There’s a good amount of Microsoft Office 2010 news coverage today thanks to Microsoft’s announcement that Office 2010 has reached the “technical preview engineering milestone.” Beginning today, thousands of individuals will be invited to test drive Office and Visio as part of the Technical Preview program.

Some of the new features found in Office 2010 include (courtesy of their press release):

  • “Work anywhere with Office Web applications — the lightweight Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote — that provide access to documents from virtually anywhere and preserve the look and feel of a document regardless of device.
  • Collaborate better with co-authoring in Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and Microsoft OneNote 2010, and advanced e-mail management and calendaring capabilities in Microsoft Outlook 2010, including the option for users to ”ignore” unwanted threads.
  • Bring ideas to life with video and picture editing, broadcast capability in Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, easy document preparation through the new Microsoft Office Backstage view, and new Sparklines in Microsoft Excel 2010 to visualize data and spot trends more quickly. “

In addition, Microsoft is simplifying our lives by reducing the number of Office Editions from eight to five. (Yeah.. that’s still 4 too many if you ask me).

Office Web Applications will be available in three different ways:

  • Through Windows Live
  • On-premises for all Office volume licensing customers
  • Microsoft Online Services

For more in-depth coverage on Office 2010, check out the following links:

Expect Office 2010 and related products to hit store shelves sometime during the first half of 2010.

[Check it out]

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