Last week saw the arrival of Office 2010. According to Microsoft, Office 2010's beta program has been its largest ever with more than 8 million businesses already using the productivity suite. Take a look at what to expect from Office 2010.
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(Credit: Microsoft)
Office 2010's main applications — Excel, PowerPoint, Word — have all gained what's called a Backstage view.
It replaces the File menu and brings together commands often used at the start or end of working on a document — for example, printing commands, saving or checking permissions — in one screen.
Pictured above is Word's Backstage view.
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(Credit: Microsoft)
Office 2010's Word features a Navigation pane, shown to the left of the screen above.
The pane includes the usual "find" functionality — type a word or phrase into the Search box and Word will show you where it occurs in the text — but it also picks out the document's headings so a user can move between sections of the text more easily.
A page view option will also show the document broken down into thumbnails of the pages it contains, to help with navigation.
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(Credit: Microsoft)
Another feature to make an appearance in Word is co-authoring, whereby several individuals can work on a document at the same time.
Co-authoring can also be used with Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote thanks to SharePoint 2010, also launched last week.
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(Credit: Microsoft)
Meanwhile, PowerPoint has gained the ability to edit pictures without leaving the application.
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(Credit: Microsoft)
Here's PowerPoint's Backstage view.
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(Credit: Microsoft)
Excel's new additions include a feature called Sparklines, which lets users create graphics that fit into single cells — for example, the trend lines seen above — to help add context to the document.
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(Credit: Microsoft)
Excel also sports PowerPivot, a business intelligence add-in that allows users to crunch the numbers held in Excel — and elsewhere, as datasets can be imported — to produce data analyses.
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(Credit: Microsoft)
Outlook also gets a revamp with this horizontal Calendar view.
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(Credit: Microsoft)
Social Connector is also on show in Office 2010. It's a tool to bring social network information into work email, allowing users to see updates from their social networking contacts from within Outlook.
Seen here is a view of how a contact's social networking updates would appear at the bottom of an email they had sent.
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(Credit: Microsoft)
LinkedIn was the first social network to sign up and a connector for the business site has been available since February.
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