There’s a lot new about Office 2010: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook all come with evolved UIs, taking cues from Office 2007’s “ribbon” UI by using tabs instead of traditional menus. Word offers the new “backstage view”, which replaces the old File menu with a sort of visual representation of it: You’ll get a sidebar with live previews, which could come in handy for things like print preview. Besides that, Word (along with PowerPoint and Excel) also adds minor photo and video-editing tools like colour adjustment, cropping and trimming. PowerPoint brings the new “broadcast slideshow” feature, allowing you to beam a presentation to any connected PC with a one-click interface; and Excel adds some smart enhancements like automatically shading the highest numbers in a given chart, and Sparklines, which are word-sized graphs that can be added inside charts.

There are a boatload of minor changes in Office 2010, and we won’t go into them all. The biggest change, and the one that’s most exciting to us, has been around for awhile in some form or another: SkyDrive, Microsoft’s online storage, now includes what’s essentially the Office take on Google Docs. With any version of Office 2010, you get 25GB of storage space. That storage gives you the ability to create and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on the fly, with simultaneous group editing, just like in Google Docs.

There are two main versions of Office 2010: The full version, the price of which has not yet been announced, and the Starter version, which offers limited-feature (we might say crippled) versions of the three main programs in the suite, and will come free with many new PCs. With either option, you’ll get the 25GB of storage space and access to SkyDrive. Office 2010 will be released sometime in the first half of 2010. [Microsoft]

The Excel creation and editing will be a free upgrade if you buy now. Like the rest of the Dataviz mobile editors, Documents to Go for iPhone uses InTact, which retains the format of edited files at all times.

They also have another version for $US10, which also supports Exchange attachments, and synchronises with the Exchange server. [Documents to Go and Documents To Go with Exchange Attachments]

Here’s the key: it looks like Excel from Office 2003, 2007 or 2008 (Mac). All your tweets are displayed in plain text down down the page, and you tweet by typing yours in the top textbox and hitting send. There’s even tabbed views along the top, making it a relatively complete Twitter package.

And don’t forget to follow us if you haven’t. And yes, pork rinds and STDs are what my friends tweet about. [Spreadtweet via NYT]

If you are interested in an app for the iPhone/Touch that can edit both Microsoft Word and Excel documents along with file sharing and content management capabilities, Quickoffice is now available via the App Store for $US20. [iTunes]

We heard about Documents To Go for Android a few months back, a Microsoft Office document reader/editor/creator for mobile devices on its way to the Android platform. Now it’s out for $US20.

Documents to Go supports file formats up to Office 2007&,dash;technically those file extensions include .doc .xls and .ppt, along with Adobe’s .pdf for good measure. But apparently that $US20 price is only an introductory deal, with the app price bumping to $US30 after some arbitrary amount of time. Get it now through Android Market. [DataViz via UberPhones]

It appears that Microsoft will be offering the new online Office suite via the Office Live Workspace in both ad supported and subscription tiers. What the difference will be between those tiers has not been revealed, but Microsoft plans on releasing a private technical preview of the Office web applications later this year. Beta information is expected to be released to Office Live Workspace subscribers sometime in the near future. [Microsoft and Microsoft and Office Live]

Whatever it happens, this is the list of features supported in Documents to Go:

• View, edit and create native Word, Excel and PowerPoint files and attachments
• Supports Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint
• Includes support for Microsoft Office Word 2007 & PowerPoint 2007
• Full featured solution with viewing AND editing functionality
• Supports file and attachments received via e-mail, Bluetooth® or media card
• Unique InTact Technology retains original document formatting of edited files
• Integrated with BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry Internet Service for reliable and instant access to e-mail attachments
• Spell checking for word processing files
• Advanced character/font formatting
• Advanced paragraph formatting
• Insert and delete tables for word processing files
• Insert and edit auto bullets & numbers in word processing files
• Sorting in spreadsheets
• Apply cell formatting in spreadsheets
• Insert and delete worksheets
• Insert, duplicate and delete slides in presentations
• English, French, Italian, German and Spanish versions available

[Dataviz--Thanks Steve]

Sure, AC/DC may be behind the times on digital distribution. And they could be described as “in denial” about the death of the music album, but this Microsoft Excel spreadsheet music video, while not condoned by the band in any way, is rockin’ our Hell’s Bells this fine Sunday afternoon. Better still, this “music video” was designed with the corporate drone in mind—spreadsheets navigate office firewalls with ease!

The video is the fine work of Phil Clandillon and Steve Milbourne, who work at a division of Sony/BMG in London. They call this “the world’s first music video in Excel format.”

“Basically, it’s come about because we recognised that a lot of people have fairly restrictive internet and security policies at work,” said Clandillon inan interview with Wired.com. “What we really liked was that we could actually subvert the corporate firewalls by including AC/DC’s music in an Excel spreadsheet, because that’s allowed through every corporate firewall there is.”

If you want, you can download the spreadsheet at the AC/DC rocks web site, and start sharing today. No Macs allowed. [Wired]