new announcements regarding ways that Office 2010 will be available:

Microsoft Office 2010 Starter:

This is my favourite of the 3, an ad-supported, cut down version of Office 2010 containing Word & Excel…for FREE. It will include the ability to view files as well as creation and basic editing functions and will be easily upgradeable to a full version of Office 2010.

This is of course aimed at increasing Office’s exposure in emerging markets as well as taking market share from Sun’s OpenOffice package; in my opinion that’s a good thing. OpenOffice, while a commendable Open Source effort, just isn’t as good as Microsoft Office. It’s not just me as a Microsoft fan saying that-friends and colleagues who are Mac and/or Linux fans agree too 🙂

The situation I can see Office Started being of most use to me is when I’m setting up new PC’s for friends/family and I get the almost obligatory “Where’s MS Word?”…”What? What do you mean it’ doesn’t come with the computer?!” tirade. It always seems that people buy new machines sans Office and then immediately need to start creating/editing documents…why, I’m not sure! Currently in these case, I recommend they download OpenOffice for the time being and then they can get Office at a later date…but I’d much rather download Office 2010 Starter edition for them! In fact, in the vast majority of cases this will be pre-installed on PC’s by the OEM manufacturer allowing users to get working straight away.

I guess a lot of people just stick with OpenOffice once it’s on their machine-something that Microsoft would clearly like to change. I can imagine that once someone has seen what is possible with Office Starter, quite a high percentage of people will upgrade to Office Home & Student which:

“has been the top selling PC software title at US retail for the last two years”

and is a great value way of getting Office at home. It’s worth noting that MS Works will be discontinued when Office 2010 is released.

Also, to combat what seems to be a common misconception, although Starter will be pre-installed by OEM’s, it WILL also be available for users to download themselves.

Product Key Card:

This is a new way to purchase Office from retail outlets (PC World, Comet,  Currys.digital etc) which is simply a card with an Office licence key on it (no dvd media); allowing you to easily convert trials that are pre-installed on machines. It hits the green mark too by using less packaging 🙂

Click to Run:

This is a new way to download, try and buy Office on existing machines. It uses virtualization technologies (which seem to be based on their corporate App-V technology) to allow multiple version of Office to co-exist. This means consumers can try Office 2010 while still keeping their current 2007 installation with no risk of conflicts.

All in all-these are yet more reasons for Office 2010 to be the best release to date 🙂

The Official Office 2010 Technet post (with videos) is here:

http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/archive/2009/10/07/new-ways-to-try-and-buy-microsoft-office-2010.aspx

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Microsoft Office 2010 Tech Preview: First Hand Look


I had hoped to get a full post together on the first day the tech preview became available but I had some issues with the installation, and that took a good few hours to sort out.

I have, somehow, ended up with a seemingly corrupt install of Office 2007 as Office 2010 is unable to upgrade it and I can’t remove it either! Eventually I tried installing 2010 alongside 2007 and it worked, the downside is that you can’t have 2 versions of Outlook together so I’m stuck on 2007 for that…however I’ll install it on another machine ASAP and hopefully Outlook will work on that 🙂 I managed to get rid of Office 2007 after 2 hours of deleting and registry editing so I now have it all installed! (I’ll do a separate post on how I did it).

Excel 2010:

Excel 2010 First Opened

That’s Excel 2010 opened for the first time-not much difference although I think it looks a bit “cleaner”.

Sparklines:

Excel 2010 Sparkline

These were one of the big features from the WPC demo of Office 2010 and they’re as awesome as they seemed. This feature is going to make Business Intelligence and the sharing of information so much easier (to understand and present) and more worthwhile; I think this is going to make a real difference in the world of work-it certainly will for me! I’ve got a spreadsheet at work that covers all our major software vendors and includes sales and profit for each one as well as overall totals, various comparisons between years and more. Currently this has multiple tabs that just contain trending charts, making it awkward to present and impossible to screenshot/print. With Sparklines in Excel 2010, I can show the trend in a single cell at the end of the data range, allowing me to consolidate it down to just one sheet!

There is an excellent post on Sparklines over on the Excel team blog here which features some great examples of how they can be used.

OneNote 2010:

One Note 2010 New Features

I haven’t had much of a play with OneNote yet but one thing I have noticed is it seems that OneNote no longer auto copies screen clippings into the Unfiled Notes section…I think I like that 🙂

Word 2010:

I don’t actually use Word that much and when I do it’s usually pretty basic, so it may well take me a while to find all the new features. However one that I’ve found straight away and is very useful is the Navigation Pane, which makes it much easier to read and work with large documents.

Word 2010 Navigation Pane Arrow

As you can see on the left hand side, the Navigation Pane has identified all the section headers in the document and allows you to jump around simply by clicking them-no more slightly random scrolling up and down 🙂 This is a truly great addition!

Outlook 2010:

I’ve not yet got any good screenshots of Outlook 2010 as I’ve discovered that the Hotmail connector doesn’t work with the new version, which is a shame. I’m sure that will be resolved by the final release though! I’ll get some screenshots from work but I’ll need to block out any confidential/customer info etc first so that’ll be next week.

I can however attest that Outlook 2010 is great. I was a BIG fan of the improvement in Outlook 2007 and the new version builds on those very well. There are no huge new killer features but there are lots of little ones such as:

Quick Steps: A set of handy time savings shortcuts which allow you to, for instance, forward a mail directly to your manager with 1 click, send an email just to your team, forward a mail and automatically add “FYI” to the subject line and more. It’s also possible to create your own Quick Steps, just like macros.

Calendar: When you receive a meeting invite, you can now see a preview of your calendar inside the mail-handy!

PowerPoint 2010:

Powerpoint has always been full of features I’ve never quite got round to using and I’m sure that is true of 2010 too, but one that I like is the ability to “Broadcast Slideshow”. This allows you to quickly and easily share your presentations with others in remote locations:

Powerpoint 2010 Broadcast 1

 Powerpoint 2010 Broadcast 2 Powerpoint 2010 Broadcast 3

This will be useful for informal collaboration with colleagues where you just want/need quick opinions and helps further Microsoft’s Collaboration through Office strategy.

General Features

Backstage: Gone is the menu/sub-menu structure for print preview, open, save as etc and in it’s place is Backstage:

Word 2010 Backstage

 The Office Sync Center:

This is a new thing AFAIK that I noticed when uploading some documents to our Sharepoint Online BPOS installation.

Office 2010 Sync Center

Office 2010 Sync Center Settings

This gives you a great overview of which files have been uploaded and if they were successful or not. It also shows a history of recently uploaded files which works well for me as I often forget whether I’ve done it or not 🙂 This seems like yet another great addition in Office 2010…

Summary:

This post isn’t finished, at the very least I’ll be adding in some screenshots and more info on Outlook. However as I come across new features in the various programs I’ll add them into this post as I go.

All in all, Office 2010 looks like a solid forward move for the Office suite and should see good adoption across the board-although perhaps more in the business rather than home space. The inclusion of more business intelligence, more collaboration and more time saving tricks is a sure winner and Sharepoint Workspace Manager (SWM formerly Groove) will only further that I’m sure.

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Office 2010


office_2010Microsoft 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!

ppt 2010

 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…

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No Office 14 until 2010


Steve Ballmer has said that the next release of the Office family “Wave 14, won’t hit us until 2010-not the late 2009 that I and many others were expecting.

Office 14 will bring the new versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote etc as well as Office for Sales, Sharepoint and OCS as well as other products too-so it’s a big ol’ release and one that I’m definitely looking forward to…

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