Get Your Free Office 2010 Migration Guides from Microsoft

Those of you migrating to the latest version of Microsoft (News - Alert) Office at your organization always face at least one challenge—user training. Every Office upgrade typically throws a monkey wrench into the workflow of your fellow employees, who now have to get used to a whole new set of features and commands. To help ease the transition for your end-users, you may want to check out the free Office 2010 Migration Guides offered by Microsoft.

Recently discussed in the company’s Microsoft Office blog, these multi-page guides highlight the differences between the key applications in Office 2010 and their counterparts in Office 2003. The idea is to help your users more easily understand and deal with the new features and commands in Office 2010, thereby saving calls to your help desk.

Available for download from Microsoft’s Web site, the guides target six core Office applications—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, and OneNote. Each guide is stored as a PDF file, so you can email them to your users or store them on your Intranet, or just print them out to give to each person.

The guides are short, eight pages on average, but comprehensive. Each one is nicely designed and laid out, offering text, images, and tables to illustrate the major features in every application. The guides start by pointing out the key menus, toolbars, and icons in Office 2010. They then move on to explain how the Office 2010 application differs from its counterpart in Office 2003. From there they cover some of the key features and shortcuts designed to help people become more familiar with the programs they need go use.

The guides focus on the transition from Office 2003 because that’s when Microsoft made some major changes, such as replacing the traditional menus with the Ribbon interface, which threw a lot of people for a loop. But they can come in handy no matter which version of Office your company currently uses.

Beyond the Migration Guides, Microsoft also offers Menu to Ribbon Reference Guides, which highlight all the commands from the menus in Office 2003 and show you their equivalents in Office 2010. These guides are available online as Excel spreadsheets, so your users can download them directly into Excel from Microsoft’s Web site, or you can store them on your Intranet.

At my former company, we created our own tip sheets and how-to guides for our users whenever we moved from one version of Office to the next. If you’ve had to do the same thing at your organization, you should find that Microsoft’s Migration Guides will save you a lot of time and effort and help your users better handle the leap to Office 2010.