Archive for the ‘Office 2010’ Category
You are currently browsing the archives for the Office 2010 category.
21
Aug
2009
Office 2010 | Outlook
With all the fanfare around Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, it’s been easy to ignore that the Technical Preview of Microsoft Office 2010 was made available to a select group of testers a few weeks ago. I was lucky enough to get myself onto the preview and took a leap of faith installing it on my Corporate everyday laptop.
Today I wanted to share my experience with Outlook 2010 as this is the app I spent the majority of my time using. At first look it is a little stark, not a lot of colour, but then again this is a Technical Preview. Colours can be easily added later and icons for that matter. The first big change is the introduction of the ribbon aka fluent UI.
The ribbon is as easy to use in Outlook 2010 as it is in the Office 2007 apps. The introduction of quicksteps is awesome as well. It allows for a bunch of common actions to be applied to a message and it’s dynamic and can be customised.
The other icon I’ve come to love on the ribbon is Clean Up. This little button looks at the conversation thread of email messages and will delete (or move to a folder of your choice) all of the repeated messages, leaving you with just one copy of the thread. If the thread has been split by multiple simultaneous replies from different people, no worry the clean up will ensure that only enough copies are maintained to preserve the data. The other cool feature is the Ignore button. Ever been stuck on a thread of “Reply to All” that you don’t care about. Simply hit the Ignore button and the messages will be deleted (or moved) for you.
The to-do bar has some new functionality also. As well as displaying a calendar, upcoming appointments and tasks, your Office Communicator contacts now appear and common tasks, such as launching IM, Communicator Calls, Desktop Sharing etc, can be launched directly from Outlook. I would love to see the ability to change the groups members within the Outlook or remove the “Recent Contacts” group, but this is only the Technical Preview and there is a good chance come RTM my wish will be granted.
That’s all for now, there are a number of new features in Outlook 2010 that only work with Exchange 2010, such as Mail Tips, but I’ll cover those later in an Exchange post.