Office 2010 is almost here Video

Office 2010 is almost here Video Transcript

>>Office 2010 brings a slew of new features across the entire Office suite with the intent of helping you manage your work flow across your PC, your smartphone and your web browser. I'm Jason Parker from CNET Download.com and today we're going to be looking at changes in the RTM version of Microsoft Office 2010 which is virtually identical to what will be available to the public in June. There's still a couple of things we can't talk about in Microsoft's Office suite just yet but today we'll look at feature enhancements that caught our eye on this mere final build of Microsoft Office. As we know from earlier review versions, the Ribbon which first made an appearance in Office 2007 is back and that works across all applications in Office 2010. In this latest version you can completely customize Ribbon to add just the tools you need. This will now, might give those less impressed by the introduction of the Ribbon and reason to give it another try. Another feature enhancement called "Quick Steps" enables you to quickly take advantage of commonly used features in your work flow. A common task like regular auto-forwarding of e-mails to a third party for example could be made into a Quick Step for easy access. This addition gives you access to more office applications and features no matter which office program you're working with at the time. The Conversation View in Outlook introduced in the beta version makes handling e-mail much more efficient. Rather than sifting through countless e-mails you'll be able to pick through an entire conversation for relevant information. You can even strip out duplicate bits of information by using the clean up conversation option which deletes redundant messages from the conversation. Microsoft decided to turn the Conversation view off by default in the latest version but it's easily accessible from the Ribbon. We think users will find it very useful to get to the information they want. With this latest version of Office 2010 we're starting to see how each of the new Outlook features will save time in your daily e-mail processing. One of the biggest changes in Microsoft Office 2010 is the Back Stage feature now found under the File menu. Working as an enhanced replacement for older versions of the File menu in Office, the Back Stage view opens into a full-screen to bring related but separate tasks onto one page for easy access. Using Back Stage and Word for example you'll be able to set permissions, share your document with others with the newly renamed Save and Send feature and look at Print and Page view options all in one place. Before you send you also can use the new Check for Issues feature to inspect the document for hidden properties, check accessibility to make sure people with disabilities can read your document easily and check compatibility to make sure your document can be read by older versions of Word. With this latest version of Office 2010 you also can customize your Back Stage view to have just the features you need for your particular work flow. One of the features announced in earlier versions we have not seen were the web counterparts to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Using your Facebook account you will be able to sign on, edit and share your projects with others from anywhere. In the online version of Word you get a slim downed Ribbon with several useful features for editing on the go. When you're done you can save your work so others can make changes. Once you get back to your desktop computer simply open the file online and click the Open and Word button to work on your document in Microsoft Office. Each of the online versions retain the formatting you used in the original so you don't have to worry about how it might look once you get back to the office. Overall, we like what we see in Office 2010 and there's much more than what we've shown here today. New image and video editing in PowerPoint will help you move your presentations from standard bullet points to a more visual experience. New easier to read spreadsheets in Excel make it a snap to locate the data you need and changes across the entire suite mean easier integration between programs, easier collaboration and hopefully a streamlined work flow to keep your mind on the task at hand. Office 2010 was released today for business licenses and will be released to the public in June. From the list of things we think it's definitely going to be a welcome upgrade. I'm Jason Parker for CNET. Thank you for watching.