Microsoft Office 2010 In Pictures
Office 2010 is Microsoft's latest major software release, and it is packed full of features including Web application versions of Office apps, PowerPoint Broadcast, enhancements to Outlook's message management and overall user interface improvements.
May 13, 2010
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Office 2010 lets users manipulate photos within your Office apps. For example, users can edit various aspects of photos, changing colors and backgrounds, all from within Powerpoint.
In Office 2010, users are able to edit and manipulate video, doing simple tasks like trimming clips out of a video. Here, a video is being edited within Powerpoint.
Outlook 2010 changes the way e-mail is managed in the inbox, smartly cleaning up message threads, so there's less sorting through messages.
Office 2010 Web Apps are available for anyone with Office licenses. However, they require Sharepoint (either Server or Foundation) for business customers, or Windows Live for consumer customers (where the web apps are free up to 25GB of storage space).
Microsoft Word 2010 comes with the ability to check a document for things like compatibility, which becomes especially important when document integrity is an issue -- for things like document sharing and co-authoring.
Creating a PowerPoint Broadcast is simple. Just pick the service (from your internal Sharepoint server, or using Windows Live), and it creates a one-time URL automatically.
Once a URL is created for a PowerPoint broadcast, you can copy and paste the link, send it in e-mail, or share it via instant message.
This is a side-by side image of a PowerPoint Broadcast and what it looks like inside a browser to the recipient. The broadcast can run inside Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. It also works on a variety of mobile browsers.
Outlook 2010's ribbon (the ribbon is now in all Office 2010 products) is much more robust, and includes things like message cleanup.
In Outlook 2010, you have the option to turn on a conversation view. In the Outlook beta, this was on by default. In the final version, you have to turn it on (this decision was based on user feedback). You can apply conversation views to folders, or to all folders.
Using Outlook 2010's conversation view, users can apply inbox cleanup, which figures out how to eliminate redundant messages in a thread, so that you're only presented with unique messages. Microsoft says its user studies show that people are far more efficient when they're able to see everything they need on the screen at one time.
In Outlook 2010 you get Social Connector, which is a more "people-centric" view of your inbox. Your message recipients come up with profile information, you can see just your threads with that person or calendar appointments, and feeds from other networks, like LinkedIn and Facebook.
Message search is more contextual in Outlook 2010, and thanks to integration with the Ribbon bar, users can easily create complex searches without having to be precise, or without having to memorize search syntax.
Microsoft has incorporated contact cards into the Office suite, and these are accessible within Outlook 2010 via Office Communicator (part of the suite). If you have OCS running, you can then use this for presence, making calls or going into instant messaging directly from Outlook.
Through OCS and Exchange, you can get your voicemail directly in Outlook 2010. But you can also get a voicemail "preview" which uses speech to text to display (as best it can) the text of the message. What's also very nifty is the ability to select a word within that text and start the actual audio playback at THAT word.
In the File tab of the Office 2010 Ribbon, Microsoft provides what it calls the "backstage" view, which includes everything about a document, including its properties. These properties can also be modified. Backstage also includes features like inspecting a document for hidden information and content.
Microsoft has made it much easier to customize the Ribbon across Office 2010 applications, and to take those customizations with them.
Microsoft has made it much easier to customize the Ribbon across Office 2010 applications. Users can add buttons to tabs, and then they can save those customizations. IT can even allow those customizations to be saved and later imported into other Office 2010 instances. Or it, can supply those customizations by default.
There are lots of new ways to customize the Ribbon and Ribbon buttons within Office 2010 applications, including the look of the buttons.
In Office 2007, Microsoft found that many of its features, which remained unknown to many users, were used more often when put into the Ribbon. So it continues to put more features, like commenting, into the Office 2010 Ribbon.
In the "backstage" view, which is accessible via the File tab in Office 2010 applications, users can have the document checked for compatibility and viewing issues before sharing -- for example, if the recipient is going to be viewing a document in a document reader, Word can ensure that there are no issues with the way the document is laid out, or with images embedded in the document.
In the "backstage" view, users can change printing options more easily in Office 2010 applications. Not only is it easier to access those options, but you can get a much better document preview; you can also immediately see changes in how the document will be printed when you select various options.
In PowerPoint 2010, users can bring in video clips, which they can edit. These video clips can be native files in a variety of formats (not just WMV), or they can be imported from the Web (YouTube, for example).
Users can edit video within PowerPoint 2010. You can make color or image correction; you can make the video black and white, or sepia tone; you can brighten it. You can do all of this right in the Ribbon, and as you examine your choices, you can actually see the affect they will have on the video itself.
In PowerPoint 2010, users can do basic video editing, cutting the front and back end of video clips to shorten their length. You cannot, however, cut out the middle part of clips.
Video makes PowerPoint files even larger than they normally would be. If you've trimmed a video, you can eliminate those clips in the final PowerPoint file, but you can also use "Internet" quality compression on the video itself, making the file size even more manageable -- although the quality of the video is certainly lessened. Also, note that videos included in and edited in PowerPoint 2010 will not work in the new PowerPoint Broadcast mode.
In Word 2010 or PowerPoint 2010, you can bring in images and do lots of fine-grain work on them, right from within the Office application.
When editing images in Office 2010 applications, simply choosing the affect (like color correction) for the Office Ribbon will let you see what affect your changes have on the image right away, even before applying those changes.
One of the most interesting image manipulation tool in Office 2010 is the ability to do background removal from an image. In many applications, you've got to draw a precise line around the image, but here you can draw a tight box around the image and color heuristic techniques separate the foreground from the background.
Here's an image with the background removed. It should be noted that the tool isn't perfect, and you may have to go in and make some minor fixes (again using tools in the image editing tool) before you're completely done with the image.
Here's an image with the background removed. It should be noted that the tool isn't perfect, and you may have to go in and make some minor fixes (again using tools in the image editing tool) before you're completely done with the image.
Office 2010 lets users manipulate photos within your Office apps. For example, users can edit various aspects of photos, changing colors and backgrounds, all from within Powerpoint.
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