Microsoft launches $80 million Office 2010 ad campaign

Today, June 15, is the day Office 2010 goes on sale at retail. Microsoft is marking the occasion by launching an $80 million ad campaign.

The "Make it Great" campaign is focused on "real people" who were among the 9 million beta testers. Microsoft officials told News.com that about 70 percent of that ad push will be via online channels, with the rest spent on print ads and billboards.

The main Office 2010 "Make it Great" site also features links to buy the product, as well as for free limited-edition trials of various SKUs of Office 2010. Microsoft is highlighting examples of school, home and work users and uses for its latest Office suite there.

Earlier this year, Microsoft began preparing its retail and reseller partners for its Office 2010 onslaught, suggesting the top 10 features they should plug when selling the product. Here's that list of the 10 top ways Microsoft planned to hawk Office 2010 via its channel partners.

Today, Microsoft is circulating a different list: The Top 7 Reasons to Try Office 2010. There's some overlap with the previous top 10. But here's what's on its latest, more consumer-focused list:

1. Outlook Social Connector, providing a "people-centric view of e-mail" 2. Linked Notes in the OneNote note-taking program (enabling users to "dock" OneNote to the side of the screen, take notes and map those notes in the presentation. 3. Sparklines in Excel which are charts that fit into a single cell to show a trend at a glance 4. Photo editing in Word 5. Video and broadcast capabilities in PowerPoint 6. Office Web Apps, which are the Webified versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Microsoft is beginning to roll out a new version of Hotmail today (Windows Live Wave 4 Hotmail) that allows users to share these Office Web Apps documents via Hotmail 7. A Ribbon you can personalize by adding often-used commands (or by collapsing it to take up less space)

Microsoft's biggest competitor to Office 2010 is Office itself. Its biggest challenge is getting users of Office XP, Office 2003 -- and to a lesser extent, Office 2007 -- to upgrade.

Here are a few other things to know about the new Office 2010:

More about Office Starter 2010 (and how Microsoft is telling its retail partners to position it) Why you should read the fine print about Office Web Apps Details on Office 2010 versions and pricing On to Office 15