When I started using office 2007 in April 2010 I felt an ocean of difference between office 2003 and office 2007. Initially it was difficult to adapt to the ribbon structure. I was surviving with Office 2003 menu shortcuts. Once familiarized with the ribbon structure I could see the robustness and effectiveness of it.
Ribbon Image
Within five months I got opportunity to use the latest Office version 2010. I got the Office 2010 installable yesterday and started using it. Here is my first feel about the application.
Performance
I opened the MS Word 2010 application and it took a long time to load. The overall performance for all the operations is little slower than 2007. Microsoft would have added new functionalities in the 2010 version which might have reduced the performance!?!.
File page
The File menu, actually I like to call it as File Page is no more a menu like in 2007 or its previous versions. The menu is a complete page. You can see the current document properties in this page which were hidden in older versions. This will help you modify the document properties easily. The file page is one of my favorite features in Office 2010.
Sky drive
How many times have we worked late night on an important presentation or document on our personal systems and forgot to take it to the meeting? Sounding familiar?? Microsoft has a solution for this – The skyDrive server. The office 2010 documents can be stored directly in the SkyDrive server from MS Word or Excel applications. This will help to keep your documents in a global share drive. You can download and use it anywhere in the world. SkyDrive provides 25GB space for each id which is pretty huge. This is similar to Google Docs, but has lots of office 2010 editing features which are missing in Google Docs. The documents can be edited in the web browser itself. But the web browser version of Office 2010 is not same as the local version. It has most of the frequently used components but not all. My recommendation is to use the locally installed application if you have one and then you can upload it again to SkyDrive. I also noticed that the formatting changes when I open a document in the web version. It is not able to handle multiple columns and image alignments properly.
Portable document format
All of us are so used to PDF that some of us do not even know what the abbreviation means! PDF – Portable document format – this is one of the moist widely used formats to share data. We always stumble upon converting office documents to PDF and end up using PDF software generators like primopdf. This is no more a laborious process. Microsoft has added the PDF generator in Office 2010. This is available in the Save and Send option in the File page. I created a PDF of this document and its pretty neat. You can generate either a high quality version ஓர் a low quality version for online purposes.
Ctrl +P
The print & print preview page has improved a lot in both look & feel and functionality. You can see the complete print option in a single page. Also you can see the print preview side by side when you make changes in the properties and settings.
Screenshot Capture
Another feature implemented in all the Office 2010 applications is the screenshot capture button. When you click the screenshot button, the office application will be minimized and any component behind it will be captured. You can use the mouse to select the area you want to capture. The captured screenshot will automatically be pasted in the activated office application. This is the screenshot I took it from my desktop image (My Daughters eye)
Ribbon structure
One of the main difference between 2003 and the newer versions is the ribbon structure. It is very tough to find a desired component in the ribbon until you are familiar with it. In Office 2007 Microsoft provided an option to create custom quick access bar. This will help you to access the most used components on top of the application. In
Office 2010 they have moved a step forward and have given options to customize the components in the ribbon itself. We can add or remove existing ribbon components.
Navigation
The New navigation bar or panel on the left side of the document will help you to navigate through any big documents at ease. The headings or sections in the document will display on the panel. You can navigate to any part of the document just by clicking the heading. This is a great feature to read huge document.
Smart Art
In Office 2010 we can add images to the SmartArt diagrams. The SmartArt diagrams are one of the most used components and it increased its prospection with the new image tag. You can rearrange the components of the SmartArt and also you can replace one with the other. These SmartArt will give great professional look to your documents and also to your presentations. Here is a sample SmartArt diagram created using Office 2010. The pictures can be modified to a great extend using the tools provided in Office 2010. You can change the color saturation etc and make it more artistic. This will add value to your documents and presentations. You should practice more on how to use these image control tools to get the most and best out of it.
Excel Sparkline
Excel Sparkline is a new functionality in 2010 and it is very useful to understand the trend of the records in a row or a column. We can’t use this to compare data in multiple rows or columns. You can add a new Sparkline component in the last column of a row or column and configure it to display the trend in a bar or line chart or win/loss format. This is pretty easy and more visualizing to the users. Pivot tables are good to drilldown a tables, but this is pretty straight forward and easy for users to understand it clearly. Here is the sample data model with Sparkline chart.
Document Translation
Translating your document is pretty simple and exhaustive in Office 2010. You can translate a set of words or you can translate the whole document. The whole document translation is performed outside the office application. The document content will be sent to
http://www.microsofttranslator.com site and you can see the translation in the site itself,
On the fly
You can filter the data on the fly in the pivot table. On the fly option is introduced in 2010 version. This is more effective when you are drilling a huge table with complex data.
Embedding
You can embed web videos in the PowerPoint presentation. This is a cool feature which will help to have a lively presentation. You can get the embedded object code form the video sharing sites like YouTube and paste it in the presentation. You have to add the video embed code using Insert Video comment in Insert tab. The flow of the video
depends on the quality of the internet connection and video quality. When I tested this functionality at my home, the video loaded pretty fast and the quality was good.
Broadcast
Another good feature in PowerPoint is that the presentation can be broadcasted to anyone in the world who has access to internet. No setup is required either in your machine or the listener machine. When you select the broadcasting option, a link will be generated by the PowerPoint application which will open the gateway to your listeners. This web link will open the presentation in the web browser.
Video Editing
Now you can edit the video files in PowerPoint. This is a cool feature to trim a part of the video or to change the coloring. You can convert your slide show as a video and can distribute it to your clients or broadcast it in video sharing sites like YouTube. This is a cool feature to spread your company news through the powerful video media. You can select the interval between the slides and also the quality of the video.
Oops I did not save the file!
Oh my God! Did your system blue screen, restart or was there a power outage? Often we hear from colleague “ I lost all the work done for hours”. Until 2010, when you are working on a saved document, Microsoft office will able to retrieve the latest data. But from Office 2010 even the unsaved document is saved automatically every 10 minutes in a specific folder. The duration and the folder location can be changed from the options dialog box. This is very useful to retrieve your work from an unsaved document which you have lost during the power outage or when you have closed the document without saving it.
Outlook & Multi tasks
You can create multi-task buttons in outlook. This is pretty cool stuff which will increase the productivity. You can create a button as ‘Sent’ and move the mail to special folder. From outlook you can add contacts to your social network group like Facebook. This is a cool feature in the real
world.
Now if you have reached this point and have not had a look at 2010 yet – I am sure you would want to explore the new features!
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