Microsoft Office 2010 | A change in the life

It's been a long time since the last Microsoft Office revision, and it can be hard to imagine what new capabilities Microsoft could possibly add to the 20-year-old suite. But Office 2010 does in fact have a lot of new capabilities to offer. Let me show you 25 features in Office 2010 you may not know about yet -- but should.
[ Read the InfoWorld Test Center's reviews of Office Web Apps [1] and its picks for the best business features in Office 2010 [2] and the best Office 2010 capabilities for remote and mobile users [3]. ]

Across the Office suite

• Universal ribbon: The ribbon interface is now a part of every single Office application. First released in Office 2007 in some of its applications, the ribbon interface was an artistic leap, and as we all know, only moments after the ribbon was born, its first "art critic" came along. The critics have trashed the ribbon interface [5], but serious Office users have embraced it [6] happily. The fact is, the ribbon works: It's futuristic in design, has a polished feel, can be collapsed and tucked out of the way when necessary, and -- now -- it can be customized.
• Customizable ribbon: Many users never tweaked their toolbars in previous Office editions, while others tweaked it extensively. With a customizable ribbon, users can regroup various tools and tabs, and administrators can create and distribute customized ribbons to users for a tailored approach or a more simplistic one as desired.
• Backstage view: Love it or hate it, this new approach for all the behind-the-scenes document work is a necessary addition. By clicking the new File button (which replaces the Office 2007 orb), you have access to all your normal Save, Save As, Open, and Close operations. In addition, you can see and customize the document properties, manage versions, check for compatibility issues, and scrub the document of hidden metadata for sharing purposes.
• Paste preview: Included in all suites is a new live preview paste feature that lets you hover your mouse over an option and see what your clipboard item will look like. From the Home ribbon, just click the Paste drop-down menu and hover over your options.
• Office Web Apps: Office 2010 now includes a set of Web-based applications -- online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote -- that work through Windows Live and/or with SharePoint. (Check out the InfoWorld Test Center's review of Office Web Apps [7].) Outlook Web App (a new name but not a new feature) continues to be offered through Exchange 2010.
• Protected view: When you open documents, workbooks, presentations, and Outlook attachments that have downloaded from the Internet or fail validation in some way, they open as read-only in the new protected view. This means the application runs in a "sandbox" mode to protect you from malicious code unless you enable editing for the document -- similar to how Excel has handled macro code for several versions.
• More themes: Themes can now be used across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to ensure a consistent look for your various documents. Microsoft has also upped the number of built-in themes from 20 in Office 2007 to 40 in Office 2010.

Word 2010

• Insert a screenshot: Now you don't have to take a screenshot using a tool such as the Windows Snipping Tool and then paste it into your document. Instead, you can use the Insert ribbon and click Screenshot to grab an image you want to insert.
• Crop images to a shape: You can now select an image, go to the Format contextual ribbon, and under the Crop option, choose Crop to Shape.
• New photo-editing options: Word 2010 has a variety of new photo-editing tools that you can find by inserting a picture and selecting it, then going to the Format contextual ribbon and looking at its options, which include Remove Background and Artistic Effects.
• Navigation pane: Locate anything in your document by going to the View ribbon, and under Show, click Navigation Pane (or press Ctrl+F). It's like the document map where you can search for text, graphics, tables, equations, and/or comments, but it's better in that you can drag and drop sections of your document to rearrange it quickly.

Excel 2010

• Sparklines: Chart your data visually in a single cell. Highly configurable and available in Line, Column, or Win/Loss styles, these mini-charts are a great way to show trends in data without manually poring over every number. Locate sparklines in the Insert tab in the Sparklines group. Use autofill to add sparklines to your entire worksheet.
• Slicers: Take the power of PivotTables and narrow down what you see based on a slice of that data, either from the PivotTable itself or from the original data source. Created via the Insert ribbon, slicers let you review your data without having to manipulate the PivotTable.
• 64-bit support: Although all Office 2010 applications support 64-bit Windows, this support especially benefits Excel users because it allows for workbooks larger than 2GB. Do note that there are some issues using the 64-bit version of Office [8]. Office 2010 ships with both the 32- and 64-bit versions; if you're using 64-bit Windows and have trouble with 64-bit Office, you can reinstall Office as a 32-bit app, though you'll lose the 64-bit-specific capabilities.

PowerPoint 2010

• Video editing: PowerPoint 2010 now has the ability to edit embedded video, so you don't have to go to an external video-editing program. The editing tools aren't incredibly capable just yet, but they do allow for trimming the video (found on the Playback contextual ribbon under Editing) and adjusting the brightness, color, and style.
• Broadcast slideshows: Deliver live presentations over the Internet to remote users by using the new Broadcast Slide Show feature. Note: You need a Windows Live ID for this to work.
• Distribute slideshows as video: Now you can convert your presentation into a video that you can upload to a site such as YouTube or distribute easily as a file for others to play.
• Animation painter: This very cool feature lets you take the animation settings of one object and paint them onto another object or selection of multiple objects.
• Sections: This feature allows you to break your slide deck into sections. You can create the sections and move them around, which helps with organization and collaboration quite a bit.
• Transition improvements: The transitions and animations features now each have their own ribbon to work from. There are a ton of new transitions to choose from, and the older transitions look better than ever.

Outlook 2010

• Conversation view: This feature allows you to manage your email correspondence through groupings where you can condense and categorize the emails you receive. This feature can be enabled/disabled through the View ribbon under the Conversations group with a single click. You can even ignore a conversation that perhaps has become boring or irrelevant to you.
• MailTips: Sometimes you need a little help when sending an email. For example, when you are blind-copied on a message, you often don't want to reply-all, as doing so exposes the fact that you were secretly in the loop. In Outlook 2010, if you do reply-all to a message you were blind-copied on, a MailTip appears to let you know you are about to reveal your having been in the loop. This is one example of the many helpful MailTips.
• Social connector: Although not completely baked, this feature is excellent for keeping you connected with your SharePoint 2010 world. Ultimately, the goal is for you to see at-a-glance information about people who are emailing you. The SharePoint connection is strong in that you can view your colleagues' information (you might see a picture of the person, communication history, meetings, attachments, and activity feeds). Downloadable connectors allow you to reach out to social media sites such as Facebook for additional news about the person you've selected.
• Quick steps: Sometimes you have an entire ritual when it comes to handling emails. Quick steps are like little macros that allow you to simplify the tasks. You can use the built-in steps located on the Home ribbon, or you can create your own. Configure these to make your common "rituals" that much easier to perform.
• Cleanup: Sometimes your mailbox is cluttered with redundant messages. Use the new Clean Up option (located on the Home ribbon under the Delete group) to tidy the folder or conversation.

• Microsoft Office 2010, as revealed by the just-released Technical Preview, brings a set of important if incremental improvements to the market-leading office suite. Among them: making the Ribbon the default interface for all Office applications, adding a host of new features to individual applications such as video editing in PowerPoint and improved mail handling in Outlook and introducing a number of Office-wide productivity enhancers, including photo editing tools and a much-improved paste operation.

  

  Missing from the Technical Preview is what will be the most important change to Office in years -- a Web-based version for both enterprises and consumers. Also missing from the preview is access to Office for mobile phones and other mobile clients. Those features will be introduced in later versions of the software; the final version is expected to ship in the first half of 2010.

  This review will concentrate on what is present in the Technical Preview, not what is expected to arrive in future releases.

  Global changes

  Office 2007 introduced the Ribbon, a major change to Office's interface that replaced the old menus and submenus with a graphical system that groups buttons for common tasks together in tabs. But Microsoft didn't go whole hog with it back then; Outlook, among other applications, was not given the full Ribbon treatment.

  The Ribbon takes center stage

  In this version of Office, all applications now share the common Ribbon interface, including Outlook, OneNote and all other Office applications, and SharePoint. Love it or hate it, the Ribbon is here to stay.

  In addition, the Ribbon has been tweaked. The Office button in the upper-left corner of the screen has been redesigned; it's now a small, unobtrusive rectangle rather than a large circle. Microsoft says that many people thought the circle was a branding icon, rather than a functional button that can be clicked on. The button has also been moved down slightly from its previous location at the very top of the screen.

  

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Backstage View

When you click the Office button, it brings up what Microsoft calls Backstage View. Backstage is essentially one-stop shopping for information about documents and common tasks you can perform, such as saving and printing files. It builds on, but goes well beyond, a similar feature in Office 2007. Choosing Print from the menu on the left, for example, lets you preview your document before printing; you can also choose printer settings such as whether to print one-sided or collated, what margins to use, and so on.

In many instances, features in the Backstage View were present in Office 2007, but hard to get at. In Backstage View, they're brought to one location. The Info tab in Backstage is particularly useful, giving you important information about your current file, such as the author and last time it was modified, and letting you review previous versions.

Paste Preview

Backstage View and the presence of the Ribbon in all applications are the most noticeable of the global changes to Office, but there are also other important ones. One of them at first glance appears to be a minor change, but could prove to be one of the biggest productivity enhancers in Office 2010 -- an improvement to the humble copy-and-paste operation.

This simple task has become more difficult to use and confusing over the years because of the many different types of content you can now copy and paste into Office applications, including mixed text and graphics, tables and other complex content. Should you keep text only, for example, and should you keep the original formatting or the destination formatting, and which should be the default? With versions of Office before 2010, you'd make a decision, see the results, undo it and try another option.

In the new version of Office, such trial and error is a thing of the past, thanks to Paste Preview. When you paste in content, you can now preview how it will look depending on your paste choice, making it much less likely that you'll have to undo a paste operation. Hover your mouse over each option, and you'll see the effect that using that option will have on the operation. When you see the option you want, simply make that choice. Paste Preview lets you set a default paste option as well.

Photo editing tools

Also enhanced in Office 2010 are the photo editing tools, accessible via the Ribbon. Select a photo or picture you've placed in a document, and a Format tab will appear with tools for editing images in a variety of ways, including sharpening or softening, changing the contrast and color saturation, cropping, eliminating the background, and adding a variety of "artistic effects."

In Office 2007, the tools available for doing this were rudimentary. You could change the brightness and contrast, for example, but without the same degree of control and visual feedback, and you couldn't remove backgrounds or add other effects.

Communications, 64-bit version

Microsoft has also strengthened the links between Office and various Microsoft communication server products. If you use Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 with Office 2010, you'll be able to see the availability status of other people with whom you work and ways to contact them, such as e-mail and instant messaging. SharePoint is even more intimately tied to Office, and lets people collaborate on Office documents.

One final overall note: Office is now available in a 64-bit version as well.

A look at the new Outlook

If you live in e-mail (and who doesn't?), you'll most likely be pleased with the new version of Outlook, which adds a variety of features designed to help solve the most common productivity problem -- e-mail overload.

And, as noted above, the Outlook interface has changed radically, with the addition of the full-blown Ribbon. This puts most functions within easy reach -- functions that previously you might have had to navigate through several sets of menus to find. Ribbon-haters will not be pleased, although the rest of us will welcome it. Apart from the addition of the Ribbon, Outlook's overall interface remains the same, with the same paned layout.

Faster mail handling

One of the most useful new features is called Quick Steps, which speeds up mail handling considerably. Right-click on a message, and you can choose from a variety of actions to take on it -- moving the message to a specific folder, forwarding it to your manager, setting up a team meeting with its recipients, sending e-mail to an entire team and so on.

You can easily add new items to the Quick Steps menu by choosing from a set of predefined Quick Steps or by creating your own using a wizard-like interface. You can also delete existing items or edit the items.

Better message threading

This new version of Outlook also tackles one of Outlook's perennial problems -- how poorly it follows threads of messages. In previous versions, the interface for doing this was confusing, so much so that most people I know, including me, rarely used it.

In this version, following a thread is exceedingly easy. Right-click on an e-mail and select Find Related --> Messages in this Conversation, and you'll see a view of all messages in the conversation that can easily be followed, collapsed or expanded. You can also choose to arrange all your mail by conversations, using the Conversation View. The ability to follow threads may seem a small thing, but it's one of those small touches added in this version of Office that should pay big dividends in increased productivity.

There's a related feature that helps cut down on e-mail clutter -- the ability to "clean up" a conversation. When you do this, you delete all of the unnecessary quoted and previous text in long e-mail threads; only unduplicated versions remain. However, once you do that, all of the quoted and previous text and e-mails are actually deleted, not just hidden, so use this feature carefully. It would be more useful if you were given the option of hiding the text, not completely deleting it.

Also of note

Microsoft also says that Outlook now includes Mail Tips that warn you against sending out e-mails that you perhaps shouldn't send. So, for example, if you're sending a message to too large a group so that it seems as if its spam, or if you're sending mail to someone who is out of the office, or if you're sending an e-mail to external parties and doing so might compromise confidential information, you'll be warned. It works only with Exchange, so I could not test this feature.

There's one thing that didn't change in this version of Outlook that many people wish had -- the exclusive use of Word as your e-mail text editor. Before Outlook 2007, you had the choice of using Word or the Internet Explorer rendering engine for creating and displaying e-mails composed in HTML. In Outlook 2007, it became all Word all the time, and in Outlook 2010 that remains unchanged. Some people complain that Word doesn't handle HTML rendering as well as IE.

One important feature that this version of Outlook doesn't have that it should is integration with social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. There is, however, a free, third-party Outlook 2003/2007 add-in called Xobni that grabs information from those sites about people with whom you correspond, so that you can get a great deal of information about people with whom you're communicating, right within Outlook. A Xobni representative said the add-on will be updated to work with Outlook 2010 by the time it ships next year. Don't be surprised if Microsoft adds a feature like this in a later version of Outlook.

Minor, but useful, changes to Word

Word hasn't received nearly as significant changes as has Outlook. But there are some tweaks.

Search has gotten a nice boost with a set of features that let you search charts, tables, footnotes and other content. The search interface has changed as well. It now opens as a left-hand pane, with options for narrowing the search. It also displays a navigable map of thumbnails of your document.

Those who like to pretty up documents will be pleased by a few new additions. You can now add special effects such as bevel, glow, reflect and shadow to text. There's also support for more sophisticated typography, such as using ligatures and small caps.

Also new is a tool that lets you take screenshots and insert them into Word documents. From the Insert tab, select Screenshot, and you'll see a list of screenshots you've already taken, even if they've been taken with a different program. You can then insert any of them into Word. In addition, you can select the Screen Clipping option, which allows you to take a screenshot anywhere in Windows and insert it into your document.

Document sharing has also been enhanced, with multiple people able to work on a document simultaneously online, although I was not able to test that feature. There are other, smaller enhancements as well. But overall, Word 2010 isn't much different from Word 2007.

Not much new in Excel

Excel hasn't been touched as much as the other major applications in Office 2010, but there have been some useful additions. The most important is called "Sparklines" -- small cell-sized charts that you can embed in a worksheet next to data to get a quick visual representation of the data. For example, if you had a worksheet that tracked the performance of several dozen stocks, you could create a Sparkline for each stock that graphed its performance over time, in a very compact way.

Conditional formatting -- the ability to apply a format to a range of cells, and then have the formatting change according to the value of the cell or formula -- has been improved as well, including the addition of more styles and icons.

As with other Office 2010 applications, Excel has new tools for sharing data with other people, including multiple people working on a document at a time.

For businesses, Microsoft is touting a Project Gemini add-on for Excel 2010 that can handle very large amounts of data -- even worksheets that include hundreds of millions of rows. It will ship as part of SQL Server 2008 R2 in the first half of 2010; a community technology preview will be available in the second half of 2009

PowerPoint enters the video age

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth at least ten thousand, but up until now PowerPoint's video features have been rudimentary at best. PowerPoint 2010 introduces a slew of enhanced video features, although in the Technical Preview not all were working properly.

Key among the new features is a set of basic video editing tools built directly into PowerPoint. They're not as powerful as full-blown video editing software but work well for common tasks such as trimming and compressing videos and adding fade-ins and fade-outs. Highlight a video you've embedded in a presentation, and the tools appear in the Ribbon.

Also useful is a set of video controls you can use during the presentation to pause, rewind, fast-forward and so on -- something that the previous version of PowerPoint did not have.

One issue with video, though, is that PowerPoint does not play a wide variety of formats. It plays Audio Video Interleave (.avi) files as well as Windows Media (.wmv) files, but many other video formats require the installation of third-party codecs or add-in applications.

New and very useful is the ability to embed videos from online video-sharing sites such as YouTube. To embed the video, you go to the site, find the code for embedding the video you want (the code is prominently displayed on most sites, including YouTube), and then paste it into PowerPoint. Theoretically, the video will play as part of your presentation, although you'll need an Internet connection to do so because the video will play from the original site, not from your PC.

I had serious problems with this feature. I could not get PowerPoint to play any videos from the Microsoft Showcase site, MSN Video or YouTube. When I tried to embed the video, I received an error message. However, in YouTube when I deselected the "Include related videos" option for creating the embed code and then pasted the results in to PowerPoint, PowerPoint accepted the video and played it in the slide show -- once. When I tried to play it a second time, it didn't work. Presumably, this feature will be fixed in subsequent releases.

In addition to video features, animations have been significantly improved in PowerPoint 2010. There are now far more animations to choose from, and it's easier to use them via the Ribbon.

You can also more easily edit your animations with a custom animation feature. And there's a nifty "Animation Painter" that lets you take any animation that you've selected or created, and apply that animation across multiple slides, without having to do it manually for each slide.

As with Word, you can add screenshots to presentations with the new screenshot tool. There are some other nice additions, including new slide transitions and additional SmartArt graphics and themes, but the basics of PowerPoint remain the same.

Highlights from other apps

The Microsoft Office family comprises more than Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, even if the other members of the family are not as well known. We won't cover every change to every family member, only the most important ones.

The desktop publishing app Microsoft Publisher can now handle type in a more sophisticated way, with the same tools given to Microsoft Word for handling ligatures, small caps and other kinds of type. Templates can be more easily edited, and they can be shared with others from directly within Publisher.

Microsoft also hopes that with this version of Office, OneNote -- an application that keeps track of notes and other data in multiple formats -- will finally come into its own. I've been a OneNote user for several years, and believe that it's one of the great underused Office applications. OneNote users will be pleased that it's been powered up in some important ways.

The new Side Notes feature lets you write a note while using another Office application, and have that note automatically saved in OneNote. It's also now easier to capture information and copy it to OneNote, and navigation through notebooks has been improved. Searching for information in OneNote, which previously was not particularly useful, has been augmented as well: You can now specify whether to search on a page or in a section, section group, individual notebook or all notebooks.