The question has been asked, who really needs to use Microsoft Office these days? The answer is, anyone who is in the business of professionally generating content for a paying customer. Word 2010 may not be the optimum tool for the everyday blogger, and Excel 2010 maybe not the best summer trip planner, just as a John Deere is not the optimum vehicle for a trip to the grocery store. But in recent years, Microsoft is the only software producer that has come close to understanding what professional content creators require in their daily toolset.
So far, the improvements we've found from actually using the Office 2010 Technical Preview released Monday (as opposed to the ones Microsoft told us about) can mainly be described as usability enhancements -- tools that appear to be responses to how people actually use the products. Compared to Office 2007, which threw out the old instruction manual with regard to how applications should work, Office 2010's changes are subtler, slicker, and less ostentatious. Of those we've noticed in our initial tests, here are five which we feel will make compelling arguments for at least some users to upgrade:
5. Embedding Web videos in PowerPoint presentations. Technically, it's possible to embed a YouTube video into a PowerPoint 2007 presentation, but you need a third-party plug-in to pull it off. Otherwise, PowerPoint is only geared to play locally accessible files, essentially using a Media Player component.
One of the very few functional changes to PowerPoint 2010 is the addition of a mechanism that enables you to embed YouTube and other videos into a presentation the same way you'd embed them into a Web page: by copying the HTML
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