7 Reasons to try Office 2010

Matthew Hanson | News, Technology | 15/06/2010 17:52pm
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Microsoft has released Office 2010 today. Check out seven of the best reasons for trying the new version of Office.

1 All your social networking is in one place

Outlook Social Connector shows what your contacts have been getting up to right within your Outlook inbox. You can see what updates they’ve posted to Facebook, when you last sent them an email, what’s happening in their calendar and whether their professional profile has changed on Linked In.

2 It’s a great way of taking lots of notes

Linked Notes in OneNote is ideal when you want to take notes in a Word or Powerpoint document, or in a web page in Internet Explorer. Once open, it sits in its own window in the side of your screen and lets you take notes and link them to a particular part of a document or web page, so when you close your notes and go back to them it will take you back to the same document or website automatically, so you can carry on working.

3 It makes the most of boring spread sheets

Looking at numbers in an Excel spread sheet can be a little mind-numbing – boring if you will. Obviously, it’s a useful thing to do if you want to show how much money you’ve spent on your shopping in a given month, for example. But, it’s not fun nor is it particularly intuitive.

So what if you could add a miniature chart next to each of your figures to quickly and conveniently get an overall picture of your expenditure? Well, a new feature in Excel called Sparklines allows you to do just this within a single cell of a spread sheet.

4 There’s no need for Photoshop

Word now has built-in photo-editing, so you can add photos to your documents and then edit them within Word without having to leave and use a photo-editing program. When you open a photo, all you have to do is click on the Picture Tools heading and a wide variety of photo-editing options will appear in the menu.

5 You can share Powerpoint presentations to the world

Broadcast Slide Show is a really useful feature in Powerpoint for giving out presentations to groups of people at a distance; ideal if, for example, you’re a teacher giving a lecture to students who’d rather work from home, or you want to easily give a presentation to staff workers that can’t be in the same place at once. The way it works is really easy – you create a Broadcast Slide Show, upload it to the internet and send the link to people you want to include. They can watch the presentation even if they don’t have Powerpoint installed on their PC.

6 Office is free! Sort of…

Office Web Apps allows you to create a Word, Excel, Powerpoint or OneNote document and save and then share it with the world (or just your friends, if you’d prefer) right within your browser window – that’s seriously convenient. And it’s free. Although Office Web Apps isn’t as fully-featured as Office 2010, it still has enough basic functions to keep most people happy.

7 You can create your own perfect menu

The menu in Office 2010 can now be fully customised to suit your individual needs, so you can set it up to appear exactly how you want. Don’t need some of the functions on the menu within Excel? You can get rid of them. Want to add some more or create an entirely new menu? You can do that too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 at 5:52 pm and is filed under News, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Office 2010