Microsoft Office 2010: Six Key Features You Should Know

On Tuesday, Microsoft Office 2010 began appearing on retail shelves, and a lot of people have asked me whether they should upgrade. The answer, as always, depends on what you are going to do with the product.

In general, I think this is a more important upgrade for larger businesses than for home users and small businesses. But it does have a number of neat features many individuals will like.

I've been using Office 2010 as my primary office suite, and have to say I've been very happy with it. Here are the five new features I think will be most attractive for home and small business users:

The Return of the "File" Menu: A lot of people liked the "ribbon" user interface that Microsoft introduced with Office 2007; and a lot of people hated it, at least at first. If you currently use Office 2003 or earlier, you will still find the change a bit jarring and it will take you some time to get used to it, but after a few weeks, you probably won't notice it unless you were a power keystroke user.

But one thing that tripped up a lot of people has been notably fixed. There is again a "file" tab in all of the applications, so it's pretty familiar for users of the older version. Clicking on it brings up all the controls for saving, sharing, printing, and so on, in what Microsoft calls a Backstage area.

The name is a bit hokey, but the organization of the page gives you much easier access to all sorts of options, such as previewing what you are printing and saving to different file formats. It can be a real time-saver. One suggestion: I added the "Quick Print" option to the "Quick Access" toolbar on the very top of the Window, so I can again print without going to a menu.

Word's Navigation pane: A version of this, called Document Map, existed in earlier versions, but it's been markedly improved. You first use styling to indicate the different levels within your document--title, headings, and so on. Then, when you turn on the navigation pane, all the headings appear in an outline fashion on the side of the screen. You can just click on a heading to navigate to it, or rearrange your document by dragging headlines. I find myself using this all the time.

PowerPoint video editing: The new version lets you import a video clip into PowerPoint and then trim the clip, setting start and end points. It sounds simple, and again, you could always use a separate video editor to to this. But it's incredibly convenient to have this capability within the presentation tool itself. In addition, PowerPoint adds a number of ways for making a video look better within a presentation.

Better graphics editing: Just about all the features now include new tools with which you can better edit graphics within your documents. The one I've used most lets you remove the background from a photo fairly easily, so you just get the parts you want. Sure, you could do this with a graphics program, but being able to do it within your document in much more convenient, and I've found myself using it more and more. There's also a new feature for doing screen captures.

Sparklines: These are "in-line" graphics that you add to cells in a spreadsheet, letting you see trend lines at a glance. For instance, if you have monthly sales listed for each product, one more column in the grid can now just show a tiny chart representing sales.

Those are the five features inside the basic Office 2010 that I think are of most interest to consumers and small businesses. But of course the biggest change is....

Online Apps: The biggest change in the 2010 versions is the ability to edit and create your documents online, with Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. These applications are free: They are meant to compete with free online Web applications from Google Docs (or alternatives such as those from Zoho or Glide), so you don't need to buy Office 2010 to use them. Documents are stored on on Skydrive, a Microsoft service that you can log into with a Hotmail or Live password. Microsoft is initially limiting this to 25 gigabytes, but that should be more than enough for most casual users.

If you buy Office 2010, though, you'll find that integration with the online applications is a bit easier. You can create the documents locally, then use options in the Backstage area to save directly to Skydrive and share them. And you can take documents you created online and just simply click "open in Word" to move them to the desktop version for more advanced editing.

I found the online apps to work pretty well, for online applications, though they're not advanced as the desktop versions. Microsoft talks about how they do a better job than competitiors of preserving the look of documents as you import and export from the desktop equivalents, and certainly, even complex documents did look quite good. For instance, in Word, basic editing was simple, and the word processor worked well with tables and inserted graphics; but it lacks the fine control of photos, charting, and reviewing options that the desktop version gives you.

Again, you don't need Office 2010 to use the Web apps, but it makes using them easier. Web apps are pretty new, so I haven't done a lot of sharing with them so far, but it does seem like a credible entry in the market.

If you're a business user, a number of other features may be more compelling to you: Outlook now has the ribbon interface, with a social connector and a conversation view; the Web Apps can be used with SharePoint so you can share documents more easily on an internal server; and Excel can now handle bigger models, offers an easier way to work with Pivot Tablets, and adds PowerPivot, an in-memory tool for dealing with lots of data. (More on these later.) My guess is that the Excel and Outlook upgrades will be enough to make a lot of businesses want to upgrade.

Here is PC Magazine's full review of the complete suite (note the Home and Office version just includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and lists at $149 for the boxed version that supports up to 3 PCs, and $119 for the Key Card version). And here's a post on how Office uses the latest PC hardware.

As I've said before, I'm surprised at the number of people who take Microsoft Office for granted. Yes, there are open source alternatives like Open Office, other reasonable traditional packages such as Corel's WordPerfect Office, and now a number of good online tools such as Google Docs, Zoho, and Glide. All of those are more than adequate to create a basic document or add up a set of numbers, but none has the depth of features as the traditional boxed Microsoft Office.

In short, for the home user, if you have Office 2007 and just use it locally, you'll find Office 2010 a useful but not necessary upgrade. If you have an earlier version of Office, though, now may be the time to think about upgrading.

Cirque du Soleil helps Microsoft in creating a Kinect experience in L.A.

Microsoft went big Sunday night in unveiling the final name of its controller-free video game technology.

Note: And yes, USATODAY.com accidentally posted a story with the name about four hours earlier than agreed on. We did our best to take it down, apologize and then reposted it at midnight ET.

An army of Cirque du Soleil performers (80 or so) and crew -- as well as an immense elephant puppet -- heralded in the arrival of the Kinect controller-free system for the Xbox 360 system.

They created a jungly environment within the Galen Center at the University of Southern California. High above the arena floor, suspended at one end of the arena was a "living room" where performers acted out the part of game players, while video of the performers and the games played on adjacent arena-length screen.

Light sabers (for Star Wars), bowling, dancing, track and field were played. Adding the Cirque touch, a pony-tailed woman walked across the ceiling of the living room as the "family" played sports games.

"I'm not sure what I'm witnessing but it's ... something," tweeted BitMob's Dan Hsu. "Over the top crazy and extravagent," he labeled the event.

Early on, the name "Kinect" formed on-screen. "That had to be the most unique introduction of a tech product I've ever seen," wrote VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi.

Later, the shoulders of the white ponchos attendees were asked to wear lit up in different colors based on their location in the auditorium. Lady Gaga would have been proud.

Other impressions from the Twitter-sphere:

-- UGO.com's Tracey John: "The Star Wars Kinect title may fulfill my dream to really use a lightsaber in a game, but I hope there's more to it."

-- GamePro's John Davision: "Non-game Kinect applications seem interesting, but games mostly come off a bit too Wii-like. There's a yoga thing with a ton of potential."

-- Kotaku's Stephen Totilo: "Kinect games at tonight's circus looked fun but v. similar to what I've played with Wii and Eyetoy for years. Microsoft sent in the clones?"

Microsoft approached the mega-performance troupe after realizing it wanted to announce Kinect in a "hypercreative setting," said Xbox general manager Rob Matthews in an interview last week. "We said, we need to do something Cirque-esque or Cirque-like. Why don't we call Cirque du Soleil."

Cirque du Soleil artistic director Michel Laprise and several other crew members came to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash., tried the Natal games and Laprise was "intrigued. The freedom and physicality as so strong. This is so emotional, it makes sense we are doing it."

To get across how Cirque works, Laprise says that at a planning meeting with Xbox executives in Montreal he poured a bucket of sand on the table. "Natal is a name of a beach on Brazil and our company co-founder had the idea that … on the beach this is where friends have dreams. So let's all dream together a story that will touch the people in the room," Laprise says.

"Then I took some rocks and said, 'This is a story where four meteors land on Planet Earth and what is very magical is that they all fall in the same Amazon forest, the place where there is the most biodiversity. It's not been spoiled by tech, it's just purely orgainc. People heard about the four meteors and when (the meteors) aligned there's a big giant monolith that came out of the center of the earth. … That attracted people from the four corners of the world and people started to interact between themselves with more friendship and more playfulness."

That concept provided the seed for the performance, he says. About the final presentation, Laprise says, "I didn't want it to be big. It had to be big."

MTV will broadcast a recording of the performance, titled "The World Premiere Project Natal for Xbox 360 experience, as imagined by Cirque du Soleil" without commercials on Tuesday at 3:30 P.M. ET. It will be rebroadcast later that day on Nick at Nite, mtvU, MTV Hits, and Logo at 9 P.M. ET.

Another of MTV's networks, Spike will broadcast Microsoft's E3 media briefing live Monday from 1:30 to 3 p.m. ET.a