We’ve seen a few things about Office 2010 over the year, and with the recent announcement that you can grab the Office 2010 Beta from Technet/MSDN, and shortly afterwards the general public, we couldn’t wait to get our hands on the latest update to the well known Microsoft Office branch. We do realise that this is just a beta and that the full version will be coming to us in the near future, but we still couldn’t wait to test it out.
Upgrading from Office 2007 to the 2010 beta was a breeze thanks to the installer for the beta, however it took a loooooooong time to do it on my relatively fast Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 and 3GB of RAM. The installer appeared to get a colour refresh, with a nice yellow/white tone to match the new, all-yellow Office logo; if you remember, the Office 2007 installer was blue. Entering the key to activate Office was a bit more difficult than 2007, however we hope that they add the key input to the installer rather than buried away inside the actual applications.
When first opening the new Office 2010 applications you notice two things. First of all is the nice new opening window, which is actually has a yellow ribbon-like animation that flows around while the application is loading. Second is the Send-a-Smile feedback program for the Office 2010 beta. Whenever you’re using a program, just click either the smile or frown logos in your notification area and it will take a screenshot of your operating environment and has a input field for feedback about the Office applications.
On to the applications. As you may have noticed in the screenshot of the icons above, the Office 2010 Professional Plus suite comes with 10 applications: Access, Excel, InfoPath (Designer and Filler), OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, SharePoint Workspace and Word. I’ll be covering only the base programs in this overview: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
Update: We found some more features in the Office 2010 suite, so we have modified this overview to include them
Interface
When I opened Word I instantly saw that Microsoft have removed the Orb that used to occupy the top left corner, and instead replaced it with a “File” tab that opens a full-windows tab of the same things that are appear when you click the Orb in Office 2007. This File tab does have a few more surprises, it now includes a few more options such as Info, which gives basic info on your document, Share, which replaces the Send and Publish tabs from the Orb, and Recent, which shows recent documents and is the default option when you click “File.” These are the same throughout the Office 2010 applications (click to enlarge images).
Also, you may notice that the interface has much more glass than Office 2007. Instead of the just the top bar being glass/transparent, the whole top of the application is glass and even the unselected tabs are glass, which gives the application a much nicer and moderner look and feel and makes it fit right in with the Windows 7 look. Also, the colour of the File tab is dependant on the application: it’s blue for Word’s blue, orange for PowerPoint’s orange etc.
And just so you get a look and feel of the most used applications, I’ve included a screenshot of Excel too.
Last on our look into the new Office look is Outlook. This is clearly where Microsoft have spent most of their time. The most obvious thing is that Outlook finally has joined the ranks of the other Office applications and has tabs. In Office 2007 it was surprising to see that Outlook kept with the 2003 way with no tabs, but this seems to have been fixed in the beta – Outlook has a much, much nicer interface that is easier to use and it is easy to find things (Outlook 2007 users might disagree though). It is a much needed upgrade to Outlook.
Features
Contrary to what we first thought, there are actually more new features inside the Office 2010 beta than first meets the eye. One of them is the new video editing tools inside PowerPoint. You can now trim videos, add effects to the video and add a preview thumbnail all inside PowerPoint with a nice new video interface. PowerPoint supports AVI, WMV, WMA, MP3, MOV and H.264 codecs out of the box.
Throughout all Office 2010 applications, there is a new paste option that previews the content that you are pasting before you actually paste it, and gives you several options as to what way you want the content pasted. However, it only works if you use the paste option from the right-click context menu, and not Ctrl+V.
We discovered that Word 2010 has some new text effects, including some options previously only used for Word Art such as glow, bevel and shadows. You can also add these effects to tables, lists and others.
PowerPoint has a broadcast feature that allows you to broadcast your slideshow to users around the world, even if they don’t have PowerPoint installed. The slideshow will be displayed in the other user’s web browser rather than in a custom application. You can find the setting under File > Share > Broadcast Slide Show.
Last on our list of new features is the ability to customise the Ribbon, which allows you to switch around tabs, add new ones or modify the existing ones. This is a really cool feature if you find it difficult to find certain options hidden away in the tabs; now you can customise it to however you like. You’ll find this feature under the Options in every Office 2010 application.
We strongly recommend you take a look at the Office 2010 Beta and explore the new features and new interface for yourself. It seems there are quite a few improvements to the suite other than just the interface, some really handy, others you may never use. By the time the full version is released, we hope that Microsoft’s Office 2010 has more features than this beta does and is worth the upgrade more than this version.
