Forbes today covered news around the Microsofts hints about the move towards office in the cloud and how they hope to expand the current market as only 4% of office productivity applications are web-based.
Microsoft’s web development team seemed to have moved faster than their marketing team as a recent update has exposed their new Microsoft Office 2010 release. Rafael Rivera tweeted the accidental release office mini-site release around 4 hours ago.
The new Office 2010 mini-site has a number of preview videos that talk about many of the much anticipated Office 2010 web applications plus some amazing new features never shown in public.
Was this a private pre-release to show media/tech buyers that was not to be publicised or tweeted about? It is likely it was just a time zone error, that enabled the web servers to release Office 2010 mini-site. This is a common issue with complex CMS systems, having a administrator the only person who can utilise the publish button can sometimes save embarrassment of an early release.
Office 2010 Product Review
We have taken time to view all the presentation videos that were displayed on tech blog “istartedsomething” and listed some of the new advanced features of Office 2010, so please enjoy and more features will be rolled out by Microsoft as the product moves closer to release. As the one of the presenters points out the theme of Office 2010 is to “Bring Ideas to Life”.
Microsoft Office helps you work from anywhere as it moves to take the product into the online/offline world with collaboration features. The popular new ribbon feature now the common menu system for the whole Office suite. Office offers improved co-authoring features, powerpoint broadcast, central backend for common printing/sharing tasks.
The new central backstage view allows for common functions such as: Set permissions, Save as PDF, Send Via Email,New Print settings
Microsoft Word 2010
Office works towards making most actions 1-2 clicks away
New formatting tools
3D effects, shading & glow
More Creative Smart Art
Visualise & Arrange Documents
More of a content management system
Document Map allows for outline view
Can create subsections for pages
Use document map to easily search within documents: Section, Thumbnail, Phrase View
Real-time collaboration online within Word
Can communicate with collaborations via phone, email or IM
Microsoft Excel 2010
Useful business intelligence sharing among your company
Make informed decisions faster with sales/company data
Better and faster analysis of data
Create effective visualisations “charts”
Quickly visualise trends within Excel
Excel Backstage View – Sample Reports & Templates
New Feature “Slicer” to filter down, dynamically drill down and analyse data
Spot revenue trends with SparkLines to show mini charts within cells
Backstage view – set permissions, preview & print in one easy view
Microsoft Sharepoint 2010
New transitions to creat richer presentation experience
Can use animation painter to easily apply animations to items
Users can trim video within powerpoint
Email features – Compress Media feature to easily compress file size
Slides can now be group into sections for easy sharing/collaboration
Broadcast slide shows using Sharepoint server
Broadcast is great for remote presentations as viewer don’t even require a copy of powerpoint
Microsoft Outlook 2010
New clean interface using the ribbon menu
Conversation field, similar to Google Wave that shows single conversation lines
Can categorisies emails in conversation window
Outlook can filter emails in conversation window
Mail tips to warn when sending to external users
Quick steps, makes common meeting actions 1 click away
Meeting requests show previews to reduce double bookings
Microsoft Web Applications 2010
Microsoft working to make remote work easier
You can now use any internet kiosks to access & edit documents
Microsoft Web Applications work within Firefox & IE
Web Applications preserve the richness of Office 2010 documents online
Access your Office documents directly in a your web browser
Excel documents can be easily edited on sharepoint servers from any PC just like on the desktop.
Microsoft OneNote 2010
Can easily view who has made changes to shared documents
Share all your web clippings and notes from the road with colleagues & co-workers
Microsoft Publisher 2007
This video seems to be having issues and will only play audio and will not show the video, so we cannot provide a review at this time.
Windows 7
One interesting point is the Microsoft is already updating these videos to promote Windows 7. It is being marketed under the campaign of “Ready Set 7“, you can visit their website and learn more about their replacement to Windows Vista.
There is a new Technical Review site, that has more details and videos
http://www.microsoft.com/officebusiness/office2010/
You can also see Office 2010 The Movie
http://www.office2010themovie.com/
Excel is the de facto business intelligence tool for most organizations. People are emphasizing the new sparklines chart option. It’s interesting to see this as a standard feature and I hope this also means that Microsoft is paying attention to the data visualization community.
i ‘ve been using office 2010 beta. its faster than office 2007 and has some new features