Microsoft have just added a page devoted to the new version of Office - Office 2010. The key features of Office 2010 are:

• telling your story with video
• rich collaborative features, allowing users to share and update documents simultaneously
• greater accessibility to users, regardless of medium – desktop, web browsers, smartphone
• enhanced image editing capabilities (check out Word 2010’s artistic effects)

There are links to a page for each new version of the Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, Access, SharePoint Workspace, InfoPath, Office Web Applications and Office Mobile. However, at the moment the information is very brief, so I’m hoping that more details are forthcoming. Of course, at this point Microsoft’s goal is merely selling the idea of Office 2010.

The information is presented textually, but there is the usual insidious link to download Silverlight to play the presentation video. No Silverlight, no video. Buckling under the pressure, I installed Silverlight.

Outspace Is Backstage

I learned something new. What I’d been led to believe was called the Microsoft Office 2010 OutSpace is actually called the Backstage.

The Microsoft Office 2010 Presenters

For your delectation, here are the video presentations, who presented them and the keypoints they made:

• Office 2010 – Chris Bryant.
• Word 2010 – Ayca Yuksel. 3d effects like reflection, shading and glow. There are more SmartArt digrams to transform your boring lists. Document Map is an outline view of your Word 2010 document that allows you to not only navigate the document, but also to manipulate its content. Improved printing.
• Excel 2010 – Albert Chew. Excel templates, filtering large amounts of data with a new function called Excel Slicer. The new Sparklines allow us to analyse trends by dislpaying line charts inside single cells.
• Powerpoint 2010 – Jennifer Kensok. Improved photo editing, new slide transitions, enhanced animation. You can now do more with video in Powerpoint 2010 – reflections, play, pause, fast forward. Introduction of new video editing tools for ediring within Powerpoint. Compression tool available within backstage for decreasing presentation sizes (good if you need to email it). Broadcast your slideshow using Sharepoint to someone else’s browser – even if they don’t have Powerpoint. Your audience will see the slides as you click through them – good for presenting remotely.
• Outlook 2010 – Dev Balasubramanian. New conversation view, cleanup conversation removes redundant messages. Mail Tips verifies the recipient’s email address, highlighting mistypes. Quick Steps for (for example, for use when scheduling meetings) defines custom actions.
• OneNote 2010 – Ayca Yuksel. Custom tags, revision tracking.
• Publisher 2010 – Rachel Drossman. The ribbon is finally integrated. Preserving template layouts when substituting images, visual page navigation displays thumbnails of what’s on each page. Stylistic text. Save publisher files as PDF or XPS for use by users who don’t have Publisher.
• Access 2010 – Abbott Lowell.
• SharePoint Workspace 2010 – Paul Cannon. What was previously called Groove 2007 is now called SharePoint Workspace 2010. Work on content offline, and then when you connect again data is synchronised on the SharePoint server. Check in and check out files, and view server properties of those files.
• Office 2010 Web Applications – Monica Mendoza. Make updates remotely to your documents safe in the knowledge that the document’s ‘richness’ (what?!) is preserved. Why can’t these people speak plainly? I’m assuming that styling, formatting etc isn’t lost when you update a document remotely. Richness? When editing a document (a Powerpoint presentation, for example), the ribbon is actually shown in the browser, enabling a consistent user experience. The presenter showed how to add slides using her web browser session. Multiple users updating documents simultaneously.
• Office Mobile – Dev Balasubramanian. Outlook 2010 on your mobile, also Word, Excel, Powerpoint. Mobile Document Viewers allow viewing of Office documents on your mobile device and works on just about every smartphone on the market.