Why Microsoft Office 2010? Part II

At first glance, SmartArt appears the same as in the previous version, but it has been enhanced in the Office 2010 package.  Any SmartArt you create is now actual text rather than being turned into a graphic image, which means the words are scannable for spellcheck – phew!  There’s nothing worse than a fanciful looking word…that’s spelled wrong!  The new WordArt Tools tool bar is very helpful also allowing great customization in adjusting your 3D graphics.  I particularly like the Wrap Text option that allows me to choose how I’d like text to wrap around my graphic.

The Navigation Pane has increased in its usefulness.  It offers you the ability to quickly get around and find things in long documents.  What I like even better is that you can move headers in the Navigational Pane and the document is changed! It’s so easy to re-arrange things now by viewing them in a hierarchy in the Navigational Pane rather than a lengthy document.

What’s more, you can now search for phrases or words and the words are highlighted both in the Navigational Pane (so you know what section the word/phrase is in) and in the document.  As you can see from this picture above, finding words has never been so easy.  Two thumbs up for the new Navigation Pane!

 

Screen Clipping

Screen Clipping allows you to take a screenshot of any of your open windows and insert it into your document.  This is very handy, especially when you are writing documents about a website, shopping comparisons, documenting your sources, etc.  You also have the option to use the Picture Tools toolbar to crop, create a border, or even compress the picture for better sharing.

 

Backstage

As I mentioned in the previous article, Why Office 2010? Part I, the Backstage is a very handy area of documents that offers a lot of choices.  You can see a long list of your most recent documents, you can change your document into a PDF, you can e-mail your PDF to someone as a document or PDF, you can even send the document using Internet fax, and don’t even need a machine.  Saving your document to the cloud is just as easy as saving it to your computer.  Saving it to the cloud allows for easy sharing of the document and edits to be made by multiple people…but you control the document permissions.

 

 

Excel

There are many nice changes to Excel.

 

Sparklines

Now this is a cool feature.  Sparklines are small charts that fit in cells and can be embedded in worksheets to give graphical display of data. For example, to track your stocks more easily, you could create a Sparkline for each stock to graph its performance over time.

 

Slicers

Slicers are built-in applets that help you to filter data in your PivotTables.  Slicers allow you to create multiple dashboards that allow you to track many types of data visually.  Excel has the capability of handling huge amounts of data, previously only Microsoft Access could handle, by adding a downloadable add-on for Excel called Project Gemini.

It’s best to see Slicers in action.  See this Excel 2010 Slicer video to see now Slicers can make your Excel analysis easier.
Themes

Excel 2010 offers a number of new themes to help professionalize your workbooks and keep them consistent with other Microsoft documents.

Improved Picture Editing Tools

Now you can have many of the picture editing controls in Excel that you’re used to in Word and PowerPoint.  You can take screenshots, use SmartArt, crop and enhance pictures, compress your pictures and more.

For a more comprehensive list (there are many more than listed here) of the new features of Excel 2010, see Microsoft’s “What’s New in Excel 2010.”

 

PowerPoint

PowerPoint has been updated with some fairly large upgrades with regards to video handling and web-based presentations.

Broadcast Slide Show

Wow, when I think back how much money it cost to share a presentation with other people across the web compared to today, I shudder.  Companies were spending big money.  With the Broadcast Slide Show, built into PowerPoint, setting up ad hoc online meetings with as as many people as you want to be included is easy…and free!

After creating your presentation, you can select Broadcast Slide Show and you’ll receive a link to send out to your recipients.  You can even send out invitations from PowerPoint itself.  Think of the possibilities…perhaps you want to teach a class, consult with a client, reach your readers to educate them on a topic on your blog, the possibilities are endless.

Unfortunately, there is one big caveat.  Recipients will not be able to hear you, so they will have to call in.  This won’t be too much of a problem if you’re working at a larger company with conferencing call capability.  For those of us at home, it limits the number of recipients to hear your presentation.  There is also no instant messaging feature available.

To learn more, see Microsoft’s “Broadcast your PowerPoint presentation to a remote audience.”

 

Video

Video within Powerpoint presentations is becoming more popular.  Microsoft has included a number of new of features to make video utilization more efficient and effective.  PowerPoint 2010 incorporates video-editing tools which allow you to correct color, define contrast, trim, compress, add fade-ins and fade-outs, and more.  Very cool.

In addition, you can alter the way your video looks, for instance, you can put a picture frame around the video clip, colorize it, adjust brightness and darkness, most of the things you can do with a picture you can now do with your video clip.  Any change that you make changes all the frames of the video.

Lastly, you now have options to pause, fast-forward, rewind, and control the volume when playing your video clips in PowerPoint.

BackStage

As noted in the  Why Office 2010? Part I article,  the BackStage is a pretty handy staging area for saving documents in different formats like a PDF, XPS (will work on most computers), or even as a fax to use through the Internet.  You can also publish slides to the Internet or a CD/DVD, send via e-mail, publish to a sharepoint on the Internet, or create a Broadcast slide show.

One of Backstage’s most powerful features is the “Save & Send” choice, which offers various options for sharing a file with others.

Animation Painter

The Animation Painter is a handy tool that allows you to “paint” animation across many slides without needing to animate
each slide individually.  This will save quite a bit of time on lengthy presentations.  The new Animation Pane works great too, you can set how many seconds each animation will take to appear.  For example, if you want to focus on one animation, you can have it slowly come in across the screen.  You control the timing.

For a more comprehensive list (there are many more than listed here) of the new features of PowerPoint 2010, see Microsoft’s “What’s New in PowerPoint 2010.”

 

 

OneNote

Think of OneNote as an electronic notebook for organizing multiple projects and large amounts of material. You can link to data on your computer or the Web, record audio or video from within it, capture information from the Web and more.I use OneNote extensively, every day in fact.  It’s my diary of business ideas, my folders of thoughts and organization for WellConnectedMom.com and TheWellConnectedHome.com, and my main organizational tool for the new house project I am working on.

I love OneNote because I can take notes and add pictures in the body using my iPad 2.  To learn more about how I use Office OneNote see my interview with the Microsoft OneNote staff, Zip lining, Alternate Avenues, and 2 Kids Add Up to 1 WellConnectedMom.

Cut & PasteThis is a feature that was present in the previous version, but I’m going to mention it anyway.  I love this feature.
Whenever you cut and paste something from the Internet or e-mail, OneNote pastes below it the location from which you copied the information or picture from.  This is very handy when footnoting a blog post or school paper.

This is a pretty cool feature. It allows you to record video and/or audio while you take notes.  I see this being extremely useful say at a conference. You can set up your laptop webcam to record the entire presentation while you take notes on your laptop.  The downfall is that you will hear your keyboard clicking during the recording, the plus side is that your notes will highlight and correspond to the presentation you are viewing when played back.  Once you record, you are able to play it back right from within the file in OneNote using forward, backward, stop, and pause features.

Sync to the Cloud – sign up for an account with Windows Live and you will be able to sync your notebooks and have access to it through the OneNote iPhone App.

OneNote iPhone App – The Office OneNote App  is a very useful app.  I use it extensively on my iPad 2.  I type all my meeting notes using it as well as work on my projects away from my home office.  It syncs through the cloud with my main OneNote application on my desktop.  Unfortunately, it is not yet available in the Android market yet.

For more enhancements included in OneNote 2010, see Microsoft’s What’s New in OneNote 2010?

 

A Mom’s Perspective

In short — if, like me, you live in e-mail, you’ll want this suite. If, however, you mainly use Word and Excel, and you don’t use Outlook or use it rarely, this new version will rank on your nice-to-have rather than must-have list.

There are many neat features that do indeed make working in Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote handy.  I have definitely been enjoying these features this past year.  I believe the more Microsoft allows access to files from the cloud (with little or no cost) through apps available everywhere (all smartphones, PC apps, web apps, TV apps, etc), the more useful Office will become.

 

*Microsoft provided me with a download of Office 2010 in exchange for my honest opinion.

Pictures Sources:  Office.com, WellConnectedMom.com