What’s New in Microsoft Office 2010

Earlier this week our friends at Microsoft Community Affairs hosted a webinar to show nonprofit organizations What’s New in Office 2010. Product Manager Markus Weickenmeier and TechSoup Staff Writer Elliot Harmon walked the participants through the compelling new features in Office 2010.
Through our Scheduled Support customers, we are seeing a lot of interest in Office 2010 with many having upgraded already or making plans to do so. Before diving into the presentation and demo, a quick Live Meeting poll was conducted to see what version of Office the participants were using. The results showed that almost 20% (out of 253 responses) have already upgraded to 2010 with 44% and 27% on 2007 (or 2008 for Mac) and 2003 (2004) respectively. It’s interesting to see a more aggressive adoption of 2010, compared to the slower migration to 2007. I suspect that this is being influenced by the upgrade of older Windows XP computers to newer desktops running Windows 7.
Getting back to the webinar, below are some the new features and capabilities that stood out for me:
- Online Collaboration: Office 2010 allows for online document collaboration regardless of location – across branch offices, from home, while travelling, with volunteers or board members. This is supported in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, although the implementation varies by application. For Word and PowerPoint, co-authoring is provided through the desktop application. Spreadsheet collaboration is accomplished using the free Excel Web App. OneNote supports multi-user access in both the desktop and web applications.
- Social Connector: With the Outlook Social Connector, you can synchronize Outlook contacts with social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Windows Live, and SharePoint. When one of your Outlook contacts updates their profile on one of these sites, this information will be available in your address book. Beyond the social aspects, the Connector allows you to quickly view your history of email, meetings, and attachments with any contact, which can help with that needle in the haystack search for a piece of information that you desperately need to locate right now. Some of the features are still in Beta, but the Facebook Connector is currently available and supports earlier versions of Outlook (2003/2007) as well.
- Photo/Video Editing: With the new built-in features, you can easily clean-up a picture or trim a video directly within Word and PowerPoint. While not as robust as stand-alone photo or video editing software, this in-house capability greatly simplifies the process of doing minor touch-up to increase its effectiveness in a report or presentation.
- Presentation Broadcasts: PowerPoint Broadcast Slide Show allows you to easily share a presentation to a remote audience. From the comfort of your desktop, you can broadcast a slide show that participants can quickly connect using their web browser or smartphone. Using the video export feature, you can convert your presentation into a video suitable to be burned to DVD or shared online.
Thanks to Microsoft and TechSoup for putting this webinar together. If you were not able to join the live event or would like to view it again, Microsoft has posted the presentation materials online at http://bit.ly/ngowebinar. In addition, TechSoup has posted a blog about the webinar, including resources to learn more, at http://bit.ly/officewebinar.
Have a great weekend!



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