Microsoft Office is the one program that most of use each day.  Whether it's for Word, Excel or something else, Office is key to our daily productivity.  So with a major new release due in the middle of this year, Kinetics staff are busy getting familiar with the beta release.

We'll keep highlighting new features here, as we note them.  A lot of changes are easy to take for granted - they 'polish' Office and make it cleaner and smoother, but you don't notice them until you revert to the old version.  And that's something about Office2010.  It's only a beta, which means its not finished, and it may still have bugs.  But so far, I've had a great experience.  It works really very well indeed.  Like the Windows 7 beta, the Office2010 beta is also extremely stable and functional.  The quality is excellent, and I'm using it for my everyday work.  It's worth pointing out that my computer is nearly three years old, and relatively low-spec by today's standards.  Nonetheless, both Windows7 and Office2010 work extremely well on it - in fact I think its probably faster to use now than when I had old Windows XP and Office 2003!

Outlook

The program we all use the most often is Outlook.   At Kinetics, we use Outlook extensively - sharing emails, appointments, contacts and tasks.   We use mobile Outlook on our phones extensively, and we all use desktop Outlook on our laptops and home PCs. 

It's Outlook that looks the most different.  The ribbon bar makes a long overdue appearance, and helps highlight some of the new features.    For example 'quick steps' lets you create simple 'macros' of things you do regularly so you can automate them.

One of the most useful new features for us is calendar groups.  While earlier versions of Outlook had the ability to group calendars, you can now open all the members of a group with one click, making it easier to schedule meetings or appointments within work teams or departments.  It's also miles easier to create groups.  This new feature alone will be a godsend to our Kinetics service co-ordinators, and I'm sure to many of our clients.

For people who work together,  but not necessarily from the same business, its also much easier to share calendars.  Using Microsoft Live, you can easily share your calendar directly from Outlook.  And, if you are in the events business, you can create and publish calendar schedules for public access - great for school events, community activities and so forth.

Of course, mainly we use Outlook for email.  And most of use have inboxes that are overwhelmed with messages.  We run the risk of losing messages as they scroll over the screen!  As with previous versions of Outlook, you can 'flag' messages.  But one of the best new features is 'conversation view'.  This automatically groups messages so that you only see the most recent email in a chain.  You can quickly 'expand' the chain by clicking on it if you want to drill into a specific email.   I really like the way the conversation automatically finds the emails I sent as well - so I can see how I replied to  a message - this is already saving me time each and every day.

There are no end of new time saving tools in Outlook.  The 'hover' feature means that if you hold he mouse over an email address, Outlook will tell you more about that person - depending on how you connect to them, it might include their status, availability, social media updates and so forth, and give you options to contact them.   (The social media links aren't supported in the beta but we can see how they are going to work).  

We'll keep posting about new features in Outlook as we find them, and share our highlights from the rest of the Office suite.

Outlook Hover Feature	Outlook Conversation View

Microsoft has their own summary : http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/whats-new/default.aspx