[Nfb-science] Fw: Office 2010

[Ed Meskys]

Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 10:11 AM
Subject: Office 2010


STATE OF THE ART. As Certain As Taxes: A New Office.
NY Times Thursday, 2010_06_03
By DAVID POGUE. E-mail: pogue at nytimes.com.. Certain landmark events come 
around
every
few years, giving some reassuring structure to our lives. You know: 
Presidential
elections. Summer Olympics. Remakes of 'A Christmas Carol.
And, of course, new versions of Microsoft Office.
Office is the software suite that includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It's 
the
world's
best-selling software; it's one of the two udders on Microsoft's cash cow 
(the
other
is Windows) thanks to the corporate administrators who buy hundreds of 
copies at
a time.
The newest version, Office 2010, arrives in stores June 15. Weirdly, there's 
no
discount
if you already own Office; everybody has to buy the full version. You save 
money
by downloading the software yourself (or getting it preinstalled on a new 
PC)
and
buying a serial-number card at a store.
The Home version (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote) goes for $120; a bundle 
with
Outlook costs $200. (Microsoft sells the whole enchilada -- seven apps -- to
schools
for $100.)
That's a little less than Microsoft was charging for the 2007 version, and 
no
wonder:
it's competing against free. A growing army of defectors is embracing 
Web-based
programs
like Google Docs, which offer the core functions of Word, Excel and 
PowerPoint
--
and costs nothing.
Drama-loving pundits predict, in fact, that Microsoft Office is doomed. But
Microsoft
says that the real Office programs offer more features, better speed and
usefulness
when you're not online.
Even so, Microsoft is clearly startled by the rise of the free Web programs.
With
Office 2010, it's fighting back with the usual list of new features and 
touchups
-- and unleashing its own free Web-based suite. That's right: you can now 
use
Microsoft
Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote on the Web, at no charge, without buying 
any
software at all.
More on that in a moment. But first, here's what's new in the not-free 
version
of
Office 2010.
There aren't many gotta-haves in Office 2010. Attractive refinements are
everywhere,
and Microsoft has removed plenty of small annoyances, but there won't be 
much
buzz
around the water cooler on the morning of June 15.
One of the most inspired changes, though, is Backstage view. It's a single, 
tidy
window whose options control all administrative aspects of a document: 
privacy
options,
sharing options, list of recent documents, a print preview and an option to 
save
a copy as a PDF document (welcome to 2005, Microsoft!). This conceptual
separation
of creating a document and managing it makes great sense.
To find Backstage, you click the File menu. (Yes, it actually says File 
again;
Microsoft
ditched the baffling, unlabeled upper-left orb of the previous version.
Microsoft
always brags about its exhaustive focus-group sessions -- how could they 
have
missed
that one?)
The only Backstage downside is that, well, you're opening what you think is 
a
menu,
the File menu, and suddenly your document disappears (to make way for all 
the
management
options). So how do you get back to your document? Hint: Don't click the 
Exit
button.
It doesn't take you out of Backstage view -- it quits the entire program. 
Oops!
Other universal changes: the Ribbon, the giant toolbar at the top of the 
window,
looks less cluttered, and you can customize it (hallelujah!).
You can now recover a document that you closed without saving. Basic
photo-editing
commands are built into all of the programs. (You know some kind of 
complexity
line
has been crossed when your spreadsheet program lets you retouch photos.)
There's also a new Preview Paste function. When you're about to paste 
material
into
Word, PowerPoint or Excel, for example, pointing to one of the Paste buttons 
on
the
ribbon shows you what the document will look like afterward. Why is this 
even
necessary?
Because Office has gotten so complex that there are various ways to paste 
(with
original
formatting, without formatting, merged formatting and so on).
WORD Microsoft Word has barely been touched in 2010. The left-side
table-of-contents
view, formerly called Document Map, is an improved navigation pane. It lists 
all
the sections of your book/thesis/whatever, with neatly indented headings.
In a snap, you can collapse them, rearrange them, jump to them, and so on. A
Search
box appears at the top, and the matches are highlighted in the relevant 
section
heads
so you know where they fall.
More special effects are available for jazzing up bits of text (shadows,
reflections
and so on), with less clumsiness than in the old Word Art module. It's now
easier
to insert the typographical flourishes that come in certain fonts, like 
swashes
and
ligatures.
EXCEL Most of the changes here are for hard-core number-crunchers. You get
better-named
statistical functions, an equation editor, refined conditional formatting, 
much
more
flexibility with pivot tables, and so on.
One of the few new features for the masses is something called sparklines: 
tiny
line
graphs that appear right in individual cells of your spreadsheet. They're 
often
far
clearer than 50 overlapping lines in a single chart.
OUTLOOK Outlook got the most attention this year; there's good stuff here.
Conversation
View, better known as threading, clumps together all of the messages from a
single
discussion. Better yet, a Clean Up command removes all the duplicate 
quoting,
giving
you much less to wade through, and an Ignore button spares you any more mail 
on
this
topic.
Quick Steps are multistep, automated functions like 'Send an out-of-office
message
to this person, forward it to my assistant, then delete the message, all at
once.
Unlike traditional mail rules, you can apply one by clicking a button 
instead of
having it applied universally.
In the lower-right corner, the Social Connector window shows the latest 
MySpace
or
LinkedIn updates from the sender of a selected message. (Facebook and 
Twitter
are
coming soon, says Microsoft.)
POWERPOINT You can now trim or create fades in videos on your slides. You 
can
embed
those videos right into your slide show file, too, rather than merely 
linking to
an external video file on your hard drive. (Pro: No more showing up at the
conference
with a big empty box where the video file is supposed to be. Con: Enormous
PowerPoint
files.)
Your slide show can now have sections, several slides apiece, for ease of
rearranging
and repurposing. You can open more than one slide show at once. Best of all, 
you
can broadcast a slide show over the Web -- a fantastic feature that could 
save a
lot of travel.
Your admiring spectators don't need Office or even Windows; they just watch 
your
slides flip by in their Web browsers (minus videos and slide transitions, 
alas).
No more e-mailing PowerPoint files and worrying about missing fonts.
THE WEB APPS The biggest news is Office Web Apps: mini versions of Word, 
Excel,
PowerPoint
and OneNote, complete with the Ribbon, on the Web.
If you do buy Office 2010, you'll love the ease of editing, saving and 
sharing
documents
directly to and from the Web. (Microsoft gives you a free 25-gigabyte locker 
for
these parked files -- a great feature called SkyDrive. Or, if you're a 
corporate
drone, you use something called SharePoint instead.) In other words, there's
much
less manual uploading or downloading of files, as in Google Docs.
If you and your colleagues have Word or PowerPoint 2010, you can open the 
same
document
simultaneously, and even edit it simultaneously. Each of you can be working 
on a
different paragraph; hitting Save updates everyone's copies, more or less
instantly.
It's complex, and a little confusing, and also still under construction. For
example,
to do this simultaneous editing in Word or PowerPoint, everyone has to own 
the
desktop
software; but you can do online simultaneous editing in Excel and OneNote 
right
on
the Web.
Clearly, Microsoft is taking aim at Google Docs and its imitators. An arms 
race
for
superiority and excellence will be the inevitable result -- and that's one 
more
life
cycle to look forward to.
PHOTOS: The new version of Excel includes a feature called sparklines, which 
are
tiny line graphs that appear in individual cells of the spreadsheet.; Office
2010
arrives in stores June 15. The Home version costs $120. (B10) DRAWING 
(DRAWING
BY
STUART GOLDENBERG) .



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