Once again Microsoft has acquired business man’s attention worldwide by making some announcments of its upcoming productivity suite, MS Office 2010. There are plenty of new features including cloud computing as well as the introduction of browser-based versions of Word and Excel in Microsoft Office 2010.
The significance of Office 2010 was realised last year November when Microsoft claimed the largest ever participation in beta testing with almost 8.6 million people involved. This is almost 3 times bigger than its previous Office beta phase.

A little about New Features

There will be lot of new featured bundled with new version of Office. Some of the new features include new picture formatting tools such as color saturation and artistic effects targetted at giving documents some life. Backstage view will give a more modern polished feel to saving, printing, sharing and publishing.
Addition of co-authoring tools in Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote (a digital editor) has made it possible to offer a similar user experience across PC, Phone and browser platforms.

Old Document Map feature function is no more in Word replaced by Navigation Pane which provides quick and easy visual representation of document structure.

A new feature in Excel is Sparklines, which delivers a clear and compact visual representation of data through small charts within individual worksheet cells, also the 64-bit version caters for huge database development opportunities.

A much awaited feature will come along in new Outlook i.e Conversation View, which can help bring together emails and replied on a themed subject into one expandable thread and the new Outlook Social Connector brings social network feeds directly within the popular productivity tool.

Talking of Powerpoint, embedding video content into presentations is now automated, negating the need to manage external media files and PowerPoint also offers basic editing from right within the application. Another exciting feature is Broadcast Slide Show which simply relies on a web browser to be present on the device used by viewers.

A Glimpse at Cloud Computing

Office 2010 has no doubt taken a significant step towards the cloud by making its desktop application suite available online. Web Applications can be viewed as being online companions to desktop programs such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, while preserving the look of whatever document is being worked on, no matter the device being used for access. The whole new world of cloud storage and collaboration possibilities heavily uses Microsoft Silverlight application.
Earlier Microsoft has had a powerful social network and email portals in its arsenal for a long time and now its moving Office into such unfamiliar surroundings, which is a clear evidence of the phenomenal recent growth of other players who offer online productivity tools (often free) and have managed to successfully shift focus from data storage on privately-owned machines to remote unseen servers, but it’s an important development nonetheless.