In this video, Office.com writer Ron Owens unveils his favorite new features in Word 2010 and some tips for making the most of them. Learn how to customize your workspace, simplify your printing experience, co-author documents, and use the Navigation Pane and paste preview. For more Office 2010 videos, check out The Office Blog on Channel 9.

PowerPoint 2010 has a lot of improvements, but there are two that I think are absolutely  game-changing features: Video embedding and PowerPoint broadcasting. These are the kinds of "if only" features that make you slap your forehead and go, "Dang, if only I'd had that X years ago." Like, if I'd only had this laptop in college. And Red Bull. Oh yeah, and the Internet.  But I digress.

Case in point:  I do some volunteering with a non-profit journalism organization, the Asian American Journalists Association. Last year I joined a committee to produce a  high-technology training event in Chicago for journalists from the ethnic press. Now, of our committee members, two of us live in Seattle, two in Chicago, one in California. Nobody uses the same computers or software, and we had documents to share, timelines to go over, deadlines to meet and proposals to make. The night before a crucial presentation....

PowerPivot for Excel is an Excel 2010 add-in that allows users to pull data from multiple sources, mash them up, and then build reports using regular pivot tables. You can even share these reports with others in Microsoft SharePoint (via PowerPivot for SharePoint). In this demo from Channel 9, Julie Strauss, Program Manager for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, shows just how easy it is to get a better view into your data. Watch for the part where she sorts 100 million rows of data instantly. 100 million rows. Not a typo. You can download the PowerPivot add-in for free at the Microsoft Download Center. More info at powerpivot.com.

Do you often work with really long Word documents? Do you sometimes collaborate with others on the creation of these really long documents? Check out the latest episode of the Office Show for a quick tour of some of the new features in Microsoft Word 2010 that could make your life just a little bit easier.

We’ll show you the new Navigation Pane in Word. It makes it easy to find your way around long, complicated documents.

In this episode of the Office Show, you'll see how three very creative storytellers use Microsoft Office to realize their ideas. Joannie Stangeland uses OneNote 2010 and a digital pen to capture inspiration and organize her poetry. David Salaguinto uses a Visio template to create comics for his popular "Office Comic." And we'll show you how acclaimed author Jennifer Egan uses PowerPoint to create fiction. She actually wrote a chapter entirely in PowerPoint for her novel "A Visit From the Goon Squad."

Poet Stangeland's daytime gig is writing help articles for Microsoft Word, so you can find her work on  our  Word blog. She also hosts a special video series, " A Writer's Guide to Office," that's all about using Office for people who are serious about good writing. You can also find more great tips on OneNote at Michael Oldenburg's blog.

Salaguinto is the author/artist of the popular "Office Comics" blog, and he's got some special things coming, inspired by this edition of "The Office Show."

And you can find out more about Jennifer Egan on jenniferegan.com, and you can buy the book directly at Amazon.com. You can see her PowerPoint chapter on her website, but do buy the book. It's a powerful chapter on it's own, but seen in the context of the whole story it's a real mind-blower.

Don't forget to check out her 10 Tips for storytelling in PowerPoint which she wrote especially for readers of the Office Blog.

-- Doug Kim

In the last episode of The Office Show, award-winning author Jennifer Egan ("A Visit From the Goon Squad") filled us in on how she created a chapter of her new book with PowerPoint. It's an amazing chapter, as are her insights on using PowerPoint's features for compelling storytelling. We had to keep the interview on the shorter side for the Office Show, but we've included more of the interview in this excerpt.

Now, Jennifer uses PowerPoint to create fiction, but it's easy to see how her approach and process can be applied to any type of presentation. You can read more of Jennifer's tips for storytelling with PowerPoint here. What are yours?

-- Doug Kim

Yes.

OneNote helps me keep track of all my writing, so I can organize ideas and works in progress and find everything.


When the Office Show crew asked me to talk about how I use OneNote when I write poetry, I jumped at the chance.

Dude. Excel. Rocks.

Literally. The "video" for AC/DC's "Rock and Roll Train" was actually created entirely in Excel. You saw an excerpt of it in "The Office Show: Visualizing Data," and you can see the entire thing here.

I saw AC/DC in concert once, and you know, it wasn't like I was rocking out with my mullet flying around, going "Dude, this would be so awesome in an Excel spreadsheet!"

But then again, I'm not a interactive design genius like Phil Clandillon or Steve Milbourne at Sony Music Creative in London. Phil and Steve get paid to do amazing, creative projects to promote Sony's musicians. For AC/DC, they honed in on some insights that Sony researchers uncovered about the band's typically male fans.  "They generally work in quite stressful office environments, and they'll go home and they'll listen to something like AC/DC as an escape from that. It's a pure rock and roll escape," they told me.

Now for most of us, Excel is awesome, but it doesn't equal "Excape" (sorry). But that's where the genius part comes in.

Phil and Steve realized that if they could sneak a little AC/DC behind...

Need a flyer or a newsletter? We'll show you how Microsoft Publisher 2010 makes creating publications easier with the new building blocks feature, plus we'll show you how to import inventory data from Excel and generate a product catalog in seconds. And for the explosive finale, we've got footage of how one Publisher fan has used it --  literally -- for rocket science.

We loved Gary McKay's Publisher rocket so much we built and launched one ourselves. Well, I don't know if launched is the right word. Let's say we fired it off, and it went up in the air, at least for a little while, before it all ended in smoking wreckage. Gary's works much better.

 If you're inspired too, here are some great links:

Get some of Gary McKay's Rebel Origami templates to try it for yourself.

Learn more about building blocks in Publisher 2010.

Learn more about creating a catalog merge with Excel and Publisher 2010.

If you have ideas and tips you want to share about how to make great publications, write a comment and let everyone know. We'd love to hear from you, and we'd love to hear more about what you think of the show. The folks at Office.com created this in partnership with our friends at Microsoft's Channel 9, where you can find even more videos about Office.