Office 2010 Technical Preview: a first look

Simon Bisson ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 13 Jul 2009

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Microsoft, like Apple, has one customer. Apple's is Steve Jobs, while Microsoft's is the Microsoft Corporation — all 70,000 or so of it. Once you realise this, it explains much of the thinking behind Office 2010. It's a suite of tools that primarily addresses Microsoft's own organisational problems — and we're lucky that most of those problems are the same as for any other business, from the smallest to the largest.

Codenamed 'Office 14' (Microsoft skipped neatly over the unlucky number 13), Office 2010 has been some time in the making prior to this public Technical Preview. There have been some snippets of information over the last year or so (among them its final name) but Microsoft has managed to achieve almost Apple-like levels of secrecy. One fact that's been known for a while is that this is the first 64-bit version of Office, part of Microsoft's transition to the current generation of processor architectures.

Office 2010 cross-application features
The latest iteration of its flagship productivity suite, Office 2010 is designed to be a companion to Windows 7, and its gently translucent menu bars and frames make it, at the very least, the most aesthetic Office yet. Even in full screen you'll get translucent borders — a big step away from Office 2007's slabs of colour.

The Office Ribbon is everywhere, and has evolved since its initial appearance in Office 2007. Microsoft has done a lot of work to the Ribbon UI since then, and the new look is very similar to that included with the bundled applications in Windows 7. The biggest change to the ribbon is the new Office Backstage, which pops up when you click on the application icon. It's here you'll get quick access to key functions such as saving, printing and preferences. It's the old File and Print menu rethought, building on the work done in Office 2007 and adding elements of Windows 7's jump lists.

Office Backstage pops up when you click the Ribbon's application icon. As well as handling general document-related tasks, it's where application-specific housekeeping is done: in the case of Outlook above, you get account configuration tools.

One feature that's made its way across the Office suite is Paste Preview, which lets you see just what a document will look like when you paste in content from elsewhere. You can preview different formatting options, and choose the one you want. To simplify the process, the entire formatting context menu fades away apart from the available paste options, so it won't hide your documents.

Microsoft has also added new photo-editing tools to many of the Office applications. All you need to do is insert an image and, once you've selected it, a new Picture Tools tab appears in the ribbon. This gives you a set of image-editing tools — including filters and effects. There's a lot in here, and although it's not Photoshop, it's certainly more than enough for most business graphics. Features like Background Removal can help blend images into your documents and presentations; and if you're using Word, additional caption tools make it easier to add text to your pictures.

Office 2010's new image editing tools work across the entire suite — although you'll get different features with different applications. Word 2010's implementation is one of the most complete, with a range of artistic effects that can quickly spice up even the most pedestrian of pictures.

Word 2010 and Publisher 2010 gain new typography features, with improved ligatures, true small caps (finally), as well as alternate text styles and numerals. Publisher comes with a new font, Gabriola, which adds what Microsoft is calling Stylistic Sets — an easy way of accessing alternate text styles without changing fonts or resorting to complex typographical effects. You won't find these in all fonts, though.

One thing missing from the Technical Preview are the online Office applications demonstrated last year at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference. These are due later in the summer, barring a sudden appearance at this week's Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. Certainly someone has taken over the www.office.com domain — and the site currently there will be gone by the end of July. It's certainly the logical name for a site hosting online Office applications...

Outlook 2010
The most obvious change to Outlook 2010 is the arrival of the Ribbon. There are four default tabs: Home, Send/Receive, Folder and View, with most common commands in the Home tab. A new Quick Steps section bundles up common actions (or at least what Microsoft thinks are common actions). Quick Steps are customisable, so you can quickly remove those you don't need and replace them with the commands you do use. One that's likely to stay is Meeting Reply, which quickly converts an email into a meeting request, with the message in the meeting body, inviting all the message recipients.

Microsoft has finally sorted out Outlook's conversation view in Outlook 2010 — and makes it the default for all folders. It's not perfect (threading is handled by message subject), but it does work, and the visual cues work well. You can also condense a thread, removing redundant messages. Outlook keeps those with all the thread content, saving space on servers and making it easier to read and search your messages.

The cosmetic changes are welcome, but the biggest change of all is under the surface. Outlook 2010 can now support more than one Exchange account. If you've ever had to switch between Exchange profiles to get a small piece of work done, you'll know just how big a change this is — and just how much time it'll save. If you're administering Exchange you'll certainly find it a time saver, as you can now manage Exchange's spam quarantine mailbox without leaving your usual Outlook window.

Some of the more useful features, at least to anyone using Outlook in a large business, are the new MailTips. Outlook will now warn you if you're about to send email to someone out of the office, to a large distribution list (hopefully reducing the amount of unwanted mail in peoples' inboxes), or to someone outside of the local directory. The last should help reduce data leaks, reminding users of when they're crossing company boundaries. This isn't a security tool, but just a reminder, so don't make it your only DLP feature. You'll need an Exchange 2010 server to get the most from MailTips.

Another new feature is the Recipients pane, which adds what Microsoft is calling 'social networking', although that's something of a stretch if you're already using tools like Xobni. The pane will bring in information about the people on a distribution list, using information from the Microsoft communications stack — SharePoint, Office Communicator and Active Directory. It won't be available if you're not using all these tools. Acrobat). You can also use it to search, edit and reorganise the document from here, giving you an editable document outline. If you drag a section around in the pane, it will move in the document. You can also add new sections, with the headings you type in the navigation pane appearing as section headings in your document.

The new calendar schedule view gives you a slice across the working day for several calendars — and makes it easy to see who's free and when, if you're trying to schedule meetings for a team. Outlook 2010 uses this as the basis for its new Calendar Groups.

There have also been changes to Outlook's calendars, with the introduction of Calendar Groups. It's easy to make a Calendar Group for a distribution list, and this lets you bring together the calendars of everyone on a team — helping you quickly decide when to have meetings. Instead of the overlay view introduced with Outlook 2007, Calendar Groups stacks the various calendars, so you can see where meetings — and free time — coincide. This takes advantage of the new Schedule view, which gives you a horizontal slice through several calendars.

Search is important in any mail client, and Outlook 2010 builds on the search tools added with Outlook 2007. The improved search box dynamically suggests advanced search syntax, while the new search tab in the ribbon helps refine scope, as well as helping you choose specific search types.

Word 2010
Microsoft has thought a lot about document design in Office 2010, and Word 2010 gets plenty of improved text features. You'll be able to produce DTP-quality documents with the new typography features — these include ligatures, small caps and alternative character and number styles. The familiar old WordArt gets a reworking, and a new name. Text Effects let you use the same powerful glow, reflection and shadow effects that you can already use with your pictures.

Word 2010's search has had a makeover. A word wheel lets you search inside a document, with matches shown as relevant section headings, as thumbnail previews or as excerpts — and, of course, matches are highlighted in the document text. Search now also covers graphics, tables, charts and footnotes.

What used to be a tool for exploring document outlines is now a key Word 2010 feature. You use the navigation pane to explore documents, seeing the structure and searching for content. You can also use it to quickly add new sections or rearrange an existing document structure.

Another big change is the new Navigation Pane. Replacing the Document Map, it lets you browse your document by sections and headings or by page thumbnails (much like Adobe's

Excel 2010
Microsoft has slowly been turning Excel into a business intelligence tool. All the old spreadsheet functions are there, but with each recent version more and more business intelligence tools have found their way into Excel. Office 2010 continues the trend, with Excel 2010 gaining new visualisation and query features.

Design guru Edward Tufte coined the name 'sparklines' for tiny, inline graphics that add context to the numbers and data around them. Excel 2010's sparklines add cell-sized charts to your worksheets. You can quickly add sparklines to a table to show trends, and like most Excel cell content, they can be painted across rows and columns to quickly add graphical information to an entire spreadsheet of data. Sparklines make it easy to deliver complex information in dashboards and scorecards, simplifying reporting without requiring large charts that distract from the data they're accompanying.

Straight out of Tufte, 'sparklines' are in-cell graphs that add a spot of visualisation to tables full of numbers, quickly showing trends. You can use line or bar charts to quickly enhance your spreadsheets — and as they're inside standard cells, you can paint them along rows and columns just like formulae and formatting.

Another useful feature, Slicers, make it easier to work with pivot tables. Standard Excel filters can be unwieldy, making it hard to show just what you're filtering on. Slicers add visual filtering elements to your tables so you can see what you're filtering on — and make exploring large amounts of data interactive. You can publish a worksheet with slicers, and leave it to users to find the information hidden in the mass of data without having to write their own queries. New search tools let you search the content of pivot tables, no matter how big they are.

Under the covers Microsoft has added features that let you work with digital ink (so there's still support for Tablet PCs). The company has also improved the accuracy of some of its key financial and statistical functions. With Excel now a key business tool, it's important that it handles statistical functions correctly — something it hasn't been too good at in the past. We'll need to wait for expert opinion to see just how the new functions shape up — but any improvement will be a significant step forward.

 

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