The first public beta of Microsoft Office 2010 (v. 14.0.4536.1000) is now available for download on both MSDN and Technet.
If you are not a subscriber, don’t hit the torrents yet because Microsoft may announce the general availability of Office 2010 beta sometime today itself. Update: You can download Office 2010 now.
Microsoft Office 2010 – What’s New
Here’s a quick visual guide to some of the new features of Microsoft Office 2010 that you’re likely to find useful once you get access to the software.
#1. Save Office Documents to the Cloud
With Microsoft Office 2010, you can directly upload documents to your Windows Live SkyDrive account and access them from any other computer.
SkyDrive provides 25 GB of free online storage and, since the service is integrated with Office Web Apps, you can view and edit these documents anywhere in the web browser without requiring Microsoft Office (even on a Mac).
#2. Embed Web Videos in your Presentations
With Office 2010, you can easily embed video clips from the Internet into your PowerPoint presentations just the way you embed Flash videos in regular web pages. Just copy the embed code from YouTube (or any other video sharing site) and paste it anywhere on the slide.
#3. Quick Steps in Outlook
Gmail includes a useful feature called Send and Archive that performs multiple tasks. When you click this button, it will first send the reply and then archives the thread with one click.
With the new Quick Steps feature in Outlook, you can create a sequence of commands (Send & Archive is just one example) and apply them to any Outlook item with a click. For instance, here’s a quick step for “Send and Delete” which would delete the email from your inbox after you’ve replied.
#4. Built-in PDF Writer
All Office 2010 programs include a built-in PDF writer to help you save documents into the PDF format with a click. Earlier, you had to download an add-on separately but now PDF support is native.
#5. Document printing made simple!
With Office 2010, Microsoft has completely revamped the print dialog and it’s a tremendous improvement. For instance, you can tweak printer settings (like page margins, etc.) and preview the changes side-by-side.
#6. Broadcast Slideshows within PowerPoint
This is probably my favorite new feature of PowerPoint 2010. You can deliver live presentations over the web from within PowerPoint and anyone in the world can view your presentation using a web browser. It just works.
#7. Video Editing meets PowerPoint
Do you want to trim some parts of a video clip before using it in your presentation? Or do you want to apply professional styles to a video (like reflection coupled with 3D rotation) so that your audience stay glued longer? Well, that’s easy because PowerPoint 2010 now includes some very powerful video editing features.
#8. Distribute your slides as video
PowerPoint 2010 can convert your presentation into a video file that you may upload on to YouTube or distribute on a portable media player like the iPod. The video conversion happens in the background so you can continue using PowerPoint while the video is being created.
#9. Built-in Screen Capture
All Office 2010 programs now include a screen clipping utility to help you quickly capture any area of the desktop screen. The tool will automatically take screenshots of all open applications on your desktop (that are not in minimized state) and you can insert them directly into your document or presentation.
#10. Outlook gets social
When you open an email message inside Outlook 2010, it will show you related information such as email attachments, pictures, meeting requests and all previous email messages that you may have exchanged with that person (something like Xobni).
There’s a green add button that lets you “add that person to your online social networks from Outlook” but the service isn’t live yet. Until then, you can use these add-ons to make your Outlook more social.
Important: Before installing Office 2010
1. If you are installing Office 2010 beta for the first time, the default settings will upgrade your existing copy of Microsoft Office. You can however customize this setting and install Office 2010 alongside an older version of Office.
2. If you already have Office 2010 Technical Preview on your computer, make sure you completely uninstall this edition before attempting to installing Office 14 beta. In case you still have trouble installing Office, use the cleanup utility to remove all traces of the previous version of Office from your system.
Related: Try Office 2010 Starter Edition
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/software/microsoft-office-2010-review/11132/
Tags: Archives, Most Popular, office 2010, Software
Reader Comments
Wow… Really an excellent journey into Office14 Beta…
Presently I m using Technical preview version. Thanks for the tips as I m gonna uninstall the preview version and going to install beta..
Written by Fasil on 11.18.09
Good round up Amit. I just want to add that “save as PDF/XPS” option is available in Office 2007 SP2 itself. Do you think they have imporoved / fixed any bugs in the PDF creation? I know for sure there are some bugs in Save As PDF feature when you are using excel sheets with complex layouts. More here link
Written by Chandoo on 11.18.09
I wonder how long the trial / beta will works. Any idea, Amit?
Written by Marco on 11.18.09
Found the answer in some MSFT forum
”
Q: How long can I use the Beta build?
A: You will be able to use it until October 2010. By that time we hope you’ve already bought the RTM version “
Written by Marco on 11.18.09
Sorry, one more thing, Beta will be available until October of 2010 at which point you will be able to download the full trial or buy Office 2010.
Andy
MSFT Office Outreach
Written by Andy on 11.18.09
They’re still pushing the ribbon interface? I’ll stick with 2003 until it turns “obsolete” and then I guess I’ll switch to open office.
Ribbon interface is the biggest fail in MS history since Windows ME2, oops i meant Vista.
Written by Billiam on 11.18.09
i love the new design templates in the powerpoint office 2010
Written by Moksh Juneja on 11.18.09
Nice review of Ms office 2010 and thanks @andy for complete information about downloading beta office 2010
Written by Youngistaan on 11.19.09
hmmm
Has some features that are worthless, social networking, but are marketing standards, everything that is available in the market is facebook compliant. and also lots of the “new” features were available as standards on OpenOffice since version 1.
The ;only good thing is the new printing layout…
Written by trotos on 11.19.09
The killer feature for me is that the Find/Replace dialog in Word is now a sidebar (finally!). The old dialog jumping around (to avoid the found text, but more often than not covering it) really annoyed me…
Written by Chris Anderson on 11.19.09
Great, now when Windows 7 dereferences my files in the cloud I won’t be able to recover them.
More bugs, less accountability. Without a competent realtime emergency response team the cloud is going to fail, completely.
Lets just stop jerking developers around and milking customers, get on with it and add Internet Office Sharepoint Explorer to Windows.
Written by Code Monkey on 11.19.09
You’ve been able to embed flash video ie youtube videos in powerpoint since office 2000 nothing new there, ive been using 2010 for a few months now and not really noticed much difference between 2007 and 2010 apart form a few minor gui changes and a few other tweaks.
Written by Martin Faulkner on 11.19.09
the “here” link you crossed out does work. You have to click on the link in the top right, and then on the next page click it again.
Good, but the windows 7 integration is still only for Outlook.
Written by attorney on 11.19.09
Office 2007 was always going to be a tough act to follow. The bold step of changing from the old cluttered menu bar to a process-oriented ribbon bar has obviously met with resistance. I look forward to playing with the new features of Office 2010. Microsoft Office Team, keep up the good work.
Written by James Wallis Martin on 11.19.09
I get Error 2203 as well. On Win 7. Tried a couple of times even with redownload. No good, still error 2203. :-(
Written by alex on 11.19.09
Video authoring for Powerpoint is a dream come true. I’ve had to do so much jumping through hoops to get a decent quality screen video capture of my presentations. Now it can be done directly in Powerpoint and save oodles of time. I needed this last week. It would have saved me 6+ hours of work.
Written by Ben on 11.19.09
There seems to be vey little to upgrade for. Especially for business users.
They all seem like novelty items, such as basic video editting – more powerful editors come free with every DVD writer, Outllok – starting to incorporated basic features that have been available on GMail for years (FREE), Cloud computing – of course I’m going to trust Microsoft with my confidential business data, ditto ditto ditto.
And the RIBBON interface is a complete production killer.
Microsoft need to make office, faster and less complicated, not more bloated and full of novelty items.
Open office is deffinately becoming more attractive for the office and business environments.
Written by Dazza on 11.20.09
Nice features but does it support copy/paste correctly? It annoys me a nearly daily basis that it deletes what’s in my clipboard when I open excel. This forces me to go back and copy what I had previously copied event if I didn’t even intend on pasting into excel.
Written by Scott on 11.21.09