Is your business ready for Microsoft Office 2010?
I'm sure you are already enjoying all the great features and benefits of Office 2007, like the Ribbon Toolbar, Automatic Document Design and Live Preview to name a few! Wait, your not using Office 2007? You mean, like Vista, you avoided upgrading your Office Suite and stayed with Office 2003? Actually, I don't blame you, it seems that every couple of years there is another whiz bang and Microsoft wants a couple hundred dollars to upgrade each license and in your office with 10, 20 or 50 users, that's not chump change.
But like your operating system there are valid reasons for upgrading your Office Suite and I want share a couple of those reasons with you. For Office 2010 the two major reasons are Increased Productivity and Collaboration capabilities.
If you are not already using Office 2007, there are several features you need to know about that are included in Office 2010, so we will start with these.
Ribbon Toolbar – The ribbon toolbar is a major user interface change from previous Office versions. As Microsoft has continued to give us more capabilities with their software, the list of commands icons has grown. The Ribbon is designed to help you quickly find the commands that you need or use the most. Back in the day when we were all working on 15-inch monitors I would have said this is a waste of valuable space, but now that we are all on 17 to 22-inch monitors I like having the commands a click away rather than 3 to 5 clicks away. If your used to the old pull-down menu approach to finding things, it may take your employees a little time to get used to it, but give it a chance, a couple of weeks after using the ribbon you will notice productivity improvements.
Tip #1 – You can minimize & restore the Ribbon Toolbar by pressing the following shortcut keys: CTRL + F1
Document Design & Live Preview – I'm combining these two features because I think they work hand in hand. In previous versions of Office, there were some basic themes and templates you could use for creating Word documents or Power Point Presentations. They were very generic and if you wanted to see the effect of one theme over the next theme it was not an easy task. Now with Document Design you have an assortment of different document themes, which are a set of colors, fonts and graphic effects, quick styles, offer a set of great effects for images within a document; smart art graphics & charts, make your documents really come alive with effects and with Live Preview you can just point at a formatting option to preview it, if you like what you see, you can then select it to apply. All these features offer productivity enhancements that save employees time. Check out these great examples that were created in minutes:
 |
 |
The Office Button – This is what Microsoft is calling part of its "Fluent Interface" I think it's a catchy phrase for where they decided to put all the File functions. I bring it up because it took me several days to find the "Save As" icon, which was located under the office button. This is the single location for all the things you can do with a document: share it, protect it, print it, publish it and send it. Again another great productivity enhancement. While The Office Button itself is gone in Office 2010, it is now just called File, but it's where you would expect it, upper left hand of the ribbon.
Tip #3 – We all love to send & receive PDF files, do a search on the internet for "office PDF add-in" and now you can save or send via email your Office documents as PDF.
There are so many more features to talk about the new versions of Office, you can do a quick search on the internet to find information on all the great features, but what I want to share with you now is why Office 2010!
Competition between Microsoft and Google is heating up. Google offers online programs that let you upload, edit, save and share files. While not as feature rich as any of the Microsoft Office suite of products, it has two major features that Microsoft is rolling out in its new version, collaboration and web based.
Simultaneous Editing – No more "file in use" when trying to access a document that is being worked on by another person. Now two people can edit a document simultaneously. There is a status bar that tells you who else is editing the document and what part of the document they are working on. You can even share a document with another user using Microsoft Office 2007 and the new SkyDrive, which is linked to your Microsoft Live account, changes can be synchronized with the original back on the server.
Office Online – Microsoft says they will have a stripped-down web browser version of Word, Power-Point, Excel and OneNote soon. It wasn't available to me when I wrote this so all I am able to say is that using your Office Live account you can Access Files Anywhere, Store online & Share.
Office 2010 is to Office 2007 what Vista is to Windows 7, while I personally liked both, most of our clients stayed with XP and Office 2003. Like Vista, Office 2007 garnered complaints because of the extensive user interface rework. But after using Office 2007 for the past couple of years and now 2010 for the past several months I can say, it is time to upgrade.
If you would like to demo the new version you can visit http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010 to download the Beta.