We’ve all been using Office2010 at Kinetics for some time.  It’s been in ‘beta’ for some months, and with suprisingly few problems for a beta-test edition. 

Why is Office 2010 so important?  It's quite simple really - the last version, Office 2007 was released 3 1/2 years ago (Oct 2006) and Office 2003 and XP are even older.  Since these came out, the world as changed, and the way we use technology is very different.  As we've charted in our newsletters, the number of people using Smart Phones has been increasing dramatically - in fact there is more internet usage from smart phone users than from Apple Mac users!  Likewise, the way we use the internet has changed, and what we expect from it is so much more.  Simply we want to access to our documents from the internet, and we want to be able to maintain them, or even build business applications using Word, Excel, Powerpoint or Access that just work over the internet.  And we want it to just work on our smart phones as well.  Whether it's an email attachment or a web document, no matter where we are, we just want to use our data. 

The full release in New Zealand is due on May 13th, and we're ready at Kinetics.  Our coaching team have prepared a number of user guides to help our clients adopt it easily, and we've been busy helpng some early adopters  pick up the new version - all with great results.  In fact, our experience with Office 2010 has been so good that we’ve rolled it out to all our staff.  And now we’ve collated their favourite experiences. 

• Creating PDFs is but a mouse click away - no longer need additional software
• The ribbon bar in Outlook makes it consistent with the other Office applications
• All the Office applications now have consistent screeb layouts so the various zoom and view functions all work as one
• When using Windows 7, the Outlook icon on the taskbar changes to indicate you have new mail
• The conversation view in Outlook takes a while to get used to but is great for tidying up threads in your inbox.
• Outlook’s calendar sharing and group calendar view make it much easier to schedule appointments with colleagues and customers
• The ability to group calendars, and hide or show them with a click of the button is really useful.  And, its great that these settings follow you in Outlook Web Access 2010!
• The navigation/search bar in Word is a winner.  It’s great for jumping around large documents and for reorganising the order of your document
• The print preview/page setting built into the ‘backstage’ (File) menu is fantastic, especially how it means you always see how your print,  and saves messing up heaps of paper
• The “Insert Screenshot” feature in Word is really handy for grabbing screenshots
• Outlook tells you who is out of the office before you send an email
• The ‘Picture Layout’ in PowerPoint makes it easy to do awesomely impressive pictures in SmartArt graphics
• Powerpoint now lets you create ‘sections’, which is an easy way to see who is meant to deliver what slide.  And it’s a great way to easily apply formatting to sectioned slides
• Powerpoint now makes video as easy as clipart and pictures
• Excel’s pivot tables and slicers make it much easier to analysis business data and get a real sense of the underlying trends – we use this to measure all sorts of performance KPIs at Kinetics
• Functions like removing duplicates, identifying outlying data points (e.g. best/worst 10% etc), and grouping data are all much easier to use, making it easier to quickly analyse your data
• Easier to share documents with other people, even outside my workplace, without emailing them.  The “Skydrive” links work really well, and from Microsoft Live, you can view (and shortly edit) documents, even without Office on your machine
• And my personal favourite : you can now just email a link to my document, rather than the whole file itself - saving mail space ad preventing versioning problems (about time!)

Once of our team, John, has even done the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T_UE1Yeh1o&feature=player_embedded

We're doing a seminar on April 29th to show you what Office 2010 can do - register here