DACS General Meeting
August, 2010
Meeting Review:
Microsoft Office 2010

By Marc Cohen

We were privileged to have Jay Ferron as the evening's presenter. Jay is a noted author and lecturer, who has covered years of Microsoft and computer history. He was able to lead us quickly thru the many new features of Office2010.

Office2010 includes a suite of the most used home and office applications: Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, and a broad selection of Web applications.

Jay started with a tour of the ribbon bar interface features that many find intimidating. He showed how the controls are rapidly understandable when using the many self explanatory templates and graphic tools that are provided in the ribbon bar 
      
Starting with a text document, Jay demonstrated how to quickly format page size, page numbering, column layout, fonts, styles, colors, by using the ever present ribbon bar. He then imported and positioned a chart and a photo within the text. He added outlines, frames and shadows to both, and was able to edit the color and rotate the photo using the tools and prompts displayed in the ribbon bar. All without the need for exiting to an additional photo or video editing program.

There are many text style editing tools that can create effects that can turn plain text into attention getting headlines by choosing glows, shaded and shadowed styles from a visual preview accessed from the ribbon bar.    

Another application, Back  Stage, gives you more options to apply to your work once it's finished. Share and Send allows sending the document in E-mail, save to a company SharePoint site, in Word2010  or publish a blog post.
Windows Live Sky Drive is a free online service  (cloud?) that allows you to store documents on line.
You can then access it from wherever you have an internet connection. You just log on to your SkyDrive site with the same username and password you use for Windows Live Messenger or other Windows Live sites. You can save all your Windows2010 files and folders without leaving the applications.

More than ever before, you can store documents and folders that only you can access or you can store documents in folders that you can give to everyone or to selected users to whom you have given access permission.

(A confession. Not being a windows Office user I searched the web for whatever I could find to expand on Jay's guided tour to help round out this review. A very interesting exercise.)