Worldwide Launch: ‘Make it Great’ with Microsoft Office 2010

Input from 9 million beta downloads went into creating Office 2010, now available on new computers and in more than 35,000 retail outlets around the world.

Virtual Press Kit:   Office 2010

Feature:  Top 7 Reasons to Try

Try or Buy:  Make It Great Website

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Office is now live on SkyDrive!

Today, Office Web Apps on SkyDrive are now available to everyone in the US, UK, Canada, and Ireland. Still more to share next week when Office 2010 is released to consumers, including how Office 2010 + SkyDrive + Office Web Apps give you the best productivity experience across the PC, phone, and browser.

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MS Office Professional Plus 2010 Trial

Office Professional Plus 2010 Trial is also out for download. Evaluate Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 in your lab environments and with Microsoft Office enthusiasts in your organization. When you download this 60-day trial software, you're automatically registered to receive valuable resources delivered at strategic intervals throughout the software evaluation period. If you are a TechNet Plus subscriber, log on to access your download.

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Download the SharePoint Server 2010 Trial

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Trial is now available for download. Whether deployed on-premises or as a hosted service, SharePoint Server 2010 helps you cut costs with a unified infrastructure while allowing you to rapidly respond to your business needs. After registering, you will receive technical resources to help you evaluate SharePoint Server 2010. If you're a TechNet Plus subscriber, get your download. However, I'll update the links once it is opened for all.

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Office 2010 Launch and a free eBook

First Look Microsoft Office 2010 by Katherine Murray is available for free to download here. According to the author:

This book was written while the software was in development, so you may find some variance in screen illustrations and procedures, but the overall story is the same: The key to the new features is freedom and flexibility—you’ll be able to see how to get more from your applications no matter how—or where—you choose to use them. Office 2010 is designed to help you express your ideas clearly and creatively, work seamlessly with a group to get things done efficiently and on time, and access and work with your files virtually anywhere with a similar look and feel whether you’re using your PC, browser, or phone.

To showcase these key points, First Look: Microsoft Office 2010 follows this organization:

• Part I, “Envision the Possibilities,” introduces you to the changes in Office 2010 and shows you how you can make the most of the new features to fit the way you work today. Chapter 1, “Welcome to Office 2010,” gives you a play-by-play introduction to new features; Chapter 2, “Express Yourself Effectively and Efficiently,” details the great feature enhancements and visual effects throughout the applications; and Chapter 3, “Work Anywhere with Office 2010,” explores the flexibility factor by presenting a set of scenarios that enable users to complete their work no matter where their path takes them.
• Part II, “Hit the Ground Running,” focuses on each of the Office 2010 applications in turn, spotlighting the key new features and showing how they relate to the whole. These chapters provide a how-to guide for many of the top features you’re likely to use right off the bat, and they offer inspiring ideas on how to get the most from your favorite applications.
• Part III, “Next Steps with Office 2010,” zooms up to the big picture and provides examples to help you think through interoperability. How often do you use the various Office applications together? Customer research shows that people often don’t realize how well the applications work together as a complete system—which means they might be laboring over items they could easily incorporate from somewhere else. This part of the book provides examples for integrating the applications and explores Office 2010 security and training opportunities, as well.

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Learn where menu and toolbar commands are in Office 2010

Are you new to the ribbon interface in Office 2010?  Here’s how you can get up to speed and learn where everything is quickly and easily.

Microsoft has made an interactive guide to Office 2010’s new interface to help users learn their way around the new version.  If you’ve already used Office 2007, then Office 2010 will be very easy to transition to, but if you’re still using Office 2003 you may find the learning curve more steep.  With this interactive guide, upgrading your Office skills doesn’t have to be hard.

Links

Office 2010 interactive guide

Download Office 2010 reference workbooks

Office 2007 interactive guide

Thanks to Geeks

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Business Intelligence Features in Excel 2010

If you're an Excel geek, you can't miss this collection of posts about the new Excel 2010 features on the Office 2010 Engineering blog.
The Excel team has made a number of improvements in the Business Intelligence area for Excel 2010, which have been covered in-depth on the Excel Team Blog.

First, the team added slicers, which are visual controls that allow you to quickly and easily filter your data in an interactive way. Slicers can connect to PivotTables, PivotCharts, and CUBE functions to creative interactive dashboards:

Part of an interactive Dashboard with Slicers and PivotCharts
A number of enhancements have been made to PivotTables- including the ability to modify values in PivotTable cells (writeback), more flexibility and power through named sets, and a series of other enhancements.
A new search filter is available for tables and PivotTables, which allows you to quickly navigate through large data sets.

The New Search Filter
Finally, the Excel and SQL teams have collaborated to create a PowerPivot, a powerful data analysis tool made up of two components: an add-in for Excel 2010 and a series of new features for SharePoint 2010.
"Designed for business users, PowerPivot […] delivers unmatched computational power directly within the application users already know and love — Excel. Leveraging familiar Excel features, users can transform enormous quantities of data from virtually any source with incredible speed into meaningful information to get the answers they need in seconds."

PowerPivot add-in for Excel 2010
Here's the full list of Excel blog posts about Slicers, PivotTable Improvements, and PowerPivot.
Slicers

• Easy (and Even Fun!) Data Exploration: Introducing Excel 2010 Slicers
• Interacting with Slicers
• Dressing up your Slicers

Table and PivotTable Improvements

• Excel 2010: New Search Filter
• PivotTable Named Sets in Excel 2010
• Excel 2010 PivotTable What-If Analysis (Writeback)
• A Few More PivotTable Improvements in Excel 2010

PowerPivot

• Introducing PowerPivot
• New PowerPivot Site
• Using PowerPivot with Excel 2010
• PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 – The Business User’s Perspective

Also, read about improvements in other areas of Excel:

• Data Visualization Features in Excel 2010
• Functions and Solver Improvements in Excel 2010
• Excel Services 2010: Excel in the browser 

Ref:
http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/archive/2010/01/28/business-intelligence-features-in-excel-2010.aspx

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Microsoft Showcase

Microsoft Showcase is the site dedicated to the latest videos from MS. Mostly ads and other product related stuff is uploaded here.
You can also find how tos of new products such as Office 2010, Windows 7 etc.

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Visio 2010 Beta Download

The advanced diagramming tools of Visio 2010 help you simplify complexity with dynamic, data-driven visuals and new ways to share on the Web in real-time.

Start by building your diagram with professional-looking templates and modern, pre-drawn shapes. Then, easily link your diagram to popular data sources (such as Excel). You’ll see data automatically refresh right within your diagram, reflected in vibrant visuals such as icons, symbols, colors, and bar graphs. Finally, with just a few clicks, publish your data-linked diagram to SharePoint, and provide access to others on the Web, even if they don’t have Visio.

Together, simplicity, data-driven shapes, and Web sharing make Visio 2010 one of the most powerful ways to see and understand important information.

Read more and download...
Also Top 10 benefits of Visio 2010

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Social networking using Outlook 2010

View existing friends' profiles and updates and add new connections without ever leaving Outlook

In the upcoming months, you will be able to view the activities of your friends and contacts from your favorite social networks directly in Microsoft Outlook 2010.
Choose your network
To get started, download and install social network add-ins for Outlook.  Currently, there are no social network add-ins available as of the beta release of Outlook 2010.  But in the months to come, this page will be updated with links to new partner networks as they become available. 

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Transition to the ribbon with interactive guides

Office 2010 is out, in case you don't find any command, you are familiar to using in Office 2003, use the interactive presentations below to see new location on the ribbon.

Excel
Outlook
PowerPoint
Word

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What’s New Inside Microsoft Office 2010

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.

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