If you, like me, spend an excess of 10 hours a day in front of a computer across work and home, there’s a fair chance that the bulk of your day is spent in front of one of the many components of the Microsoft Office suite. Even so, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t use half the features of the Office suite, and I’m pretty certain I represent the broad majority of users in India.

Why then, you may ask, would the latest release of the Office suite, Office 2010, excite me? The answer lies in some nifty improvements I’ve seen working with the elements of the suite I normally use the most — Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook — over the past couple of weeks, stuff you will wonder how you did without once you get used to it. Here’s my list of stuff I love in Office 2010…

Word 2010: Word 2010 adds minor ‘word’ processing features, but the big enhancements are around image editing, especially with the introduction of Artistic Effects and the powerful Remove Background tool. Artistic Effects are the Office equivalent of Photoshop filters, so instead of stepping out of Word into Photoshop to edit an image to add say a pastel or an oil painting effect, you can now do this within Word itself.

The Remove Background tool is even niftier — it lets you remove the background from images, like the sky from a photograph of your family, leaving you with just the folks in the photo. Granted, it takes a bit of getting used to, but you can easily add and remove parts of the background you need, and it’s very useful when your background conflicts with the document look and feel.

Another feature I like which works in Word and PowerPoint is the capability to edit a document collaboratively, so long as it’s stored on Windows Live SkyDrive. Word, for example, locks the paragraph that one person is editing and will show you a contact card for them so that you can mail/chat with them through Windows Messenger.

Excel 2010: Maths geeks will love the ton of new statistical, mathematical and financial functions, but for me, the Sparklines feature stood out far and above the other enhancements in Excel 2010. Sparklines are mini-graphs that let you see trends in a series of values, so instead of hunting around for the trendline on a bigger chart, Excel shows the trend for a range of values in an adjacent cell, so you know in one glance which direction the stuff you’re looking at is going! Oh, and if you love using Pivot Tables and Charts to visualise data, you’re going to love Slicers!

Powerpoint 2010: The image editing tools in PowerPoint get a makeover, but it’s the video editing tools that are the headline feature. Right from within PowerPoint, you can edit videos, add effects like fade-outs and reflections, and even embed Web video (like YouTube) to your slides. The editing capabilities are basic, but the results are seriously professional looking.

Small business owners without dedicated web-conferencing infrastructure will love the broadcast capabilities of PowerPoint 2010, all you have to do is choose Broadcast Slide Show from the Share & Send section in PowerPoint and you get a URL you can email across to clients. All they have to do is open their browser and they get to see full resolution slides as you move through your presentation. The broadcast can be viewed on mobile phones too, just that I wouldn’t advise you try it over our painfully slow GPRS connections. Plus, PowerPoint 2010 can convert your presentation into a video file that you may upload on to YouTube or distribute on a portable media player like the iPod as well.

Outlook 2010: Now I’m a person who didn’t exactly jump with joy with the user interface changes in Outlook 2010, but I did love the much-improved Conversation View, even more so thanks to two cool features — Clean Up and Ignore. Clean Up scans entire conversations and deleting any redundant messages within messages, for example, when someone in a long e-mail conversation clicks Reply All without realising that they’ve just sent copies of the last 10 messages within that message.

Clean Up ‘cleans up’ the conversation, and presents you a reduced list of messages to read. And if you’re tiring of a conversation that just won’t end, the Ignore moves all future messages from that conversation automatically to the Deleted Items folder.

• Price: Office Home & Student 2010 – Rs 4,999

Office Home & Business (FPP) – Rs 10,999

(All estimated retail prices, also available at www.microsoftstore.co.in)

• URL: http://office.microsoft.com/en-in/

Free play

The world of gaming just moved its collective behind, with Microsoft and Sony formally launching their motion gaming initiatives — Microsoft Kinect and Sony PlayStation Move. While Kinect tracks a player’s body movements without the need for a controller, Move is another motion-sensing gaming experience, but this one has you holding a wand to track your movements, similar to the Wii. Is the future of the gaming console controller-less, or will people gravitate back to controllers for accuracy? Initial feedback suggests that Kinect will find its own niche, and its success depends largely on how well the game producers respond to the Kinect’s hands-free challenge.

• URL: http://www.e3expo.com/