High spatial coherence is one of the salient properties of laser beam, while laser beam with low spatial coherence named partially coherent beam is preferred in many applications, such as correlated imaging (i.e., Ghost imaging), sub-Rayleigh imaging, free-space optical communications, particle manipulation, laser detection, and particle scattering. The coherence structure of conventional partially coherent beams is a Gaussian distributions. Recently, more and more attention is being paid to partially coherent beams with nonconventional coherence functions, and such beams display many extraordinary properties, such as self-shaping, self-focusing, self-splitting, and super-strong self-reconstruction. We will introduce research progress on manipulating spatial coherence of laser beam.