Office 2010 Official Launch

Today I am staffing the community booth for Microsoft’s Office 2010 Launch down at the RenCen. My fellow IT Pros from across the State are stopping by to ask questions. Some are old friends, some I’m just meeting. It’s fun.

But the real question of the day, is why should my clients care about Office 2010? Since most of you are still using Office 2003 I think that there are a huge number of improvements that you will value. I’m going to list a few of the more innovative features and skip over the fact that regular tasks like mail merge, save, print, protect have been made a lot easier. In a new version that goes almost without saying.

• Free Web Apps. Microsoft has created free web versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. That’s not the innovative part. They have further allowed you to connect those web apps to your Sharepoint site on your own server so you can access your files from any browser. Connecting the web, free apps and your local data together allowing you to work anywhere. It’s a repeating theme in this version of office.
• Built-in PDF. You can save directly as a PDF.
• Social Media Connector. In Outlook, all of my emails and contacts now have your picture in them if you are my friend on Facebook, LinkedIN or Live Messenger. Further I can click on those photos and community with you directly in those social media applications from Outlook.
• The Ribbon and Backstage. The ribbon isn’t new in this version but it is refined. The ribbon exposes features like never before. It make advanced features easy for the ordinary office user.

I’m not going to go on and on. The new feature set is so large. Just when you think Office can’t possibly change for the better, it does. The office team really out did themselves.