According to Microsoft, businesses are deploying Office 2010 at rates five times faster than Office 2007 clocked up during its first year. So what exactly is all the fuss about? We take a look at one of Microsoft's most popular partnerships - SkyDrive and Office 2010.
Office 2010's appearance a year ago essentially marked the rollout of Office Web Apps, which are browser-based versions of Excel, Word, OneNote and PowerPoint for the PC. The 2010 software suite is the fastest selling update among regular consumers, and almost 50 million of us are using the Web-based versions of Office programs
One of Microsoft's most popular partnerships is Windows Life SkyDrive and Office 2010. SkyDrive is a Microsoft Office storage service that allows you to save files and photographs on the web with up to 25 gigabytes of storage. SkyDrive is available free to anyone with a windows Live ID. With Microsoft Office 2010 you can save files directly to SkyDrive without even having to access the website. And Windows Live SkyDrive is a must for anyone who needs to save Microsoft Office 2010 documents online so that you can access these documents from other computers without saving to disk.
Saving documents online, means you can collaborate online and in real time, for example, on Excel and OneNote documents. If you and the person you're working with both have Office 2010 installed on your computers, you can also work in real time with Word and PowerPoint documents. The first step to working with others on Office documents is to store the document on SkyDrive, where your colleagues have access to it.
To save an Excel 2003 file in order that other users can view and work on it, for example, simply click on the File menu then select Save and Send. With Microsoft Office 2010, there are different options for saving and sending your files and for uploading to a website.
To work together on documents in SkyDrive, go to Windows Live SkyDrive (you might need to sign in with your Windows Live ID). Once you have signed in, Office will download your SkyDrive folder structure. You will notice that there is a sharing status for each of your folders. If you want to work on an existing document, select a file to work on, click Share, and then click Edit permissions. Click Edit permissions to set permissions. Under Add specific people, enter an email address, choose whether they can edit or view your docs, and then click Save. You can access your files from any computer that is connected to the internet, just by signing in to skydrive.live.com with your Windows Live ID.
With a huge amount of free online storage, you can upload thousands of Office documents, files and photos to Windows Live SkyDrive and view them from a PC. To view Office docs from your PC, go to Windows Live SkyDrive. Now click Documents and navigate to the file you'd like to view. Click a file to open it in your browser, then simply select it to open it.
There's also the flexibility with Windows Live SkyDrive to share links to your files and photos with specific people or groups of people. Or you can choose permission settings so that anyone who has the web address to your files can access them. Simply post a link to your social networking website, or email it to the people you'd like to share your SkyDrive content with.
SkyDrive is easy to access even from computers that don't have Office installed when you make use of the Microsoft Office Web Apps. With Web Apps, you can work with others because you can send links to documents instead of sending file attachments. That saves on email storage and prevents you from having to reconcile multiple versions of the same document. Your friends just click a link to open the document in a Web App. If you're collecting information in an Excel workbook or a OneNote notebook, you can work in the document at the same time as your friends and colleagues. There's no more waiting for one person to finish with the document before the next person can access it. Now that is something to create a lot of fuss about.
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