Office 2010 will be released next year, so what can we expect to see? The most significant feature is the idea of being able to open and maintain your documents not just from Office on your PC, as you are used to, but also from a web browser, or a mobile device.  Microsoft are making sure that no matter where you are, or what tools you have, you can access and maintain your files consistently.  it's all about choosing the right tool for the job.  They're calling it "Office Anywhere".  And they are making a big deal that 'web' means more than Internet Explorer - they are also supporting Safari and Firefox.
Firstly, lets look at the programme most people use the most -  Outlook.  it's been strengthened to make it easire to manage the deluge of emails.  Did you know that on average, most people get 93 emails per day?  It's a staggering load, potentially a massive distraction and certainly time-sapping.  So, in Outlook 2010 there is a new feature that will allow you to view your inbox by 'conversation'.  So if you are looking at an email, Outlook will automatically group all the messages in the 'thread' together, seeking them out from the folders you may have filed them in, and making it easy to reference what's gone before. But of course some message conversations are just noise.  Because you're in a particular address group, or you've been cc'd, everytime someone hits 'reply-all', you get yet another message in your inbox.  I've just been through this with a conversation in our office, where I've long since made my contribution and I don't need to see any more.  And I certianly don't want to be distracted by the 'new email' alert everytime there's yet another reply to the conversation.  Outlook has a new feature called 'ignore', which wil automatically move any new messages in the thread straight to your recycle bin without annoying you further.  The great news is that these tools carry over to your web and mobile email client's as well. Visually, as you can see from the thumbnail screenshot of Outlook2010, the ribbon finally makes it to Outlook.  And with it comes 'quicksteps' which is a library of shortcuts you can build.  They remind me of very simple macros, enabling you to do regular tasks at the click of a button.   The final significant new innovation is called 'mailtips'.  This comes into play when you send an email, assessing your address block and warning you if it senses anythign may be wrong - for example an excessive number of recipients, or mixing internal and external recipients.	Click here to check out the preview videos of what you can expect in Office 2010
Excel 2010 is exciting as well.  The feature that caught my eye is called 'Sparklines'.  It's a great way of presenting complex data.  In the screenshot on the right, you can see a column made up of little graphs.  These 'graphs in a cell' graphically represent the values in the adjacent cells, making it easy to spot trends.  We'll be using this to visualise our KPI's more readily. Like it's companion products, Excel allows you to view and update documents consistently within the browser.  Not only does this mean you'll be able to update and mainain Word, Excel and other documents over the web from whereever you are, regardless of the machine you are on, but it also means that presenting graphs like the one in the screen shot can be consistent within your web dashboards, enriching your sharepoint business analytics. Those analytics themselves are also much easier to collate.  It's a cornerstone of Microsoft's strategy for Excel that you'll be able to make it your primary business intelligence tool.  They demostrated an ordinary office computer using Excel 2010 to attach to a massive database with 100 million records, and quickly an easily summarise the data.  That's an incredible feat and something we'll be looking forward to helping our clients exploit.
Likewise, change is coming to Powerpoint.  There are a massive number of new tools including much a better and more appealing selection of slide transitions that leave you spoiled for choice including one that's like the ripples on a pond - all very effective. Video has been incorporated, with a great range of effects. You can crop a video, recolour it, and manipulate it like any other Powerpoint content.  No longer does it look like an after-thought!  But probably the most compelling features are the collobration ones.  Powerpoint 2010 lets you share a powerpoint file with a co-worker, and you can both maintain and update it at the same time.  And you can email it to colleagues and then have them 'follow you' as you click through the slides, regardless of their platform.  In the thumbnail, you can see an example of this using the desktop and webbrowser views, and mobile works just the same way.
These are just a few examples of what you can expect from Office2010.  We've got a "technical preview" copy, which is one step ahead of beta, and we'll be going through it, looking and learning so that we can help you to get the most from this exciting new version.