The press release said that a survey of 600 sales, marketing and IT professionals from companies in the UK, France and Germany had revealed millions of pounds were being wasted every year on unused applications. Actually, it said millions of Euros but I knew what it meant. Actually, at first I didn’t know what it meant as my thoughts turned to smartphones and while I appreciate that the iPhone, BlackBerry and assorted Android devices are doing well, I wasn’t swallowing a survey which reckoned that business were wasting millions every year on apps they don’t even use.

Then I read the document again, and everything became clearer. This was a story about data governance rather than Angry Birds in the office, and don’t even get me started about that one or the wife will kill me. According to Informatica, the outfit that provided me with the research data, some 81% of those IT professionals questioned said their corporate networks were hosting unused applications and data. Which isn’t really any surprise at all, is it? I’ve just looked at my own corporate network and it’s full of applications that sounded like a good idea at the time but turned out to be a waste of money as they are never used. Microsoft Office 2010, for example.

Microsoft Word 2010, along with the rest of the redundant suite of Office applications, sits there taunting me

Yep, I invested in a copy of Microsoft Office 2010, as you do when you are a small business running on a Windows platform. It was only after I had installed it that I started wondering why I had bothered; this was a knee-jerk purchase rather than a business-needs driven one. Now please don’t file this under ‘Microsoft Basher’ as that really couldn’t be farther from the truth. Both my kids are happily using Office 2010 Home and Student edition, and I’m quite happily running the equivalent of a small zoo full of Microsoft software here.

But as  a professional writer, as well as a consultant,  surely Microsoft Word gets used to within an inch of its life, I hear you pondering. But no, I’m writing this blog entry in my text editor of choice which happens to be NoteTab Pro. Yes, I said text editor rather than word processor, because my business-driven need for writing happens to be getting words onto a blank page with minimum fuss. That means I want a clean and compact interface without annoying distractions, and I want text entry to be straightforward and equally distraction free. By the time I have turned off everything that Microsoft throws in my direction by way of interface and text-entry distraction I could have written a small novel. NoteTab Pro has a spoil chicken (you know, the thing that checks your spellings), it has a word count function, and it has all the letters of the alphabet that I need.

Yet Microsoft Word 2010, along with the rest of the redundant suite of Office applications, sits there taunting me for being a slave to something (truth be told, I’m not even sure what). Am I really so gullible that I fall for the marketing hype, or such a predictable geek that for me ‘upgrade’ is the same as ‘fix’ to a junkie? I suspect the latter, although why I was upgrading from something I hadn’t been using to something I wouldn’t be using, at considerable cost, on the off chance that I might be missing something, I have no idea. It’s not even that I cannot view Office documents without it when they arrive, as I can.

Back to that report, and the suggestion is that unused applications and data on your corporate network are ‘inefficiencies’ which place a significant cost burden on your business in terms of resources, power and management time. The bigger your business, the bigger those inefficiencies and the bigger the bottom line. Eighty six per cent of those asked agreed that removing unused applications would result in their IT systems running more efficiently. Mind you, so could preventing sales and marketing droids from installing unnecessary apps in the first place. The findings revealed that, and I quote, “sales and marketing departments are prone to side-stepping the IT department when it comes to adding new software and applications to existing systems”.

I can’t use that excuse: I am the sales and marketing department here. I can, and indeed have, used the research as a catalyst for having a long overdue clear up of unnecessary and unused applications from the servers. Which revealed that I am a pretty average kind of business guy, I guess, as just as the survey predicted the unused application detritus accounted for around a quarter of the total number of applications installed.

Also, just like 46% of those surveyed, I wasn’t keen on removing all the unused apps just in case I needed them for something at sometime in the future. Yes, you guessed it, Microsoft Office 2010 is still there and I’m still not sure why. It’s as if it has an uninstall block imprinted on my brain, and I remain convinced (for absolutely no good reason) that to remove it would be folly.

Go figure…

Step 1. Open up an email in Outlook 2010

There’s probably an empty thumbnail at the bottom-left of the email (it will only include a photo if you already link to that person via the LinkedIn connector, which launched with Outlook 2010). Press the thumbnail and you’ll see this.

Step 2. Add that person on “another social network”

Click on the Add button, then select “on another social network”.

Step 3. View other social network providers

Click on the “View social network providers available online” link at which point you’ll be taken here…

Step 4. Connect to your favourite social network

Previously this page only showed LinkedIn and myspace – now Facebook and Windows Live Messenger appear. All the instructions below should apply equally to Windows Live, but annoyingly the link above is broken right now (this is the correct link for Windows Live Messenger’s Social Connector provider). For the rest of this guide we’ll only talk about Facebook.

Step 5. Download the Facebook provider

Click on the Facebook icon and you’ll be directed to this download page. Scroll down until you see the two Download buttons – one for the 64-bit version of Office (OSCFB-x64-en-us.exe) and one for the 32-bit version (OSCFB-x86-en-us.exe). Download your chosen version and then double-click to install it.

Step 6. Download Outlook Social Connector 1.1

You’ll first be prompted to update the latest version of Outlook Social Connector, which will be downloaded automatically. Press Install and choose to automatically close Outlook when prompted.

Step 7. Almost there…

Outlook will restart with all your windows in the same position as before, but with a comforting message saying “The installation is complete”.

But that only refers to Outlook Social Connector 1.1. You will (probably) still find a dialog box open prompting you to install the Outlook Social Connector Provider for Facebook.

Step 8. Install the Facebook Social Connector Provider

Click Install and within seconds you’ll see the following screen:

Step 9. Start using it!

Now, when you restart Outlook and open an email, you should find Facebook added to the list of Social Network Accounts.

Select Facebook and you’ll be prompted to enter your login details. Then press Finish.

Hey presto, you’ll be able to see your friends’ Facebook feeds whenever you click on the People Pane in one of their emails.

Note, though, that this isn’t a way to update your details – you’ll still need to head to Facebook itself, or use a dedicated app, to do this.

You had to jump through three or four hoops in Office 2003 and Office 2007 to add them (clicking Tools | Options | Calendar Options and then tickboxing “Show week numbers in the Month View and Date Navigator”), but fortunately Outlook 2010 makes it much easier.

Or at least, easier to explain. So, here are the three steps you need to add week numbers in Outlook 2010.

First, click File to bring up the Backstage View.

Second, click the Options button and then the Calendar button, third from top.

Third, scroll down until you see the checkbox option “Show week numbers in the month view and in the Date Navigator”. Check the checkbox.

Lo and behold, the numberless view you had before (below left) is now basking in the full glory of week numbers.

Easy? Yes indeed. But it took me about 20 minutes to find this option hiding away, because I was foolishly hunting around the Ribbon looking for the right setting.

UPDATE: The first commenter to this post, Chris, pointed out that Outlook determines the first week of the year by default as the first week that includes January 1.

But you can change this. In Calendar Options (see the second step above), you can choose between three different ways to determine the first week. See the screenshot below. However, there’s no way I know of to force Outlook into tying week 1 into your company’s financial year.

But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been driving me up the wall.

Outlook 2010 tries to be all clever by bundling messages into “Conversations”. This is useful for when someone in the office CC’s everyone in on which pub to go to and you spend Friday afternoon battling a deluge of witty put-downs. In Outlook 2010 everything with the subject line “Let’s go to the pub!” is rolled into one conversation and you have to scroll through your inbox less.

Problem is, Outlook 2010 isn’t particularly clever when it comes to the science bit. Instead of being smart and looking at to whom an email has been sent, it simply grabs the subject line and lumps any subsequent email with the same subject line into the same conversation. So if you forward an email from a stupid person to a clever person and add a line saying “LOOK AT THIS MORON!”, Outlook will see the subject line and make it look like you’ve accidentally CC’d the idiot. I did this last week and nearly had a heart attack.

Take this screenshot. (These emails, by the way, are different to the one which nearly gave me an aneurism last week.) Greg Salmon does PR for Microsoft Office, Tim Danton is PC Pro’s editor. It looks to the untrained eye like they’re both CC’d in on an email with the subject “Office 2010”, but they’re not. It simply means I’ve sent them separate emails which Outlook has grouped into a conversation.

Microsoft claims Outlook 2010 is more intelligent than that. A spokesman reckons “the scenario of similar or exact subject lines has been accounted for by tracking the GUID [Globally Unique Identifier] of each message,” but I really can’t see it. Take the screenshot below as an example.

Naturally, this is less of a problem if you use nice, descriptive subject lines such as “Meeting on Monday the 25th to discuss the price of tea”, but I don’t. I send messages with stupid subject lines like “I’m…” and finish the rest of the sentence in the body of the email. Or I say things like “Meeting”, and suddenly Outlook thinks I’m taking part in a giant email conversation with 98 recipients.

Microsoft is keen to point out this isn’t the final product. “We are still working on this feature, and are planning improvements to our ability to differentiate conversations with the same subject line before Office 2010 ships”, said our friendly Microsoft spokesperson.

But it’s surprising that, even at this early stage – and remember this is the Technical Preview of Office 2010, it’s not even at Beta yet – the view is so far behind other conversation-threading systems already available.

For example, Gmail offers conversation threading as well, and the technology behind it sounds similar: “Gmail threading is determined by consistency within the subject headers and references headers of email. A subject header is commonly known as the subject line and a reference header appears in the “References” line within the original, raw message information,” according to the company.

That sounds a lot like the GUID that Microsoft’s talking about it but my inboxes don’t lie: Gmail is currently threading my conversations correctly, while Outlook 2010 is very hit and miss.

You can turn it off and arrange messages simply by the “To:” field like in the old days, but I don’t want to. I like the conversation feature. I use it in Gmail all the time and it’s brilliant, and I want it to be brilliant in Outlook 2010. Certainly the rest of the application is golden: searching is nearly instantaneous in my 5,000-strong inbox and I like how a business card pops up onscreen if you hover over an email address. But until Microsoft gets the conversation feature right I’ll be treading a lot more carefully in my emails.

There are a number of things I like about this dialog, which is what you’ll see if you press Ctrl + P or click File |Print, where File is the new-style Office icon that sits at the top-left of the Word window.

And prime among them is the automatic print preview feature.

Previously, you’d have to click an extra button for this, and as most people don’t bother they won’t notice that they’re accidentally printing in landscape when they meant to print in portrait, and vice versa.

It also makes it incredibly clear which printer is being used, and makes it easier to collate multiple copies and select one-sided or duplex printer options.

If you scroll down the window, you’ll see the rest of the options. You can quickly select different margin options, different paper sizes (I don’t want Letter, for instance) and how many pages get squeezed onto each sheet of paper.

Choosing the different options is a simple matter of clicking on the dropdown arrow and selecting the relevant choice.

There’s little to criticise, certainly on first sight, but one area Microsoft could still improve is the print preview. In particular, the preview should be showing that the HP LaserJet I’ve chosen doesn’t support colour, so the blue hyperlink will be printed out grey.

Aside from this, though, Word 2010’s print dialog is a big improvement on what any previous version of Word has to offer.

Primary among these, so far as I’m concerned, is the new meeting request view. Not so much in the organisation phase – there are no major innovations there – but in the view that’s presented to invited members.

Before, you just got a simple message to say whether the meeting was clashing with another, and a small Calendar button so you could go and check, but now your day is actually integrated into the meeting request email – as per the screenshot above.

Suddenly it’s much easier to see whether or not you need to rearrange another meeting or if it’s just a reminder you popped there, and not a real meeting at all.

I’m now using Office 2010 as my main office suite, so if you’ve got any requests about topics for future posts then let me know. For example, I’ll be using the “Quick Steps” pane in anger over the next few days, and I’ll be interested to see whether it speeds up using Outlook… or just gets in the way.