Office 2010 and Dynamics GP

With Office 2010 going to retain stores this week, a lot of questions are coming up about upgrading to Office 2010 from Dynamics GP Users.  Office 2010 has already been released to partners and via Technet, and is getting good reviews.

Preston Gralla from PC World writes -

“I review plenty of software packages throughout the course of a year, and it's rare that I come across one that I believe will truly make a difference in the way that I work or use my computer. This is one of those times.”

I recommend you check out the review, highlights the outstanding features of Office 2010, especially Outlook.

Pam at the Inside Microsoft Dynamics GP has highlighted the new features of Excel which would be useful to Dynamics GP Users. PowerPivot and Slices do look wonderful!

“Microsoft Excel 2010 has a number of new features that make information more visual, helping to interpret data easier to avoid overload.  When connected to Dynamics GP, Excel empowers people by delivering new insight into business information making it easier to share and act.  New Excel 2010 features such as Slicers and Sparklines bring numbers to life

PowerPivot  for Excel 2010 is super cool and has a huge value to Dynamics GP customers.  Mash data together from Dynamics GP, Dynamics CRM, and other data sources and create graphs and charts against your key business metrics in one place.  This is a must do.  Check it out.”

Dynamics GP 2010 and Office 2010 (Supported)

As per the GP 2010 System Requirements the supported version of Office with GP 2010 are -

Microsoft Office 2007
Microsoft Office 2010

Note –

1. Based on the feedback from users and a Microsoft tech looks like the Email Functionality in GP 2010 is not compatible with Office 64 bit at this point. It does work seamlessly with the Office 32 bit version.

2. If you want to use Word templates with Office 2007, you need to install the GP 2010 work add-0n

Dynamics GP 10 and Office 2010 (Not supported)

As per the GP 10 System Requirements the supported versions of Office are -

Microsoft Office XP
Microsoft Office 2003
Microsoft Office 2007

Although based on Mariano’s testing last year with the Office 2010 beta, he didn’t run into any problems .

I am currently running Microsoft Dynamics GP v10 Service Pack 4 on Windows 7 Enterprise. Upon launching Dynamics GP I thought I would encounter my first issue with the Home Page perhaps not being able to address the new version of Microsoft Outlook 2010 components.
However, it seems that Microsoft Office development team made a conscious effort to preserve the COM automation interfaces for compatibility with other applications that have come to rely on these objects. Next step involved testing SmartList exports to Microsoft Excel 2010 and Microsoft Word 2010. I went ahead and selected the Account Summary SmartList and click the Export to Excel button. The test completed successfully …

We’ve just setup Office 2010 on a couple of workstations and haven’t  run into any problem with Smartlist exports either. I will post my notes of more testing later.

However, if you want to go the correct  route and get Office 2010, you should start planning your GP 2010 upgrade. Most people already are.

Video

The Next Wave of Business Productivity: Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 with Microsoft Dynamics