Visual Overview of Office 2010 Features

Word 2010, showing the tweaked Ribbon. Note the rectangular Office button in the upper left, which is now obviously an action button rather than a branding logo.

Office 2010: Office 2010: Most Innovations are Online

Office 2010: A Complete Overview of What's New

Office 2010's Free Web Versions Fend off Google Docs

- Preston Gralla

Not much has changed in Excel 2010. The most imporant addition is "Sparklines" -- small, cell-sized charts that you can embed in a worksheet next to data to get a quick visual representation of the data.

- Preston Gralla

Outlook 2010 has gotten a major overhaul, with the Ribbon now an integral part of the interface. Outlook also includes new tools for improving your e-mail productivity, such as Quick Steps, which give you fast access to common actions you perform on a message.

- Preston Gralla

Office 2010's photo editing tools let you edit images in a variety of ways, including sharpening or softening, changing the contrast and color saturation, cropping, eliminating the background, and adding a variety of "artistic effects."

- Preston Gralla

The new Backstage View, accessible via the Office button, gathers a host of useful information and common tasks. Choosing Print, for example, lets you preview the document and adjust print settings wihtout having to dig through different menus.

- Preston Gralla

Backstage View's Info view lets you review previous versions of your document and see information such as the author and the last time it was modified.

- Preston Gralla

Animation features have also been beefed up in PowerPoint 2010; there are more animations to choose from, and they're easier to use via the Ribbon.

- Preston Gralla

PowerPoint 2010 has entered the video age with a host of new video editing tools for common tasks such as trimming and compressing videos.

- Preston Gralla

Word 2010 looks and acts largely the same, but search has been improved, with a new search interface (left) that lets you search charts, tables, footnotes and other content. And you can now pretty up your text with special effects (right).

- Preston Gralla

OneNote -- an application that keeps track of notes and other data in multiple formats -- will finally come into its own.

- Preston Gralla

As you would expect, the Office Excel Web application allows you to create, edit and, save Microsoft Excel workbooks via Web browsers. Other functions:

* Multiuser co-authoring -- more than one person can edit data at the same time.

* The ability to use the same Excel formulas on online and in the client version of the program.

With the Office PowerPoint App you can create and edit presentations from the Web -- that includes the ability to pick a theme and slide layout. Other online features include:

* Ability to add animations

* In-browser and full-screen Slide Show views.* Autocorrect, spelling checker, and auto-numbering/bulleting and undo/redo.

* Ability to insert pictures, charts, and tables into existing PowerPoint presentations

With Office Word App you can:

* Create, edit, and save Word documents

* Add tables, bullets, and styles to Word documents

* The browser-based version of Word has AutoCorrect and background spelling checker.

Office 2010: Office 2010: Most Innovations are Online

Office 2010: A Complete Overview of What's New

Office 2010's Free Web Versions Fend off Google Docs