Photos: Office 2010 - Word, Outlook and PowerPoint features explored
Know your PowerPivot from your Sparklines?
Yesterday saw the arrival of Office 2010, with Microsoft's business division president Stephen Elop (pictured here) doing the honours at the official launch event in New York.
According to Microsoft, Office 2010's beta programme has been its largest ever with more than eight million businesses already using the productivity suite.
Over the next few pages, we take a look at what to expect from Office 2010.
Photo credit: Microsoft
Office 2010's main applications - Excel, PowerPoint, Word - have all gained what's called a Backstage view.
It replaces the File menu and brings together commands often used at the start or end of working on a document - for example, printing commands, saving or checking permissions - in one screen.
Pictured above is Word's Backstage view.
Photo credit: Microsoft
Office 2010's Word features a Navigation pane, shown to the left of the screen above.
The pane includes the usual 'find' functionality - type a word or phrase into the Search box and Word will show you where it occurs in the text - but it also picks out the document's headings so a user can move between sections of the text more easily.
A page view option will also show the document broken down into thumbnails of the pages it contains, to help with navigation.
Photo credit: Microsoft
Another feature to make an appearance in Word is co-authoring, whereby several individuals can work on a document at the same time.
Co-authoring can also be used with Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote thanks to SharePoint 2010, also launched yesterday.
Photo credit: Microsoft
PowerPoint meanwhile has gained the ability to edit pictures without leaving the application.
Photo credit: Microsoft
Here's PowerPoint's Backstage view.
Photo credit: Microsoft
Excel's new additions include a feature called Sparklines, which lets users create graphics that fit into single cells - for example, the trend lines seen above - to help add context to the document.
Photo credit: Microsoft
Excel also sports PowerPivot, a business intelligence add-in which allows users to crunch the numbers held in Excel - and elsewhere, as datasets can be imported - to produce data analyses.
Photo credit: Microsoft
Outlook also gets a revamp with this horizontal Calendar view.
Photo credit: Microsoft
Social Connector is also on show in Office 2010. It's a tool to bring social network information into work email, allowing users to see updates from their social networking contacts from within Outlook.
Seen here is a view of how a contact's social networking updates would appear at the bottom of an email they had sent.
Photo credit: Microsoft
LinkedIn was the first social network to sign up and a connector for the business site has been available since February.
Photo credit: Microsoft
Facebook updates can also be viewed using Social Connector.
To see how Office 2010 will look on your mobile, see our photo story here.
Photo credit: Microsoft