Now that Office 2010 is in public beta and you have an opportunity to take it for a spin on your own PC, you might be wondering if there’s any reason to make the switch. After all, an Office suite is an investment — not just in money, but also in training time and learning/unlearning various muscle memory reflexes.
Based on my time with various preview and beta versions of Office 2010, I’ve compiled a short list of goodies in Outlook 2010 that might be enough to woo you away from Office 2007, Office 2003, or whatever version you happen to be using. I’ll give you some great reasons to move to other members of the Office suite later, but Outlook has had such a significant upgrade, I figured I’d start here.
So, with no further ado, here are my picks for the four best reasons to upgrade to Outlook 2010:
Outlook gets a ribbon. If you’re a fan of the ribbon in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (and admittedly, I know that not everyone is), then you’ll dig the fact that Outlook now gets the full ribbon treatment. I like the fact that Outlook’s features are better organized and you can add frequently used tools to the quick launch bar. E-mail in Outlook just feel more efficient.
Reply with a meeting. Good grief, this should have been in Outlook 10 years ago, but it’s so sweet to finally have it now. Click on an e-mail, click the Meeting button in the ribbon, and Outlook creates a meeting with all the folks in the message (and puts the guts of the email thread in the meeting notes for you) automatically.
See your schedule when accepting a meeting. When you get a meeting invite, Outlook now displays your schedule right in the inbox, so you can not only see if you’re available, but what meetings you might have on either side of the invite. You can deal with the meeting request without ever leaving the inbox.
Quick Steps. Speaking of efficient, Quick Steps is a cool feature that lets you build macros in Outlook to automate e-mail handling. Do you frequently bulk move messages to a particular folder? Forward e-mail to your manager or team members? Delete or archive message? You can now build those steps in a simple “Quick Steps” editor and trigger the action with a click in the ribbon.
