In Office 2007, we significantly improved the rendering quality of static content. Users could quickly and easily enhance shapes, pictures, and other content with effects such as bevels, soft edges, and reflections. For Office 2010, we switched our focus to enhancing dynamic content - animations, transitions and video. To accomplish this, we rebuilt the core rendering engine using DirectX 9.0. As a result, you’ll notice that PowerPoint 2010 is improved in four major ways: Improved Slide Show Performance...

Join us every Tuesday for free webinars about how to use Office programs. You can watch the Office 15-Minute Webinars live, or view them later. They run 9:15 am-9:30 am Pacific time on Tuesdays with a live Q&A session to follow. We'll add links to previous recordings below as they become available. You can also download a calendar reminder for the series.

To join the meeting, click the link below after 9 am Pacific Time on the day of the webinar and read the instructions below if you need help connecting. We'll be online to help you solve any technical matters at 9am, and the webinar will start promptly at 9:15 am.

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For everyone using the Outlook 2010 Technical Preview, there are a number of improvements for working with multiple Exchange accounts. My name is Andrew Sullivan, I’m a Program Manager working on Outlook and it’s my pleasure to highlight some of these improvements. Connect to more than one Microsoft Exchange account simultaneously. If you’ve worked with more than one Exchange account in Outlook 2007 or earlier, you may have resorted to using multiple Outlook profiles to access your...

In Word 2007, I was the program manager responsible for driving both the changes in the styles user experience and the investment made in lists. There a number of decisions that were made by those of us involved in those efforts that folks are still talking about (including in recent comments on this and other blogs). This post gives you some of my personal insights as to why we went in the directions we did. The goal is to provide a bit more information about both how Word works and why it works...

Did you know that over 5.5 million users have downloaded our Office 2010 Beta?  This makes Office 2010 Beta the largest beta program we have had in the history of Office.  We asked this broad set of beta users for feedback, and the response has been terrific. The level of positive feedback we have received makes us feel both proud (of representing this business) and humble (about working on a product that is important to so many people). We are also very excited about the many great stories our customers are telling about using this new product. Here are some interesting facts that I want to share from my read of the feedback we received.

For more than 20 years, we've worked on Office with a clear aspiration: to give our users the best productivity experience. Nine out of 10 of our beta users found Office 2010 to be an improvement over their current productivity suite, and this fact becomes even more exciting considering the fact that 70% of beta users are actually users of Office 2007, our current release. Here are some additional data points from our 2010 beta users:

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A lot of people want to use different page numbering schemes in different parts of their documents. And a lot of people want to use "page x of y pages" page numbering in their documents.

Sometimes, people want to use "page x of y pages" page numbering in just a part of their documents.

It all gets down to linking--or unlinking...

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Why do we still buy $12 calendars even though finding what day it is as simple as looking at your computer or phone? It's not new to create your own, but I wanted to show you how simply you can do it with a free template at Office Online. You can download the template mentioned here and the calendar I made here . All templates for 2011 calendars--over 100--can be found at Office.com . <div><img alt="DCSIMG" id="DCSIMG" width="1" height="1" src="http://m.webtrends.com/dcsygm2gb10000kf9xm7kfvub_9p1t...

Today, we are thrilled to announce the release of the public Beta of Microsoft Office 2010! Betas for Office 2010, as well as SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 are available for download at www.microsoft.com/2010 . This is an exciting and significant milestone for both the Office and Outlook teams, because it means that for the first time, anyone can download Office 2010 ! You can learn more about the complete release of the Office 2010 beta on our Office blog . The Outlook team...

Highlights The ability to export reports to Excel has been added. Fixes for issues with the import data wizards, report printing and previewing, macros, Excel integration, and date filters. Updates to Access Developer Extensions and Access Runtime are updated for SP2 and are available in all supported languages. The ADE is patched with the full Office Suite patch, while the Access Runtime is in a separate patch. More Access Runtime info This version of the Access 2007 Runtime contains the same version...

We've got good news for those of you who read your Windows Live Hotmail accounts in Outlook. We have released an update to the Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector. This update brings a number of fixes and is required to continue using Hotmail accounts in Outlook. The version number for the updated Hotmail Connector is 14.0.5139.5001. To determine which version is installed on your computer, see the end of this article. Here is an overview of changes in this update: Several send/receive issues are...