It seems like just yesterday when everyone was complaining about the new ribbon interface Microsoft introduced in Office 2007. Not only has it been almost four years since it was released but we now have Office 2010 which includes a ton of new features and contextual changes.

In this article we are going to review some of the major additions to Office 2010.

Ribbon Interface

In Office 2007 the ribbon interface was only available in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Microsoft loved this concept so much they decided to make it suitewide in Office 2010, which includes Outlook, OneNote, and Visio in addtion to the previous mentioned applications.

Backstage

Besides the ribbon interface you will also notice the ‘Office Button’ in the upper left had corner has been replaced by a ‘File’ tab. When you click on this you will be greeted with a plethora of options.

Microsoft calls this feature ‘Backstage’. You can do things like edit a documents permissions, select sharing options, access links to autosaved versions, and view document properties. This feature is available in all the Office 2010 applications.

PowerPoint Embedded Video

Forget bullet points and clip art, you can now embed videos in PowerPoint. You can either embed videos you have stored on your computer or from online sources like Youtube. You can also use the photo editing tools to manipulate the locally stored videos.

Outlook Social Connectors

With Social Connectors you can integrate profiles from sites like Sharepoint, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook into Outlook. The Social Connector for each social network must me downloaded seperately but once installed it will pull things like profile pictures and status updates and use them in different parts of Outlook like your address book. You can expect many more social networks to be added in the future.

Slicers and Sparklines

There are two major new features in Excel 2010, Slicers and Sparklines. While these tools are tailore more towards advanced users due to their relation to PivotCharts and PivotTables they are pretty easy to use.

Slicers are visual controls used to create interactive filters. Use the Slicers with PivotTables/Charts with some styling and you will have a chart that looks great for presentations.

Sparklines allows your to create mini charts in a single cell. This is great for showing trends across data sets.

Office in the Cloud

With Office 2010 comes the highly anticipated Office Web Apps. The web application suite includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. While Microsoft had three whole years to learn from Google Docs implementation of office web applications it is still pretty rough around the edges as far as functionality goes. One of the major complaints is the lack of auto save. Hardcore Office users will probably really like it since the interface is familiar. Another great feature is that you can integrate web services including Hotmail.

Paste Preview

With ‘Paste Preview’ you can get a live preview of how information you are pasting from an external source will look. This will give you a good idea of how your document will be affected. Paste Preview is availalbe in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Publisher.

Other new features in Office 2010

Co-Authoring: This is a great feature that allows multiple people to edit the same document from different locations at the same time.
Threaded Conversations in Outlook: Similiar to how Gmail nests messages into conversations, Microsoft has added this in Outlook 2010 (six years after Google first introduced it).
Screenshot Capturing: Easily insert screenshots into your documents on the fly.
Photo Editing: While it is no Photoshop you can now edit photos within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Publisher. Use this to remove backgrounds, adjust colors, crop, and much more.
Video Presentations in PowerPoint: Easily convert your presentation to video and share it online using Youtube, or other video site of your choice.

As you can see there are a lot of great features added in Microsoft Office 2010. While I didn’t cover everything added I did make sure to touch on what I believe are the best and most useful.

What is your favorite new feature or features? Do you prefer Microsoft Office 2007 or maybe an older version? Please let us know what you think in the comments.