Were you at the CNS Office 2010 Launch Party? Yesterday we hosted about 50 IT decision makers at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center and spent the morning talking about the new version of Microsoft Office and how the new features will save countless hours for everyone in your company. The event was vey demo heavy – we had a total of four slides for a two event.
The venerable Steve Deming from Microsoft spent about an hour discussing the benefits of the Office Ribbon, Excel Conditional Formatting Sparklines, PowerPoint Live, Word Styles and Outlook Conversation View. The word WOW was overheard many times.
We then moved into a feature update show where we took a new feature and showed you how you do it now, and showed you how to do it in Office 2010. Features like Picture SmartArt, the new picture and video editing tools, and the amazing Office WebApp co-authoring capability stole the show. Everyone was left waiting for more – and four people left with free copies of Office 2010 Standard.
In the end, it was a great event and I want to thank everyone involved and everyone who attended. If you missed it, we are working on getting the video online. Watch this space for more info.
In IT lingo, this means it’s done! I was able to download the final release version this morning and I’m already enjoying the final release. There are a TON of new features in the latest version of Office and the good news is that if you spent a lot of time learning Office 2007, then you’ll be quite happy as your effort was certainly not wasted. Microsoft has improved upon many of the faults with the Ribbon interface, including the ability to easily customize and move icons. It has also brought back the venerable File menu in place of the button that just about everyone missed.