Microsoft Office 2010 On The Shelves Today!

Media Release
16 June 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 On The Shelves Today!
Leading productivity suite now available for consumers in NZ

Today the latest version of Microsoft Office, Office 2010, has landed on retailers’ shelves across the country, and at more than 35,000 retail stores around the world. With three versions of Microsoft Office available in stores, consumers can choose the product suite that best meets their needs – Office Home and Student 2010, Office Home and Business 2010, and Office Professional 2010.

Microsoft Office 2010 can also be purchased with the most popular desktops and laptops from leading PC makers. In the next year, more than 100 million PCs worldwide will ship with Office 2010 preloaded, which can easily be activated with the purchase of any one of the three versions of Office 2010.

Consumers who purchased and activated Office 2007 from 5 March this year can now download and install Office 2010 at no additional cost thanks to the Tech Guarantee programme. New Zealand tertiary students can also bag themselves a great deal by purchasing a copy of Office Professional 2010 Academic version for only NZ$99 as a download when they visit www.office.com/studentnz.

“Consumers everywhere will love connecting to their social networks through the Social Connector functionality in Outlook 2010, and with a new focus on design elements, Office 2010 opens up new avenues for transforming visuals into works of art, helping people bring their ideas to life,” says Anne Taylor, Information Worker Business Group Manager, Microsoft New Zealand.

“We’ve preserved the look and feel of Office across the desktop, phone and Web browser, for anywhere, anytime access. Office 2010 also defines the future of productivity for businesses – organisations will save, innovate and grow as their people benefit from working across the PC, phone and browser.”

Office 2010 delivers new capabilities to help people bring ideas to life, with video, text and image editing, new broadcast capabilities in PowerPoint, auto-previewing in Word, easy document preparation through the new Microsoft Office Backstage view, and Sparklines in Excel for precise trend and data visualisation. New and improved picture formatting tools, such as colour saturation and artistic effects, work in tandem with a wide range of new customisable themes and SmartArt graphic layouts to help people to express their creative ideas more visually.

Connecting and collaborating with friends and colleagues on the same document is made easier with co-authoring – working together in real time, simultaneously editing and updating a document; and the new Outlook Social Connector brings communications history and social network feeds directly into your inbox.

People who purchase Office 2010 will also now have the ability to work from virtually anywhere with Office Web Apps (accessible by setting up a Windows Live account at www.windowslive.com) – the lightweight Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. Office Web Apps offers the same look and feel of a document regardless of device, allowing you to view, edit, store or share an Office document online in the same format you are familiar with on your PC.

Early adopters of Office 2010 are reporting productivity gains along with great excitement over the new features the suite brings with it, such as tools for trimming videos in PowerPoint and bookmarking areas to jump straight to, the Artistic Effects that can be applied to images and photos in Office 2010 for stunning results, and the snappy 3D effects and SmartArt diagrams to give documents a bit of an edge.

Kordia, a boutique telco and media business, has experienced a number of benefits with its upgrade to Microsoft Office 2010. “Our team has embraced the changes to Microsoft Outlook 2010, with conversational threading and improved mailbox layout making it quicker and easier to manage communication. The Sparklines data analysis feature in Excel 2010 has also been particularly useful, making it simple to produce a quick report highlighting important data trends,” says Stephen Beckwith, IS Manager, Kordia.

To celebrate the launch, and as a follow on from the ‘Bring Back Clippy’ poll in April, Microsoft New Zealand will be auctioning a number of limited edition Mr Vintage ‘Bring Back Clippy’ T-shirts for Cure Kids on TradeMe. Please visit Trade Me to bid for one and raise money for this worthy cause.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realise their full potential.
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