Saturday, July 3, 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 Introduction and Review










 

Windows7Forums.com takes a quick look at the
Office 2010 suite and what its subtle advantages are in comparison to Office
2007. Now available in 1080P High Definition.

One of the most common
themes that can be seen from evaluating the final version of Microsoft Office
2010 is the less intensive resource consumption, as well as the focus on
consolidation. Office 2010 will likely have its greatest impact on businesses
with the advancements made in Outlook 2010, and its forward looking extended
compatibility with Business Contact Manager (BCM) 2010 for Small Businesses, as
well as its integration with Microsoft Exchange for Windows Server. The weeding
out of bugs in Outlook has been something greatly anticipated by IT managers and
support staff for several years, since the introduction of Business Contact
Manager. As small businesses may find that support for Business Contact Manager
and Exchange has improved, they may be less likely to move to third party
applications for customer relationship management (CRM), such as
ACT!.

The main advancements of Office 2010 rely in the area of
reliability and ease of use, consistent with the effort that was initiated by
Microsoft with the development of Windows 7. For project managers in a business
environment, Office 2010 promises to streamline the process of constructing
online and offline databases, queries, and other functions in both Access and
Excel, making the process easier, and allowing project management tasks to be
less focused on tech-heavy investments in coding, and more focused on the actual
use of these databases for data entry, marketing, and so forth. This can best be
seen by the efforts made in Access and Excel to further improve upon the XML
open standards now used in the software, as well as the ability to create and
link via ODBC. While the promise of InfoPath to make the creation of fillable
forms and data entry easier, it probably won’t supplant the features found in
competitive products like Adobe Acrobat, whereas, fillable, downloadable forms
have become commonplace in PDF format. However, InfoPath still offers unique
opportunities for companies to easily create fillable forms for data entry. It
is clear that this type of consolidation between data existing in multiple
programs of the Office suite (Excel, Access, InfoPath, and SharePoint Workspace)
is at the heart of an initiative to make the management of complex data
easier.

The rebranded Microsoft Groove, now known as Sharepoint
Workspace, promises to make the idea of “working from home” not a criminal
offense, but a reality. With a Sharepoint Workspace account, Office users can
work collaboratively, as a team, on a level that would normally require an
entire Windows Server setup. By presenting this product in a way that Microsoft
can host this data online, in a cloud computing environment, Microsoft is taking
early steps to see the Office suite, not only as a product that can be activated
and used on a single computer, but one that can be used from any computer
worldwide.

For the home user, Office 2010 stands out in the areas of an
improved word processor, a relatively faster loading Excel, and the new version
of InfoPath. OneNote’s drastic improvements allow for the taking of huge amount
of notes, which will benefit students greatly around the world. It can also
clearly be used by businesses to take down meeting minutes, or create a binder
of information that can be made accessible to the business at large. PowerPoint
will still be a major player in presentations, and online versions of the
software promise to make it universal and accessible through cloud
computing.

Overall, Office 2010 stands out with what may seem to be at
first: minor innovations. But when taking into account the potential it has to
change the nature of how we use and access data, along with major improvements
in reliability, it actually promises to revolutionize the experience of the
actual office worker. While Office 2010 may not be the perfect solution in every
scenario, the learning curve for new users, this time, may not be as steep as it
was in Office 2007. Here we see that the famous “ribbon bar” has been made
entirely easier to use, understand, and the creation, manipulation, and
management of documents and projects has never been more open to learning and
understanding.

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