The mail merge feature in Word 2010 is much improved — this feature undergoes a big change in every version — and is easier to use than before. But it undoes an earlier fix: if your data source is an Excel file that contains formatted numbers and dates, these data will lose their formatting when they get placed into your document. For example, $10,000 will become 10000 and April 22, 2011 will become 4/22/11.

You can still edit the field codes in Word to manually insert formatting instructions (press Alt + F9 to toggle codes on and off and Ctrl + F9 to insert brackets), but it doesn’t always work properly and the codes can be inscrutable. I’ve found that the best solution is to use the Mail Merge Wizard (rather than simply choosing the data source manually) and connect to the Excel data using DDE.

Rather than go through all the steps here, download my PDF that has detailed instructions and screen shots. You can print it, if you want.

Microsoft SharePoint and Office 2010 work and play together very well. In fact, it could be hard to tell that your files are on a secure web server, rather than on your own hard drive. Here is a quick tutorial showing several ways of saving, opening and moving files around using Office and SharePoint 2010.

Back in June, I posted that if you’re running the 64-bit version of Microsoft Office, you couldn’t insert Flash movies, since the Flash player is only a 32-bit plug-in. Users of 64-bit Windows have also experienced a lot of problems when watching Flash videos, which is the format of most videos on the Web, like on YouTube, Vimeo and elsewhere.

So it was an excellent gift today when I downloaded the beta of Adobe Square, the x64 Flash player. There are actually two downloads: an ActiveX control for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office, and a plug-in for Firefox and every other browser. You’ll probably want to install both.

As soon as I did — wham! — I was able to place Flash objects into PowerPoint and Excel. On the Insert tab, select Video/Video from File.

Someone had sent me an Excel workbook that contains videos (a teaching aide that I’ll review in the near future) and originally, all I saw were blank boxes. Once I installed Square, the videos played just great. I also noticed that YouTube videos play a lot more smoothly, without jumping, jittering, starting-and-stopping. Flash player 10.1 fixed a lot of that already, but Square seems even better.

A couple of caveats: since Square is still in beta, there’s no guarantee of anything, so if you experience crashes and whatnot, don’t say you weren’t warned. Also, the beta won’t update itself automatically and you won’t get reminders to do so. It’s up to you to visit the download page every so often to update it manually. Download it here.

Microsoft always releases a new Mac version of Office one year after releasing a new Windows version of Office, and the 2011 version is now available, following Office 2010 for Windows.

The two biggest changes over Office 2008 for Mac is that Outlook now replaces Entourage as the mail/calendar/contact/task application, and macros are once again part of the team. This means you can now record, write and play macros using Visual Basic for Applications. Microsoft inexplicably removed VBA in Office 2008.

Like the 2008 version, 2011 looks and feels like a native OS X application. They didn’t try to stuff a Windows program into a Mac. So the toolbars and panels are right where you left them, and there are some cool, new features and the look and feel is updated, like Excel PivotTables:

(Click for larger image)

PC Magazine has a great slide show of screen shots from Office 2011. Take a look.

I just posted a dozen videos covering features of Excel 2010. Just click the Free Excel Videos link on the right side or on top. These are also available as a channel on YouTube. I made all these videos for Lynda.com.

What if you want to learn Excel 2010, but didn’t have an Internet connection handy? I know, I know — but not everybody has a mobile Internet card. Or maybe your particular flight or train or mountaintop doesn’t have a good connection. Who you gonna call??

Lynda.com, that’s who. The DVD version of my Excel 2010 Essential Training just became available today. It’s the same course that you can take online, but the movies and data files are packaged on DVD. Check it out!