Microsoft Office 2010 will be available soon to consumers

Microsoft recently announced the worldwide availability of Microsoft Office 2010 to consumers in 240 countries and 10 languages, including Sri Lanka. Consumers will soon be able to purchase Office 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 at retail stores across the globe and online.

Office 2010 can also soon be purchased with the most popular desktops and laptops from leading PC makers including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba. In the next year, more than 100 million PCs will ship with Office 2010 preloaded, which can easily be activated with the purchase of any one of the three versions of Office 2010, including Office Home and Student 2010, Office Home and Business 2010, or Office Professional 2010.

The multitude of benefits that the new and improved Microsoft Office version offers has already made it a much talked about innovation from the global IT solutions company, Microsoft. Based on the great response to the Office 2010 beta and the success of Windows 7, Microsoft believes this will be the biggest consumer release of Office, ever.   

Productivity solutions across the PC, phone and browser

Throughout its development cycle, customer feedback has been critical to the improvements found in Office 2010. Based on this valuable input, Microsoft has made considerable enhancements to help users:

Create great looking documents and presentations. Express creativity in PowerPoint 2010 presentations with new video and photo editing features. Add extensive text effects and table formatting options in Word 2010. Reveal important trends in data with Sparklines in Excel 2010. OneNote 2010 makes everything you need simple to find, organize and share.

Connect and work together more simply. Advanced e-mail management and calendaring capabilities in Outlook 2010, and the new Outlook Social Connector help people stay productive and in touch with personal and business networks. Work with others more efficiently using new co-authoring in Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010 and OneNote 2010. Deliver presentations over the Web with new PowerPoint Broadcast Slideshow.

Get things done from anywhere

With Office 2010 and the Office Web Apps – the online companions to Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote, people have the freedom to view, edit, and share Office 2010 documents in the cloud with Windows Live SkyDrive. The Office Web Apps preserve the look and feel of Office documents, so valuable content and formatting are not compromised while moving between the PC, phone and browser.

 

Manoji Samararatne, Director Marketing, Microsoft Sri Lanka says, “We are confident that Office 2010 will be the biggest release of Office, ever. As an indication of its popularity, Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony, Toshiba and other leading PC makers will be shipping well over 100 million desktops and laptops pre-loaded with Office 2010 globally. We expect that by the end of this year, 80% of PCs worldwide will come pre-loaded with Office 2010. Easier than ever to unlock the power of Office on new and existing PCs, customers looking for flexibility and value addition should be in possession of Office 2010.”

Buying Office 2010

Consumers can soon purchase Office 2010 in a variety of ways:

Office 2010 will be available at leading Sri Lankan retail stores and authorized Microsoft resellers island wide.

Purchase a PC with Office pre-loaded. Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony, Toshiba and other leading PC makers are shipping well over 100 million desktops and laptops pre-loaded with Office 2010.

Customers looking to purchase a new PC will soon find that Microsoft has worked with major suppliers to make it simpler than ever to buy Office 2010, as most popular PC are pre-loaded with Office 2010.

Product Key Cards make it easier to buy Office with new PCs at the point of sale across retail and reseller channels. A Product Key Card contains only a product key and it is a single user license for one Office 2010 pre-loaded PC.  Product Key Cards make installation fast and easy because a DVD is not required. Customers who are purchasing PCs that have the pre-loaded image of Office 2010 suites can purchase the Product Key Card for one of the three Office 2010 suites and use the product key to install and activate the pre-loaded image, without inserting a disc.

Already, nearly ten billion people worldwide have downloaded the beta version of Microsoft Office. The beta version of Office 2010 will expire in October 2010, after which users can choose to download the trial or buy the full version of Office 2010. 

By using fully licensed, genuine Microsoft Office software, customers can be confident that they will have access to the latest the features and support that will help to improve their productivity and expand the capabilities of their technology. They will also have access to new innovations and offerings available only to genuine Office customers, which assists in maximizing product lifecycle and enhances the customer’s user-experience. Genuine software will also benefit from higher levels of security.

Setting New Standards

Statistics reveal that people are embracing mobile access and social networking, and need tools that help them share documents with others regardless of location. Digital information is becoming more and more pervasive and facilitating this need is exactly what Office 2010 does best.

Office 2010 will set the new standard for how people get things done. For example, Power Point 2010 allows you to be your own producer - with simple photo and video editing in PowerPoint and paste with live-preview in Word, whereby you can quickly create, and deliver more compelling documents. While Office 2010 offers new tools to help you express your creativity using text, video, and images, together with Windows Live, it helps you share ideas and information across the PC, phone and browser. As of 5th March 2010, consumers who purchase and activate Office 2007 can download Office 2010 at no additional cost.

New Office 2010 Features 

Edit and enhance photos in Word or PowerPoint 2010.  Put more visual impact in your documents or presentations with easy-to-use photo-editing tools that let you crop and add artistic visual effects without leaving Word 2010 or PowerPoint 2010.

Discover all the tools you need to work with your documents with the new Backstage view. The Microsoft Office Backstage™ view provides a rich full-screen environment for working with your documents so you can quickly save, print, and share as well as access document properties and change options.

Find the features you need fast and personalize your Ribbon. An improved Ribbon lets you access your favorite commands quickly and customize or create tabs to personalize the experience to your work style.

Analyze finances easily at home and at work with Excel 2010. Use Sparklines in Excel 2010 to create small charts that make it easy to highlight trends in data at a glance.

Take control of email conversations with Outlook 2010. Track and manage your email easily with Conversation View in Outlook 2010, a feature that lets you condense, categorize, and even ignore lengthy email exchanges with a single click.

Stay connected to your network with Outlook 2010. The all-new Outlook Social Connector connects you to the social and business networks you use, including Microsoft and other popular third-party sites, so you can get more information and stay in touch.

Access, edit, and share from virtually anywhere with Office Web Apps on Windows Live SkyDrive. Get things done when you’re away from the office, home, or school by creating documents in Office 2010, then posting them online to Windows Live SkyDrive to access, view, and edit - either alone or with others - with Office  Web Apps from virtually anywhere you have Internet access.* (*An appropriate device, Internet connection, and browser are required.)

About Office Web Apps: Office Web Apps are online companions to Microsoft Office, giving you the freedom to view, edit, and share Microsoft Office documents from virtually anywhere. To use the Office Web Apps, all you need is a free Windows Live ID. To get started and to learn more, visit office.live.com

Office Web Apps are designed to enhance the experience for users and the combination of Office Web Apps, and Office on the desktop, will offer the best experience across the PC, phone and browser. iPhones - and most smartphones with modern browsers - can access and view Office documents stored in SharePoint using their browser. However, co-authoring functionality is available in Excel Web App and OneNote Web App and over time Office Web Apps will enable co-authoring across the PC, phone and browser.

These are the features that users will appreciate about Web Apps:

Consistent and familiar Office experience in the browser.

Professional-quality, high-fidelity viewing of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents.

Consistent formatting – so documents will look and feel exactly how they were created.

 

Superior Mobile Experience

The best Office mobile experience is on Windows phones. Office 2010 for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones is available. Windows Phone 7 is the next generation of the Windows Phone family and takes everyday tasks and creates end-to-end experiences called hubs.  Hubs help apps work better together so you don’t miss a beat. With access to Office and OneNote in one place, users can read, edit and share documents. With the power of Outlook Mobile, users stay productive and upto-date while on the go.

Office 2010 symbolize technology that help people work smarter and faster from virtually any location using any device, offering innovative capabilities and providing new levels of flexibility and choice. With this worldwide launch announcement Microsoft and its channel partners eagerly look forward to deliver Office 2010 - the latest standard in productivity, to existing and new Office customers around the world and across Sri Lanka.