New Features of Office 2010

Ribbon Interface

The ribbon interface has improved customization and is present suitewide. You can assemble the commands you use most frequently — regardless of where they normally reside — in tabs and groups of your own creation.

Big Office Button

The big Office button is gone that appeared in the upper-left of each window. Instead, clicking on the File tab now brings up a new window (called Backstage view) with a slew of options for creating, saving, sharing, and printing, as well as for accessing recent versions of the current document — or easily opening others via a handy list of recent documents. This window also leads you to menus for application-specific options.

Live Preview

The Live Preview for paste not only lets you opt to retain the source formatting, merge with destination formatting, or transfer text, but also allows you to see what your choice will look like before you commit to it — much the way the ribbon lets you try out formats by hovering your pointer over them.

Multi-media

The suite also boasts some fairly sophisticated image and video-editing tools that could eliminate the need to process media with third-party applications.

Security

The programs by default open downloaded Office documents in a protected view, with editing disabled until you explicitly authorize it by clicking a button in a highly visible warning.

64-bit options

The 64-bit edition does not have the full functionality of the 32-bit suite: Among other things, third-party Outlook Social Connectors are not immediately available for x64 (Microsoft says they will arrive eventually), and Outlook x64 does not support synchronization with Windows Mobile devices because 64-bit versions of Windows lack the Windows Mobile Device Center.

The 64-bit editions of Excel and Microsoft Project can use x64’s ability to address more memory to run huge spreadsheets or project models, respectively (though the same does not hold true for large Access databases). Unless you bump into limits with the 32-bit version of these applications, however, Microsoft recommends that you stick with the 32-bit edition of Office, even if your computer runs a 64-bit operating system.

Word 2010

New OpenType typography features that let you apply artistic effects ranging from ligatures to glows to beveled edges, all easily accessible from the Fonts pop-up window.

In longer documents with subheads, the navigation pane makes skipping between sections simple.

New Insert Screenshot feature permits you to add, in­­stantly, an image of any open, nonminimized window on your desktop; without exiting the document, you can even opt to add just a region of an open window, which you can define on the fly.

New image-editing tools allow for a wide range of adjustments and effects, including a compression feature to help keep overall file size down.

Unfortunately, Word has become such a powerful document-creation tool that its online counterpart is all the more of a letdown. Using the Web app isn’t difficult: The Save & Send screen has a convenient Save to SkyDrive option, but you have all of the rich media tools.

The Web app’s lack of support for Word’s own revision-and-review toolset seems unpardonable, since one of the best reasons for a Web version is to simplify collaboration. While the Web app does support simultaneous editing, the feature is still underwhelming.

Excel 2010

The chart graphics introduced in Office 2007 are certainly a hard act to follow, and aside from the suitewide image-editing, OneNote integration, and paste-preview features, the new Excel doesn’t offer a lot to brag about.

The most innovation is the addition of Sparklines, a feature that can create tiny charts in a single cell to illustrate trends in a row of figures.

Excel users who own the 64-bit edition stand to benefit from the ability to manipulate massively larger amounts of data thanks to that version’s increased addressing of memory. Excel jockeys also will want to download the free PowerPivot for Excel 2010 add-on, which lets you gather and analyze huge amounts of data from multiple sources.

The ability to save such complex spreadsheets to the Web, open and edit them in the Web version of Excel, and return them to the desktop without encountering formatting issues is probably one of the strongest achievements of Office Web Apps. Anyone who has attempted to do this kind of thing with third-party Web services knows just how difficult it can be. But as with Word, functionality in the Web edition of Excel is severely limited, offering no charting tools whatsoever.

On the Web, you can use functions like insert a table or hyperlink, and refresh data from outside sources. But the performance is painfully slow.

PowerPoint 2010

PowerPoint’s Broadcast Slide Show feature is impressive. You can run remote presentations, not to mention live demos and more, with services such as WebEx — but if all you want to do is share your slides, nothing beats the sheer simplicity of being able to do so straight from your desktop. You can’t see your speaker notes when you’re broadcasting without a second monitor — you can see only what your audience sees.

Other PowerPoint improvements in­­clude fairly robust built-in video-editing features that not only let you trim your embedded video but also bundle it up so that it travels with your presentation. You can import video from the Web on the fly, too, and all the neat image-acquisition and editing features available in Word apply here as well.

PowerPoint 2010 enlarges the already handsome arsenal of transitions and themes with new eye candy, including a selection of 3D effects. A new animation painter allows you to apply animation you’ve created for objects in one slide to objects in other slides. And a new autosave capability will surely rescue more than one work in progress from oblivion after an unexpected crash.

The Web-based version of PowerPoint is embarrassingly skimpy — not just in comparison to its desktop sibling but to online competitors such as Google Presentations and Zoho Show. You can create slides containing only text, still images, and smart art (Google’s app at least lets you insert a video); in addition, you get merely a few image style tools, and no animations or transitions. Working in the PowerPoint Web app is frustratingly slow.

Outlook 2010

To the existing panes (folders, messages, reading, and calendar), the default mail view adds a people pane that shows your recent interactions with the sender of whatever message appears in the reading pane.

The people pane (only in 32bit version) is the most interesting new feature, Outlook Social Connector, which lets you view updates from popular social networks for contacts who are members. This function, however, works only with networks that support it with a downloadable add-on (only Linked­In and MySpace provide add-ons; Microsoft says that Facebook and, oddly, Windows Live add-ons are due soon).

New Quick Steps feature, which is basically an easy way of creating rules and applying them to specific messages (as opposed to filters, which perform actions on a set of rule-defined messages). The app comes with several predefined Quick Steps, but creating a new one took only a few seconds and a couple of clicks.

Myriad other tweaks simplify setting up meetings from within email, creating a team calendar, finding a room for a meeting, and other routine tasks. As with the other Office apps, clicking the OneNote button in Outlook’s ribbon sends the item at hand (contact, email message, or the like) to whatever notebook you specify.

OneNote 2010

OneNote is now a component of all Office editions. It adds some powerful tools, including an improved search function, the ability to turn handwritten math equations into text, and — for shared notebooks — visual cues to show what new content has been added since you last opened the document.

One­Note has the ability to record audio while you’re taking notes — and then to let you use the notes to play back the audio it captured as you were writing them.

The program’s new layers of note organization is confusing: You can now create tabs and sections on three of the application window’s four sides, but their hierarchy isn’t immediately obvious.

Web Apps: Slow and limited functionality

Even if you have great bandwidth, the best apps available on the Web can’t really match the rich functionality and speed of Office’s mature desktop programs.

What Microsoft is doing with Office Web Apps appears to be little more than an effort to fend off Google Docs and other online-apps competitors by giving users who collaborate on documents — or individuals who need access to their files from several Office-equipped computers — a basic alternative.

Office Web Apps can edit documents only in the XML-based file formats introduced in Office 2007 (if you try to edit a document made in an earlier format, you get a prompt to create an XML-based copy).

All of the Web-based applications have handy buttons that allow you to open the document at hand in the corresponding desktop program, in case you find yourself bumping up against the online versions’ limits.

Most glaringly absent in the Web versions is support for any of the desktop applications’ revision modes. You are not able to open documents with revision-mode changes for editing; you an only view them. You also don’t get any support for video.

You can create new Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents online, via the Office menu item that appears on your Windows Live home page when the apps launch. And saving items to SkyDrive, the repository for Office documents in Windows Live, is a straightforward, one-click affair in the Backstage view of the 2010 apps.

Microsoft is also integrating Web-app support into the new version of Hotmail: Users who receive attachments in Office XML formats will be able to open and edit them in the browser (saving the download step previously required to open the documents in a desktop program). Of course, you’ll still have the desktop option if you want more functionality.

Aside from online access, the other principal benefit of Microsoft’s Web apps is that they don’t break Office formatting. Whatever changes you make to a file on the Web, you are unlikely to be surprised with the results when you bring the file back to your desktop. Given the formatting issues that frequently arise with Office docs in competing Web apps, this is no small achievement.

Other Office programs

Microsoft is continuing to bring the look and feel of the 2007 overhaul to Office family members that appear in corporate or volume-license bundles (InfoPath, Access, and Publisher) or are sold as stand-alone apps (Project and Vizio). All of them now have ribbon interfaces with Backstage view.

PUBLISHER

Publisher benefits most from the suitewide improvements to formatting tools. New alignment technology makes it easier than ever to position design elements precisely, and a Hide Scratch feature lets you see how items that bleed off the edges of pages will look when the page is trimmed. Publisher users will appreciate the addition of Live Preview capabilities.

ACCESS

Access users get an extensible Backstage view that permits IT types to incorporate their workflow into the program.

A new Add Application Parts feature has the potential to simplify database creation by allowing you to reuse custom components (yours or a colleague’s) across the suite.

The program’s new Quick Start feature allows you to add fields or groups of fields to your database easily.

Navigation Form provides simple-to-use tools for creating a layout from your elements; improved conditional formatting and the addition of data bars also help to give your databases visual panache.

PROJECT

The 2010 versions of Project provide enhanced visual features — a Timeline view — to assist in creating schedules, assigning resources, and identifying potential problems. The Professional version adds team-oriented features such as the ability to incorporate SharePoint Foundation 2010 task lists and to publish project plans back to SharePoint Foundation.

VIZIO

Improved drawing tools available (for instance, the new AutoConnect and the QuickShapes floating minitoolbar) should make creating business diagrams effortless. Auto-alignment technology will help you arrange elements the way you like them.

OFFICE MOBILE

Microsoft is also launching a 2010 version of Office Mobile, consisting of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and even a new SharePoint Mobile app to facilitate syncing and collaboration on the go.