Last Thursday, Microsoft East and Central Africa, unveiled its latest office productivity suite, Microsoft Office 2010 at media event at the Stanley, Hotel in Nairobi. The Suite which incorporate new Office Web applications made a global debut early last month was introduced to the media by Kellington Kituku, Microsoft’s IT Manager for East & Central Africa.New Office Web Apps was among the most talked about feature of Office 2010. The service enables users to work with office documents online by logging in via a Microsoft Live Account. Office web Apps is seen as a counter defense against Google Docs which Google has been pushing aggressively to both retail and enterprise users, with various firms adopting the product. Office Web App does not require the installation of Microsoft Office on a computer and may be a viable choice for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) users who have had no way of using Microsoft Office before. The File menu is back after it was removed from Office 2007. This now replaces the Office button that appeared on the top left corner of the Office Ribbon. Various functionality including document protection and sharing are accessible via the File Menu. The Microsoft Office Ribbon remains the same across all applications and has gone through some slight improvements. Support for OpenDocument formats that are in use in OpenOffice has vastly improved since its introduction in Service Pack 2 of Office 2007, though it still remains wanting.
 
 
Enterprise users can leverage Microsoft Office Web Apps together with Microsoft SharePoint 2010, which allows sharing, and collaborative editing of documents. SharePoint is an alternative to Groove which was available in previous version of Microsoft Office. Other features that come with SharePoint 2010 include document security controls, version control with roll back and notifications on document changes.
Office Outlook 2010 users can also look out for the contact card, which is a feature that enables you to see a person's office location, telephone and email contacts by mousing over their names, a feature that first appeared in Apple Mail. If enabled by your contact, the contact card can in addition, display their current location (if away from their physical office) and even an audio clip to help you pronounce their names.  There are also 'clever tips' that alert you based on what you are doing, for example, if one is sending a mail marked confidential to an out-of-domain web address , a tip alerting you of the same appears.  Outlook also finally goes social, with Facebook and Linked-In integration. Improvements in Excel include usability features, such as ability to select a trend from a range on your worksheet. The feature is known as a “Sparkline” and shows a quick chart of the selected data.
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2010 comes with the ability to directly edit photos and videos from a slide.  Users will also look forward to several new animations for their slides and a tool that makes it easy to insert screen shots into their presentations. Office 2010 is now available across Africa both for retail and enterprise users. Although the price may be seen as out of reach for many consumers, Microsoft has worked to improve on this by having their products pricing lowest in Africa. Microsoft has previously piloted a program known as Office for Africa, which offers Office products at affordable prices as a way of reducing the piracy rates that currently stand at 81%.  It was also revealed that there was lack of information and several vendors were selling counterfeit office copies to unsuspecting users.  One can tell if their software is legal by going to howtotell.com. Microsoft Office 2010 can be purchased online  here.