Last weeks PDC brought a slew of product announcements, cool demos and new possibilities, but the standout for me was that Office 2010 has hit the beta milestone. As a pretty devoted Office guy, I have been talking, demonstrating, tweeting, watching, reading about Office 2010 and the reactions have been overwhelmingly positive. This is heart-warming for me – having been playing with various versions incarnations of Office for a while now, I think that we are on to a winner. It is great to see that feeling shared by many people trying out the beta.
While other people are caught up in the largely academic exercise of cramming more stuff into a browser (how much client-executing code and browser plugins do you need to add to a web page before it just becomes an inefficient smart client app that happens to have a URL?) it is great to be using a productivity app that supports the various ways that I want to work whether I’m at my PCs, phone or just a browser somewhere. There are a couple of time saving behaviours that Office 2010 has allowed me to adopt.
On boot confession: 2 Outlooks before breakfast
I have probably used Office 2010 in two different ways before I get out of bed. My phone alarm (the dulcet tones of the Touch Diamond 2) goes off at around 6.00am – I roll over to groan, check my calendar to work out if I need to be at work early and to see how much email has arrived overnight. Outlook mobiles new conversation view is a lifesaver here – I previously had to scroll through a whole lot of reply-all (that’s “Big-R’s” in Office shorthand – or ctrl-shift-r) emails to get to the interesting topics. If emails announcing the end of the world < 1, I can usually grab another 15 minutes of shut-eye…
…before reaching for my laptop. Yes, I charge it on my bedside table. Yes, I know how obsessive that sounds. However, getting out of bed with a triaged inbox is a whole lot better than getting to work with 150 outstanding emails. It only takes me about 20 minutes to scan through my email on my laptop… this is one of those tasks that really needs to be done with good old .exe software. Why use Outlook when the Outlook Web App is all but comparable in functionality (and includes some extra capability that the client doesn’t have)? Well – Speed.
Nothing beats the speed and responsiveness of desktop software. I have set up my search folders and Quick Steps so that I can very quickly prioritise my mail by holding Ctrl-Shift and hitting a number. I have set up my quicksteps as follows:
- Big-1 (Ctrl-Shift-1) – Mark as complete. This flags the email as read, done and no other action required. This is by far the most commonly used command.
- Big-2 (Ctrl-Shift-2) – Mark for follow-up today. This is the important stuff that I should do when I start work proper.
- Big-3 (Ctrl-Shift-3) – Mark for follow-up this week. This is the everything else category. Even if something is due in a month, I will file it here, then come back to it to put it in my calendar for a months time.
Above: My Outlook 2010 Quick Steps, as they appear in the ribbon.
Email done and mind awake – time to start the day!
Presentations – anytime, anywhere.
A big part of my job is talking to our customers and partners about Office. One of the challenges of presenting is the inevitable VGA cord swap. With the PowerPoint Web App I can send around a URL, or queue up a slideshow on a PC already connected to the projector. One of the great things about the Office Web Apps is their high fidelity viewing experiences. Looking at a PowerPoint slideshow in the browser (whether that browser is IE, Safari or Firefox) is so good that most people can’t tell the difference (except close colleagues - If they don’t see a hardware rendered 3d transition from me, they know that something is wrong).
The other great thing about the PowerPoint Web App is the ability to stay within the context of the browser when you are searching for something. I often find large presentations, stored on far away SharePoint sites. The ability to preview the document in the browser before committing to downloading the document is a great feature – I find that I am using it more and more.
Taking my data with me.
I try to centrally store all of my important documents (even unimportant ones end up on my MySite). One of the great things about Office 2010 is the integration between centrally managed servers and the local clients. For instance, in the save dialog box, I can see my favourite SharePoint sites and also local SharePoint Workspaces. In addition to visibility, the save experience is much faster thanks to a little workhorse called the Office Upload Center. The upload center turns a plain old synchronous save into an asynchronous one. This is fantastic because it means I don’t have to wait for delays due to the server, service or network, I can just carry on working. If I want to take a whole document library or site with me, I can do that easily by syncing the site to SharePoint Workspace. SPW is the new Groove, plus more. In addition to the state of the art hybrid-peer collaboration, SPW can also sync content back and forth between your desktop and your SharePoint site. This brings me all the benefits of local storage, without any of the trade-offs.
These are some of my favourite features in Office 2010. There is a lot to like in this release, from the client, phone apps and web servers and services, one blog post could hardly do it justice. Office is a lot of things to a lot of people, but everyone has their own favourite features – but the only way to find them is to explore Office 2010 for yourself at www.office.com/beta
