Office 2010 features made public via officially unreleased video demos

The official announcement was believed to be made over the the next three days during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

But thanks to Windows devotee Rafael Rivera on Twitter, and Google Cache, Windows blog iStartedSomething has managed to get hold of a number of videos describing Office 2010’s new features.

Although its been some time since I’ve used many of the windows office applications, the interface generally looks quite similar across the board, despite Microsoft’s claim that they’ve been given “a completely redesigned look”.

The most prominent new feature across the range of office applications is online access. Being able to store documents online, then access and edit documents from (practically) any Web browser. “The online companion to Word, Excel®, PowerPoint® and OneNote® applications, allow you to access documents from anywhere and share them with whoever you may be working with. You can create new documents and do basic editing using the familiar Office interface.” Notice I italicized ‘basic’, how often do you hear Microsoft playing down its efforts? Either Microsoft has turned a new leaf and is understating the quality of its products, or the editing online is extremely basic… If its the latter, my presumptions were correct and Microsoft are, yet again, years behind Google’s online efforts.

Unfortunately embedding the iframe based videos don’t work too well with wordpress, so go watch the videos here while they’re still live. We’ll update this post with more information about the new release over the next half hour or so.

Thanks Atul