Office 2010 Core Improvements

The next version of Microsoft’s Office suite is currently in beta, with general availability scheduled for June 2010. Many new features or improvements tighten integration of Office applications with SharePoint, and improvements to core Office applications such as Word and Excel may not, on their own, justify deployment for many organizations. Although most users will find that they like one or two of the improvements, organizations not using SharePoint are more likely to make their decision based on costs and their interest in standardizing on a version of Office under Mainstream support.

This article covers improvements to the core Office suite applications, which for Office 2010 include Access, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word. (For a complete list, see the sidebar “The Office Suite“.) Some new features of the Office 2010 suite require SharePoint products and are covered elsewhere. (For earlier coverage of Office, see “Document Sharing with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010” on page 3 of the Jan. 2010 Update.)