Being a huge nerd, I decided that I would go ahead and upgrade to the latest and greatest office. That being, Office 2010 Professional Plus. The biggest concern that I had was loosing all my mail settings from Outlook 2007. Thankfully, it upgrade gracefully and worked like a charm. So lets start this top 10 list.

1) You can upgrade without fear of loosing all your stuff! As you can tell by the screenshot below, you can select what you want to do. I selected to remove all previous versions. 

 

2) Outlook conversations: Just like GMail, you can now group emails by conversations. This is simply awesome and a must have.

3) The ability to ignore conversations. If you are on a email thread that has nothing to do with you. Simply “ignore” the conversation and all emails go into the deleted folder.

4) Quick Steps, do you send an email to the same team member or group constantly. With quick steps, its just one click away.

5) Spell check in the Subject line!

6)  Easier Screenshots, built in just click the button. No more ALT-Printscreen for those that are not aware of the awesome SnagIT 10 that's out.

7) Open in protected view. When you open a document from an email attachment, it lets you know the file may be unsafe. You can click a button to enable editing. This is great for preventing macros.

 

 

 

8) Excel has always had a variety of charts and graphs available to visually depict data and trends. With Excel 2010, though, Microsoft has added a new feature called Sparklines, which allows you to place a mini-graph or trend line in a single cell.

The Sparklines are a cool way to quickly and simply add a visual element without having to go through the effort of inserting a graph or chart that overwhelms the worksheet.

9) Contact actions. If you hover over a name in the form or fields on an email, you get a popup giving you several actions you can perform on the person such as adding them to your Outlook contacts, scheduling a meeting, viewing their stored contact information if they are already in your contacts, sending an instant message or even starting a telephone call.

10) Windows 7 Task Bar Context Menu – I love the jumplist. I don’t know how much that I would actually use it but it just rocks.