Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Office twenty-ten (the correct way of saying it) has some awesome new features over Office 2003 and 2007.

The following links highlight some of the amazing things that are going on and I must say I am pretty impressed so far.

Joseph Chirilov has been busy writing (and geting guest writers to write) articles about both the upcoming changes in Excel 2010 as well as a series on using sparklines in Excel 2007 and 2010. Sparklines are mini in-line charts that can graphically display data in a very small space.

• Data Bar Improvements in Excel 2010 – specifically now the ability show negative values in data bars.
• Icon Set Improvements in Excel 2010 – he walks you through customising the icon sets.
• Sparklines in Excel – Sam Radakovitz created the following series. This is the introduction.
• Adding Some Spark to Your Spreadsheets – using Excel 2010 to create sparklines
• A Sparkline Trick - Using the Horizontal Axis as a Reference Line – a walk through of sparklines.
• Sparkline Axis Options – a more detailed look at the various axis options for sparklines
• Formatting Sparklines – how to format the sparklines in various different ways – plenty of pictures here.

As mentioned previously the Office 2010 Technical Preview was released a while ago but is not for general public use but invitation only. I was fortunate enough to get a copy to play with and have been having some fin exploring. If you are unable to get into the program then these Office 2010 videos may be good to watch.

Some of the back story to Office 2010. This is pretty exciting stuff and is very obvious when you open up any of the applications and click the Office orb. This part of office is now called backstage. This excerpt is from the official Office Product Development Group Blog. I suggest you read the whole article about the backstage approach to printing to get the whole story.

Many of the Backstage features in Office suffer from low discoverability and we want to use the Backstage View to address that. We also want to help you get more out of the Backstage features that you already know.  One of the best examples of a Backstage feature you know and likely rely on is Print. It's been around for ages and largely hasn't changed since you first used it:

Even though Print hasn't really changed in all these years, it is far from perfect. Has the following ever happened to you? After writing a document, you format the page so it looks just right. You click Print and walk over to the printer, only to discover in horror that you forgot to set it to print two-sided, or that a last minute margin change meant the last word of your document got pushed onto its own page. You realize this as you watch the first of 30 copies printing.

The first part of the backstage story is here. To be honest I though the second part made immediate sense whereas the first part is more setting the scene stuff.

OneNote has some pretty exciting new developments

• Follow this quick tutorial to see how Microsoft OneNote 2010 can help you organize your Business and home projects. With OneNote you can keep notes, ideas, maps, meetings and other information
• OneNote AfterGlow - Note that this might not be safe for work (NSFW) so just a word of caution, no swearing or nudity just an “adult situation”
• OneNote 2010 File Format Information
• Overview of OneNote 2010 – What’s new for you
• OneNote included in all Office editions!
Finally Word 2010 from 30,000 feet.