First looks: Microsoft Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010 and PowerPoint 2010 review

There are new Scheduling Views & Calendar Groups in the calendar module and you can better control who sees what in your calendar.

Unified Communications through Exchange Server 2007 or 2010 and Office Communications Server integrate well with Outlook 2010 with features such as your Communicator "buddies list" showing up in the To-Do pane and we're sure the integration will improve as we get closer to release.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2010
New Animation tools, including an animation painter to copy animation from one object to another and new 3D transitions make livening up a presentation easier.

Adding and editing video is also much easier. You can trim video clips within PowerPoint and add effects such as reflection or colour washes. Slides can be divided up into logical sections and the sections moved around in the slide sorter. Incorporating screenshots or maths equations are also much easier.

Presentation options now include the ability to broadcast a presentation to your audience in their browsers or compress a presentation to send it by email.

Conclusion
It's clear that Word, Excel and PowerPoint haven't undergone massive transformations with Office 2010, but they will all benefit from the changes we've outlined in our preview of Microsoft Office 2010 as a whole.

Microsoft Outlook 2010, on the other hand, has undergone some big changes that could make a real difference to productivity in offices.

As we said in our preview of Office 2010, there's still a lot of work to be done before this office suite can be called finished. But so far, almost all the moves are in a positive direction.

Author: Simon Jones