There is more to sharing Word documents than the ancient tradition of attaching them to an Outlook email. Now Word 2010 makes it easy to share your Word documents over the web or SharePoint without you having to leave the application and creating too many steps between your documents and their recipients
Click File. The BackStage View appears. Click Save & Send to access Save & Send options. Here is a breakdown of options that are available:
Send Using Email
The Send Using Email option enable you to attach a copy of the document you are working on to an Outlook email. It also lets you create a link to the document if you have it in a shared location like a SharePoint site folder. This is the better of the options because it gets everyone working on the same copy of the document enabling people to see all of the document edits and changes in one location. Plus it also keeps email size small which should make your email administrator happy.
You can also click Send as PDF to create a PDF of the document you are working on and attaches it to an Outlook email. PDF is a trusted way for preserving document formatting and fidelity especially if you are working with people using different versions of Microsoft Office.
Considering that PDF is such a de facto standard, Microsoft’s XPS format always seemed like a solution in search of a problem and I’ve yet to see it as a requirement for any projects. Nonetheless, click Send as XPS to attach an XPS version of your current document to a blank email ready to send to that one person you might know who wants to receive the document in that format.
Microsoft Word 2010 also integrates with Internet fax services (service sold separately) but even Internet faxes seem old school by today’s standards, right?
Save to Web
When Office 2010 launched, Microsoft also launched updates to their Windows Live suite of online services. SkyDrive, their online file storage system, comes with 25 GB of online storage for free. Click Save to Web to save your document to SkyDrive where you can later share the document with other people online.
The Save to Web option might be locked down depending on your organization’s network security. However, it’s all good though, because it shows an acknowledgement by Microsoft to all the small to medium business and solo workers in the Microsoft Office user community.
Save to SharePoint
With each subsequent release of Microsoft Office and SharePoint, the Office and collaboration platform see a better level of integration. The integration between Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 is the easiest yet. Click Save to SharePoint and then browse for a location on the SharePoint site(s) you have at least Contributor access and then click Save As to save the file.
Publish as Blog Post
Click Publish as Blog Post to publish your current document as a blog post to a SharePoint blog on your SharePoint site. I like the thought of using an internal blog on a SharePoint site to communicate product updates and related report which this option makes it an easy task. This option also support publishing to WordPress, Blogger, Community Server, and TypePad.
What sharing options do you use for your Word documents
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