Office 2010 - What's New with 2010
Microsoft Office has been the benchmark for all productivity suites for almost two decades. Microsoft launched its latest version this year, Office 2010, and offers a plethora of new and improved features while staying true to its core design. Office 2007 made a huge transition from the traditional toolbars and menus approach of its predecessors to a new graphic interface called "Fluent user interface". The fluent user interface replaced the legacy menus and toolbars with a single tabbed toolbar, named as the "Ribbon". In Office 2010 Microsoft built on the same interface and made minor improvements to streamline the already excellent interface, Microsoft also added some very welcome new features.One particular improvement in Office 2010 is the return of the file menu. Microsoft has removed the Office button/orb from Office 2007 and it has been replaced with the new and much improved file menu, known as Backstage in 2010. The new file menu features a full-screen menu with all of the actions that pertain to a file such as create new file, open, save, print, and file properties. The improved "Print View" makes things much easier by combining all of the options previously inside the printing and layout options and puts them next to a print preview of your file.
Office always had a good reputation for simplifying the tasks related to today's work place and making it much easier to organize, analyze, and use the data and create amazing content for use in the workplace. With Office 2010 the most notable changes compared to its previous iterations, are the across the board improvements/modifications in navigating the applications. The ribbon interface described earlier has been integrated in all Office applications including OneNote and Publisher. For those of you who were disillusioned by the new Ribbon toolbar in 2007 Microsoft has now added the ability to customize the Ribbon in Office 2010. Just as with the Quick Access Toolbar, you can scroll through a list of commands and simply add them to the tab or group of their choice and/or create a new tab for their own commonly used commands.
With Office 2010 Microsoft has also improved the illustrations and image tools. Most applications in the suite now have the ability to insert a screenshot or screen capture from within the application. Apart from these you also have new and improved image editing capabilities such as applying a variety of artistic effects and previewing cropped images on the fly. These improvements pertain to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Microsoft has also added the ability to convert SmartArt to simple shapes. Creating and controlling gradient stops when formatting the color inside the shapes is much simpler than it has been in previous versions of Office. Rather than a drop-box controlling the color and position of a stop, you can now see a more intuitive sliding bar; this gives you a live preview of your gradient while you are making changes.
Another new addition to the Office suite is the Paste Preview feature. This feature allows you to see a live preview of how the content would look before actually pasting it.
The Launch of Office 2010 is the debut of Microsoft's free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. All these are compatible with the most popular web browsers i.e. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Google's Chrome.
LearnKey has already released training for Word 2010 and Excel 2010. Sign up here for our New Course Release List to receive an email when the remaining Office 2010 courses are released.
