6.  Making Data Tell a Story with Excel 2010 Visuals

There are some very useful new data analysis and visualization tools in Excel 2010. The new Conditional Formatting and especially the new Sparklines feature allows me to show visual insight into the meaning of the numbers I am tracking or presenting.  If you are looking for a way to quickly and easily make sense of data, but don’t want to spend minutes or even hours preparing charts and metrics, you will be pleased with these new tools.

7.  Get the Big Tasks Done Fast and Easy

It’s all thanks to the new Office 2010 Backstage view in all the applications. It replaces the traditional File menu to give you a centralized space for all of your file management tasks. But beyond the simple tasks such as save, save as, and print, it adds powerful, but very easy to use tasks such as creating a new document from the vast template library on Microsoft.com and publishing to SharePoint, your blog, the web, and more. With PowerPoint 2010 you will even find broadcasting and compression options within the Backstage view!

8.  Work with Office Wherever You Are

Many of my clients have run into the same issue. You need people, such as folks on the shop floor and remote users, to be able to work with Office documents but who don’t need full Office features with the full Office price tag.  Office 2010 can greatly help with the new Microsoft Office Web Apps. With Microsoft Office Web Apps and SharePoint, you can easily extend the Office 2010 experience to anyone who has access to your SharePoint site.  Employees, volunteers, venders, customers, etc. can access, view and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files online from virtually anywhere.  But that’s not the end of the story. Use a Windows smartphone or Laptop? You might like these new features too.

• Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 – If you are a laptop user and your business uses SharePoint (that’s me), you will love SharePoint Workspace. It lets you synchronize SharePoint 2010 lists and libraries that way you can access, view, and edit files anytime and anywhere, without the need for a Wi-Fi connection! When you’re back online, everything will sync again with SharePoint.
• Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 – You can stay current and respond quickly using new mobile versions of Office 2010 applications.

9.  Waiting Your Turn is Old-school.  Now You Can Work Together Simultaneously

This is a great new feature. At Pinnacle, I can find myself wanting to open a document that someone else is working on. We’ve all seen what happens next, you get the familiar options to open a read-only copy, create a local copy to merge later, or receive notification when the original is available. Office 2010 changes the game.

You can use co-authoring in applications such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel Web App, and OneNote shared notebooks. A status bar notification tells you who is currently editing the document and where they’re making changes. Why is this so cool? It’s now so much easier to brainstorm on ideas and meet deadlines now that you can you work in groups.

10.  One More New Outlook Feature (Because Outlook 2010 is That Good) – Conversations

If your day is anything like mine, you are inundated with many emails, from many different people, regarding several different projects. In the past and as a result, most of us found e-mail too often a burden rather than a productivity tool. However, Outlook 2010 has made a big step at help to turn all the noise into music.

Through the Conversation View feature of Outlook 2010, it’s e-mail management made easy. The new view aims to alleviate much of the noise by offering new ways to organize your email. I save valuable time by streamlining my inbox. I can compress long e-mail threads into conversations that can be prioritized, categorized, and conveniently filed-away.

1. The Ribbon – Now Included Outlook 2010 Too!

Why would I list the Ribbon as my number one loved feature in Office 2010 when the Ribbon was introduced in Office 2007? In Office 2007 it was the feature that caused controversy. But in Office 2010, it’s been truly perfected and included in all Office products including Outlook and OneNote.

That’s great news, why? The big reason is that you now have control over your Ribbon and what items appear on its tabs, and you can even add tabs of your own to easily add your favorite commands. No more “My favorite command that was on a menu can’t be found anywhere on the Ribbon!”  And as a business, you can deploy customized commands, groups within tabs, or entirely new tabs for your employees.

But my favorite new reason to love the Ribbon is that it’s been added to Outlook 2010. Unlike Word and Excel, most of us don’t/didn’t have Outlook commands customized just the way we wanted them. Outlook historically has been an application everyone in business needs to use, but never had any fun using. The Ribbon, with the inclusion of “Quick Steps,” allows you to easily find what you need in Outlook, and if you want a command that’s not out-of-the-box, build it with “Quick Steps”. You can easily create complex commands without any programming. I used it for escalating an important client e-mail as shown in Figure 1.  With one click, I am able to take that e-mail and move it to a special folder, forward it to my manager, create a task, and set importance.

2. Save Time and Stress, Preview Before you Paste

I am often finding myself cutting and pasting graphics, columns, text, and many other elements between documents. If you do too, you will also love Paste Preview.  Why?  You can often get unexpected results when you paste, especially with text formatting.  Get what I’m saying?  Office 2010′s Paste Preview function gives you control over the pasting process.

Past Preview Cool Features:

• Allows you to see what a paste will look like before actually executing the command.
• Offers multiple options to manipulate your clipboard contents before pasting.
• Depending on what you are pasting, you can use it to remove, merge, or preserve formatting, convert to an image, remove borders, and so on.

Now that saves time ! Especially when working with large, complex spreadsheets where columns of numbers, associated formulas, and embedded formatting needs to be adjusted whenever you move something around.

3. The Many, Many Helpful Add-ons for Outlook 2010

As someone in sales, I can’t speak enough to how helpful it is to be able to have as many activities as possible in one place. Outlook 2010 has done a lot to become the one place I can stay and still get pretty much everything I need to do and keep tabs on. Here’s what I mean:

• With Social Media Connector, I can sync LinkedIn and Facebook so that before I reply to my clients e-mail, I can see that his anniversary was yesterday and he recently received a promotion. I’ll note in my e-mail.
• With Twinbox, I can respond to any client questions or comments from Twitter with instant notification.
• With Bing, I can book my travel arrangement and have Outlook automatically create calendar events, task reminders, and set my out-of-the-office autoreply automatically when I’m gone. Video how-to here.
• And finally, with the Dynamics CRM Client for Outlook, I can link my activities to the right client with a click.

4. The Surprisingly Advanced Graphics Tools

If you ever add any graphics to your documents in Word, Excel, Publisher, and PowerPoint or your e-mail, this may just be the feature that pays for the upgrade.  Instead of needing a complex, expensive graphics editor to make changes to a picture or graphic before inserting into your document, you now have a very large set of tools built right into Office 2010. As shown in Figure 2, you can crop, resize, color correct, and remove layers and background, change brightness and contrast, add artistic effects and visual styles, and do many more tweaks.

5. Adding Screenshots and Screen Snips

If you are a tech writer, blogger, or a user who just needs to submit a helpdesk ticket. Word 2010’s new Screenshot tools couldn’t be easier to use. It gives you a visual listing of every open window and dialog box easy screen grabbing, or you can click “Screen Clipping” to create your own custom sized screenshot.