Microsoft Office 2010: Cool New Features
There are so many new features in the Microsoft Office 2010 suite, it’s difficult to narrow them down to a few highlights. But moving beyond the consistently cool Backstage view, here are some of the great new features in Office 2010 that work across all the products:
- Same File Format
- Customizable Ribbon
- Save Screenshots
- Save to SkyDrive
- Co-authoring
The difference between Office 2003 and Office 2007 file formats was a painful one for many customers. Not only did different document converters need to be installed for Office 2003 shops, but many spam firewalls and other non Office aware appliances would by default, block the new Office 2007 format.
The new design, however, proved worth the pain. Now, moving from Office 2007 to Office 2010 is made much easier because the extensible xml format ensures that should an Office 2007 worker open an Office 2010 document, they simply won’t see the new features. Unless a user is using a fancy new word-art object, users for 2007 and 2010 can happily co-exist.
Two power users requests have been answered in this release: the ability to customize the Office “ribbon” as well as the ability to take and insert screenshots into applications like Word. (OneNote users can continue to use their screenshot capture functionality as well!)
Two major changes that directly impact customers using other products suites (such as Google Apps) are Microsoft’s decision to bundle 25 gigabytes of free cloud-based storage with each Office suite (called SkyDrive) as well as their decision to allow multiple users to edit document simultaneously (co-authoring) when those users are working on documents stored in SharePoint or the cloud.
All of these features work across all the various applications, helping those of us who mainly use Outlook, PowerPoint and Word to the more data driven Excel and Access users. Give New Signature a call to see how Office 2010 can help your office improve productivity today.