Microsoft Office 2010: In-Depth

Microsoft Office 2010 is coming. It has new, updated versions of all the applications you know and love, plus online browser versions of several popular Office apps. You can check out the video here or browse the website for the latest information about Office 2010.

The 'three screen' strategy Microsoft has been shooting for over the last few months comes to fruition with Office 2010. 'Three screens' is the idea that users should be able to synchronize content between their phone, web browser, and PC. Now that users will be able to edit, create, and share documents online a greater level of synchronization than ever before is possible.

Of course, Google docs already give us that ability. Far more people use office than use Google Docs, however, and now that vast multitude of Microsoft users will have an easy way to connect their devices. Microsoft's done more than just put Office up online, though.

PowerPoint 2010: Users will now be able to edit videos and images. Microsoft's put in both video and image editing tools, which are supposed to work like simplified versions of iMovie and Photoshop, respectively. You'll be able to share your PowerPoints in real time now as well, which means you can make a presentation on your desktop and view it on your mobile phone.

The free, online browser version of PowerPoint will not include video editing.

Excel 2010: First off, the online browser version of Excel is supposed to offer way more options than Google Spreadsheets. Considering how much longer Microsoft's been doing spreadsheets, we'll trust them on this.

The big new thing they've added to Excel is sparklines, which is supposed to help users pick out data trends over time within cells. Sparklines produces a 'visual snapshot' of the data trend so that you can get a better idea of just what is the numbers in your spreadsheet are saying.

Word 2010: Most of the work done on Office 2010 seems to have been dedicated to making sure that it looks the same in a browser as it does on your desktop. 'Document fidelity' as Microsoft calls it, is a big deal. That's why the UI to the Word browser looks and moves exactly the same way as the application does.

The desktop version also has collaborative features, which will allow multiple people to actively edit or modify the same document. Also new is a copy/paste function that allows you to see where the object you are pasting will go before you do it.

Outlook 2010: Outlook seems less terrible than ever before with this new update. Turning all the received emails from a person into a continuous thread was a good idea, as was allowing users to ignore people. Search has also been improved, and content is supposed to be 'easier' to find now.

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