As a buyer in a retail company, I’m glued to my LCD screen for a large portion of my day. Reading and replying to emails, analysing stock and sales, and creating presentations are all part and parcel of a typical day, in addition to seeing account managers, ordering stock and briefing advertisements.
We were lucky enough to get Microsoft Office 2010 pretty much the first week it was released, and it isn’t until you start exploring beyond the standard templates and tables that you can see where this productivity suite really comes alive. The main point about Office I’m going to make is its ability to give your documents real visual flair.
Inserting images into a Word document, for example, doesn’t just have to be a cut and paste job. There are numerous options available to crop that image, frame it nicely and even add some kind of special effect if the image calls for it. You don’t need to open another image editing suite, it’s all done within the page itself. Very cool. You can even save that pic for use in other documents.
PowerPoint can do the same thing but extends the abilities into the video editing area. You can add effects, edit the video down to the main points and choose your own transitions where you made the edit points. In fact, after you’ve finished your presentation and set all the timings, you can save the ENTIRE presentation in video format, so it’s locked down and can’t be edited by your intended audience.
Even Excel, the most dreaded of fun-sucking applications in the universe, can be given a little facelift to more clearly illustrate trends and patterns. If that’s your thing.
From an online perspective, there’s more integration than ever before. I’m writing this post on Word, and all I need to do is click “Publish” and it will update my blog – all you need to do is register your account and it’s saved for any future posts. And the Office Skydrive is cool if you have a team of people working on a document. Just upload it to the cloud, everyone can contribute, and download the final version at the end.
It’s up to you how you use Office 2010, but for me it’s all about Creating Compelling Content. If you do use it and haven’t peeked under the covers to see what else you can play with, here’s a short video I did for Bing Lee that shows some of the cool features: