Microsoft Office 2010: The Future of Business Today

Microsoft Office 2010: The Future of Business Today

As of today, you can now download a free trial of Microsoft Office 2010 at Microsoft’s TechNet (www.technet.com), purchase yours to own from a reseller, or wait until June when the boxed version will be available in stores.

Microsoft Business Division President Steve Elop presided over the launch on May 12^th, beginning his introduction to the new suites with an exploration of the present business climate that inspired many of the alterations and new features found in Office 2010: the recession, the challenge of incorporating the new millennial generation into the workforce, the new and ever growing population of mobile workers, the increasing emphasis on social networking as a valid business tool, and the growing dominance and importance of cloud computing. Microsoft’s specific initiative while developing Office 2010 was to create a platform on which businesses could transform these current challenges into new opportunities.  One new feature, the heavily hyped Web Applications, were designed to assist the growing mobile workforce (projected to surpass the 1 billion mark this year), keeping them connected to the office from more places and through more devices via a web browser.

But Web Applications are only the tip of the iceberg; the new Office 2010 has amassed a multitude of new features making it “the best and most powerful application suite on the planet” (Edward Mendelson, PCMag.com).       

The Ribbon

First introduced in Office 2007, the Ribbon revolutionized suite interface. With all toolbar tabs located on a single menu and iconic commands, the Ribbon is far more organized and visual, making it far easier to maneuver than the traditional clustering of menu options. In Office 2010 the Ribbon is now the interface of every tool including Outlook and the experience has become far more personal with customizable tabs.

The Backstage View  

The Backstage view is a new feature replacing the traditional File menu across core Office tools. Backstage gives you a great behind the scenes view of your document, as well as easy access to the commands you use most often, allowing you to share, print, and publish your documents with a few clicks.    

Web Applications

The new Web Applications in Office 2010 allow you to access any of your files – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote – via a web browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox), allowing you to access, share, and even edit your documents from virtually anywhere and from several devices such as smartphones, notebooks, and PCs. The new Web Applications also allow for co-authoring, the capability of multiple individuals to simultaneously work on the same document from different locations. Keep in mind that you will need the new SharePoint 2010 Server or Windows Live to use Web Applications and that they only come in the Office 2010 Suites Professional Plus and Standard.   

Outlook

Email correspondence just got easier with Outlook 2010. An advanced conversation view lists all message threads in a tree-style format so one may quickly hone in on the threads of importance, a new cleanup button deletes all redundant back and forth emails leaving the basic message intact, and a new ignore button quickly removes one from undesired email lists. The new feature Quick Steps further simplifies the email experience with its ability to perform multiple, customizable operations. With Quick Steps, one can now respond to an email while simultaneously deleting or moving the message to a storage file with a single click.

One can now search through their LinkedIn contacts via Outlook: a feature that will soon expand to incorporate other relevant social media sites. On top of this new LinkedIn capability, Outlook now also boasts its own social network called My Site.  With a Yearbook View that displays contacts by picture ID, My Site visually categorizes and hierarchically displays all employees and employee relationships. If you have SharePoint 2010, it will, with your permission, comb through all of your emails and documents, find your interests and expertise and automatically send you an email a week suggesting people for you to connect with and areas of expertise for you to add to your my Site profile.

There have also been great leaps and bounds made regarding “Search” for Outlook via the new SharePoint 2010 Server. Now when you search by keyword, experts in that subject will automatically appear to the right hand side of the browser, and all content will automatically be filtered on the left hand side by author and document type; you may also pull up a preview or the actual document itself in the web browser. You can also tag which documents you find relevant or interesting and that will automatically be updated on your My Site for all to see. 

Word

Word 2010 boasts new powerful safety features.  One example, when you now download a document from the web a colored banner will appear at the top and inform you of the potential hazards of opening a document from the web and you must click your permission to open the document. The Find feature in word now has the dialogue appear in a separate navigation pane showing you all the instances of the searched for string (the original Find feature you are used to is still there, just simply called Advanced Find). There is also a new high detail document navigation map allowing you to move content around by dragging items around on the map and providing you with a thumbnail preview. Word now also boasts new and improved picture formatting tools such as color saturation and artistic effects and SmartArt graphic layouts    

Excel

The real new advancement in Excel 2010 is the new feature Sparklines which really helps you to visualize your data. All you do is select the data you want by highlighting the appropriate cells and you will create a line graph representation of that data in a single cell. Power Pivot is the other feature to get excited about in Excel 2010. It allows you to work quickly with vast amounts of data thanks to Office 2010 now working with 64 bits as opposed to the 2007 version that only had 32 bits at its disposal. The example given at the Launch seminar on May 12, 2010 was for 1.5 million rows of data that was sorted and filtered in a half second. Power Pivot also allows you to build dashboards and to the right hand side of your dashboard, you have a new feature Slicer appropriately named as you can slice out a section of data that you want to focus on.

PowerPoint

Like Word, PowerPoint 2010 boasts the new and improved image formatting tools such as new artistic tools like “Bevel” and “3-D Rotation” and a new equation editor that gives you elegant mathematical typography. On top of that, there are now also improved video formatting tools: you are now able to edit your videos - compress them, trim them in length to your specifications, bookmark specific parts, resize and move them about the slide even as they play, and you can even format them for a greater aesthetic with such features as Reflection and Rotation – without a third party tool.  When you add a video in PowerPoint, it is automatically embedded within your presentation. You can now broadcast your presentations live, in real time, to a remote audience over the web with the new feature Broadcast Slideshow.    

Publisher

Publisher sports the new Ribbon interface and the new Backstage view that all the rest of the Office tools partake in as well as all the new advances in graphic design and editing and OpenType, an extension of the TrueType font format, gives you advanced typographic control.  OpenType is also found in the new Word 2010. Other new advanced graphic design features included in Publisher 2010 include a new background removal tool that allows you to save the foreground object while removing everything else with your ability to control what gets saved and what gets discarded.      

OneNote

According to Elop, the average American worker spends 40% of their workday simply accumulating and wading through their data without adding any value to it.  This is truly a waste of time and money. OneNote 2010 now makes accessing, organizing, and sharing data faster, easier, and more efficient than ever whether it be text, audio, video, or image; the notebook now allows you to take notes while you work in other Office tools as well and you can keep the notebook open on your desktop always for easy access with the new doc to desktop feature. If you utilize SharePoint 2010, any update made by anyone will be automatically updated for everyone. New features include Linked Notes - resembling wiki-linking, this feature links all relevant notebook pages together -, automatic highlighting that highlights all changes made by others since the last time you opened OneNote, and version tracking which records all alterations made to the notebook chronologically and by author so that if you dislike the latest updates to the notebook, you can go back to an earlier version. OneNote now also has a more advanced search that will, based on your previous preferences to documents, rank the findings in order of personal interest. You can also hover over a word with your mouse and it will automatically translate it for you. The new quick filing feature allows you to quickly file your notes to the appropriate notebook.

Office 2010 and SharePoint: Co-Authoring, Web Applications, and SharePoint Workspace (Groove 2007)

If you invest in the SharePoint 2010 Server, you are privy to several extra goodies such as the ability to share your documents via Backstage view to the SharePoint and the co-authoring abilities of the Office tools: where several individuals can work on the same Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. You can also use SharePoint to access your Microsoft Web Applications. Note: if you do not wish to invest in SharePoint, you may also access Microsoft Web Apps via Windows Live, allowing you to access, store, and share your documents from virtually anywhere through the web.  You can also use your SharePoint Workspace (formerly known as Groove) to work on files from your SharePoint server on your PC and you can even take those files and save them to your desktop so that you may work offline, simply by clicking on “Sync to SharePoint Workspace” and you can take your work with you and then add it back to the SharePoint server when you are back online.   

Office 2010 and Exchange Server 2010: Advanced Messaging Infrastructure

If you have Exchange Server 2010, you are also privy many wonderful new features including Mail Tips that “warn[s] users before they commit an email faux pas such as sending mail to large distribution groups, to recipients who are out of the office or to recipients outside the organization, helping protect against information leaks and reduce unnecessary email messages” and Voice Mail Preview which allows one to “see text previews of voicemail directly in Outlook” (Microsoft).  

Conclusion

The new Office 2010 will definitely usher you into the new millennial business style of instant information access and ease of business mobility via cloud computing. In this current economic recession, business owners and decision makers need proof of a return on investment before they purchase anything. Elop promises that with Office 2010 businesses will see significant gains in productivity, reduced costs, and a demonstrable ROI. According to Elop, a representative company that deploys Office 2010 will see an improvement in productivity accumulating to more than two work weeks per person per year, will save roughly 13.8 million dollars over a 3 year period, and will receive a 300% ROI over the same 3 year period, translating into a turnaround after 7.5 months. Office 2010, especially when paired with SharePoint Server 2010 or Exchange Server 2010, truly delivers the future of business functionality today.           

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References

1.      Microsoft; www.microsoft.com

2.      “Microsoft Office 2010” by Edward Mendelson for PCMag.com http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2362923,00.asp  

3.      “Top Ten Benefits of Office 2010 Beta” http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/whats-new/default.aspx