Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft announced the technical preview of the much awaited MS Office 2010 at Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans on 13^th July, 2009 and unveiled the enhancements to MS Office 2007.  The development of Office 2010, codenamed as Office 14, started in 2006. This will be the first office application to be available both in 32-bit and 64-bit version.

The key features that Microsoft claims to have added across all applications in the MS Office 2010 package:

1. The applications will be available on your phone, PC and web. MS Word, excel, power point, OneNote becoming web based is one of the major leaps Microsoft is making through Office 2010. A lighter and free, web version of office 2010 can be accessed across devices (PC, phone etc) and will be available anytime, anywhere.  This cloud based web application will have fewer features than the desktop version of MS Office 2010 but will be good enough to edit and make changes in the document.
2. The ‘Ribbon User Interface’ (Ribbon is a combination of tool bar and tab bar which we see at top in most of our Office 2007 applications) is upgraded and is extended to all the applications including MS Outlook, MS Visio, OneNote, Project and Publisher.
3. Backstage view is something which is going to attract all of us. It acts as a substitute to the usual ‘File Menu’. This will redefine our experience of opening a new doc, with a good layout of templates of new document, different ways to share our work, different print settings and page layouts at one place.

Here goes the detailed analysis of enhancements of few applications in MS Office 2010 suite:

Microsoft Word 2010:

1. More than one user can work at a time on the same document at the same time. Word will alert the two or more users who are working on the same doc when the changes need to be synchronized with their document.
2.  We can have the live preview of paste function.
3. Word 2010 diminishes the use of ‘Print screen button’.  It is capable of taking screenshots directly from the word document by clicking on “screenshot “ .
4. We can remove the background of the picture directly, we need not use Photoshop.
5. Word 2010 makes available the visual panes with which it becomes very easy to navigate through the document.
6. Few amazing art effects are added in ‘word art’.  Features like pencil sketch, chalk sketch, glow edges, photocopy are included ‘artistic effect’.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2010:

1.  PowerPoint is powered to edit a video and image within itself with the help of basic video and photo editing tools.
2. We can share a slide with others via browser.

Microsoft Excel 2010:

1. One of the cutting edge feature of excel 2010 is ‘Sparklines’. It gives a visual snapshot image of the data trend over time with in a cell.
2. We can toss between tabs to access formula, insert diagrams and charts and get data from the connected source.
3. More kinds of charts are included in this version of excel and this will help us analyze the data more effectively.

Microsoft Outlook 2010:

1. The most striking feature is the ‘Ribbon user interface’ that Outlook possesses now,  like word, PowerPoint  and excel.
2. With improved search functionality it is easier to search contents.
3. The calendar can be previewed in e-mail itself.

Microsoft Share point 2010:

1. Like Word, Excel, SharePoint 2010 is also going to use ‘Ribbon user interface’.
2. The authors of the document can be tagged and they can be shared more easily.

There is an interesting trivia associated with Office 2010 being codenamed as Office 14 after MS Office 2007 being codenamed as Office 12. The version number 13 was not considered due to the “Number 13 phobia”.

The web-based MS Office 2010 is looked at as a huge challenge to Google docs and it will be in market in first quarter of 2010. So we need to wait for quite sometime before we experience the new, rich version of MS office.

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