Open plan offices make great use of available space, helping to cut overheads and, therefore, contributing to greater profits (or lower losses) but there is often a need for a finished off area for conferences or inexpressive meetings. The latest amelioration in this area is a virtual wall of frameless glass doors that can stretch up to eight metres wide yet, when fully open, occupy a tiny footprint against a wall.
The doors are made of tempered glass and slide along guides in the ceiling and floor until they reach a side wall, where they pivot ninety degrees to stack neatly against the wall. The glass has a very slim profile therefore a stack of eight or so doors is barely more than a hand span.
The doors may spend many hours stacked out of the way and can be slid back into place in a minute. The first door is turned ninety degrees to slide along the guides to position, followed by each of the other doors until the final one is in place. There is a main door that opens in the original way so that the room can be entered and exited in the usual manner by staff, executives and guests.
The frameless glass stacking door system described should not be confused with a purely sliding doors system or a glass wall with a pair of occasion doors which do not enable maximum entrance in the middle of areas. The slide-pivot-stack glass door system is the only one of these that facilitates a full open plan office environment.
Frameless glass partitions are becoming popular in hotels and large bistro areas to divide areas for inexpressive functions. For further privacy, there are tinted glass options.
Smaller restaurants are having the doors installed as their asset frontage to enlarge their dining areas on great weather days. great than bi-folding doors in terms of narrow profile when fully open and stacked, the slide-pivot-stack recipe is far superior when open part way. This is because the individual doors are either stacked away from the main entrance or they are in place along the guide line to form a window-wall whereas bifolding doors fold together as they slide, leaving a zig-zag protrusion along the remaining guides, wherever the doors have folded.
Developed from the 'glass curtains' conception popular in Europe, frameless glass doors are now available to order, made to measure in England, with facility included in the quoted price.
In expanding to the industrial applications, the frameless glass room dividers are suitable for homes and a double-glazed frameless glass patio door version was launched in Spring 2010 to comply with construction regulations for domestic dwellings. The double-glazed doors are frameless but have a narrow opaque gasket at the sides of the glass panels to seal the cavity in the middle of the panes of glass.
Open Plan Office And Glass Partition Doors For Switchable PrivacyIt's a love/hate relationship. When Office 2007 came out, you whether loved it or hated it. With Office 2010 out now, your hate may soften to accepting the product, and your love will just deepen.
The dismay in Office 2007 centered on the look and feel of the product. The introduction of a new Ribbon, which replaced the accepted toolbar in Office 2003, had users grumbling. One was the familiar look that prior Office products held. You could upgrade and the transition was easy.
In Office 2007, Microsoft made a giant leap into the new and unknown, leaving many Pc users baffled. The new Ribbon housed a fixed arrangement of command buttons and icons, organized commands as a set of tabs, each grouping relevant commands. The look and feel of the old standby was gone.
Designed to make the features of the application more discoverable and accessible, the Ribbon was whether loved or hated. Many gave it a short term shot and went back to using Office 2003.
With Office 2010, Microsoft designed a first-rate product. Microsoft listened to all the challenges and complaints of users and created a exquisite blend. Office 2010 is the best of Office 2003 and Office 2007.
New Features
Those who endured will enjoy a new customizable Ribbon (Users could not customize the Office 2007 Ribbon) so you can organize it agreeing to your needs. A modified Ribbon is now ready in all Office applications, and it now includes the "File" selection and a new highlight called "Backstage View," giving easy access to task-centered functions such as printing and sharing.
Get excited! Backstage view incorporates the most generally used actions in one place (no more dialog boxes with tabs). And there's more! You get the usual open, save and print, and you also get any templates for new documents, print layouts and ways to share your work, all without dialog boxes and tabs, everything is much more certainly accessible.
Additional features include:
• A Paste preview which lets you switch between paste options so you can make sure that your work will be formatted correctly
• Role orientation tailored to employees in "roles" such as study and improvement professionals, sales persons, and human resources
• A built-in screen capture tool for easy internet copy and paste
• A background extraction tool for editing photos and clip art within a document
• SmartArt templates and author permissions so you can originate amazing documents even though you're not an artist
• New text and image editing effects; production it easy to be the pro
• Live collaboration functions; great for the office
• New animations in PowerPoint 2010; insert videos directly into PowerPoint
• A public Connector that allows users to write emails while keeping track of their family, friends, and colleagues by viewing status updates and past communication history with the individual
Web Apps
For those who are just buying into the idea of "Cloud Computing," Microsoft now offers a free web-based version of its Office productivity suite, known as Office Web Apps, which started shortly before Office 2010 was released. Office Web Apps include online versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint and OneNote. This allows sharing and collaboration of documents and files. It also features user interfaces similar to the desktop version. Office Web Apps were released to Windows Live Skydrive for consumers and SharePoint Workspace for corporations last month. If you are without Office, you may have to download a Trial version or buy Office before using Web Apps.
Which Edition Is Right For You
The home editions:
Home and learner 2010 include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
Office Home and enterprise 2010 adds Outlook to the core apps.
The enterprise editions:
Standard 2010 adds Outlook and Publisher to the core apps.
Professional 2010 adds Outlook, Publisher, and Access.
Professional Plus 2010 includes Outlook, Publisher, Access, SharePoint Workspace, Communicate, and InfoPath.
What are the principles requirements?
Office 2010 runs on Windows Xp (Sp3 required), Windows Vista with Sp1 or later (32-bit or 64-bit), Windows 7 (32-bit or 64-bit), Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-bit or 64-bit) with Msxml 6.0 installed, Windows Server 2008 (32-bit or 64-bit), and Windows Server 2008 R2. You'll need at least 3 Gb of hard disk space.
So there you have it-the love/hate association with Microsoft Office 2010. My opinion, I love it. I've been using Office 2007 for three years and found the move to Office 2010 easy. If you hated Office 2007 and went back to Office 2003, give Office 2010 a chance. If you loved Office 2007 you'll be totally infatuated with Office 2010.
Next month I will delve into the Office suite applications.
Part one of a three-part series
By Cary Warner
