Microsoft Office 2010 is the next generation in the ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite. Since its original release in 1981 with only Word, it has grown into a powerful collection of industry-standard applications. With the Office 2007 release (version 12), Microsoft introduced the popular Ribbon interface, which has continued into both the Windows API and, not surprisingly, Office 2010. The most notable features released in the entire suite (2010) are Backstage, a re-vamped full-screen file menu replacing the Office Button, and the introduction of free, web-based, lightweight versions of selected programs in the suite called Web Apps. In this post, we will see the major new features coming out in Office 2010.

The Office Suite

There are several key changes made to the entire Office suite, all of them simply excellent. By popular demand it is now possible to completely customize the Ribbon, to add new tabs, groups and buttons, possibly even to assign those buttons to user-defined macros. It has ditched the Office Orb it had in 2007 and brought back a bigger and badder file menu, called Backstage. With an insane Print tab, Backstage is simply awesome. You can now insert screenshots of specific windows right from the Ribbon, and can remove the background on those images if desired. There are new Smart Art designs, new shapes, new everything – there is even a new animated splash screen for all the Office products. Now available in both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) editions, it now takes advantage of all the power your processor has. It is expected that all of the programs in the suite will take advantage of Windows 7 Jumplists, but it is confirmed only in Outlook 2010.

But the honor of the greatest improvement in the suite, which may possibly redeem Microsoft from its reputation as Mi¢ro$oft… possibly – is the introduction of the Office Web Apps, lightweight versions of the popular Office programs that run right in the browser. They are not as powerful as their desktop counterparts, but for students and users on the go, they are simply perfect. And best of all, they’re free. That’s right – free. This is a new high for Microsoft, and we are proud of them. Or at least I am…

The Office suite has also added better tools for media editing, which will be explained in the next section.

Word

Possibly the most useful feature added to Word is the ability to truly edit images. Features include recoloring, color corrections, background removal, and various artistic effects. The Picture Layout gallery has also been improved, and a few more picture effects have been added. Another major addition, called Text Effects, is now replacing the classic WordArt. The effects include a variety of accents, shadows, reflections, and glows – all with Live Preview, introduced in Office 2007. In keeping with Microsoft’s ‘anti-undo’ goal for its suite, Live Preview has also been added to the Paste Options contextual menu, which was not available in previous versions.

Also added was another pane that includes the Document Map, Page Thumbnails, and now a more enhanced Find function. It is also possible to sort by content from this pane – to find all the graphics, tables, equations, etc. in the document.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint also was graced with several upgrades from the 2007 version. The most notable change was the ability to truly edit video. Similar to Movie Maker, PowerPoint 2010 has the ability to recolor entire videos, trim videos, add bookmarks to frames, brightness/contrast manipulation, apply familiar themes like the ones available for images, and can trim video borders to shapes. Honestly, however, it has a long way to go quality-wise. When adding a complex theme such as a 3D perspective playback is choppy, but this may be due to the graphics card I’m using (nVidia 9600 GT 1GB). It is fairly fast on simpler effects though. Supported video formats include AVI, WMV, and MOV.

Another truly wonderful feature is the ability to record slideshows to videos. Previously only officially available through CamStudio, the awesomeness is now available natively in PowerPoint, with no third party applications. Also available in PowerPoint 2010 is Presentation Broadcasting, which allows PowerPoint 2010 users to broadcast their slideshows over the Internet. The broadcasts are password-protected. There are also new animations, slide transitions, and now media compression for space-sensitive saving.

Excel

As of yet, I could not find anything exceptional in Excel 2010, but there are new in-cell graphs called Spark Lines, which are an extension of the Conditional Formatting available in Excel 2007. Another useful feature is Slicer, which gives the user a run-down of table data. It is now also able to add filters to Pivot Charts, instead of viewing everything at the same time. I may be adding more to this topic as time goes on, so check back often.

Outlook

Outlook 2010 has taken a leap in communications technology. Granted, it’s a leap almost five years overdue, but it’s a leap nonetheless. It now supports conversational threads, that is to say it tracks replies and forwards that were sent to you or by you. It is confirmed that Outlook 2010 now takes advantage of a Windows 7 feature called Jump Lists, short contextual menus for common actions right on the superbar (Windows 7 taskbar). As for its mobile counterpart, the 2010 release of Outlook will try to be more static across the platforms, hopefully allowing for a more seamless interchange between environments.

OneNote

Since its release in 2003, OneNote has come a long way. OneNote is perfect for anyone who needs to get organized quickly, and needs to be able to reorganize on a whim. The most drastic visual change from 2007 is the introduction of the Ribbon interface into OneNote, but the fun doesn’t stop there.

OneNote now introduces Dock View into the mix, and this has implications across the board, or rather the desktop… When in Dock View, OneNote 2010 will record what other windows is active when you begin taking notes in it, and will link that window to the notes. For example, if I was making notes on a document in Word that I needed to study, OneNote would record what document was open at the time of note taking and would link the document to the note. In PowerPoint, OneNote would even take note of what slide you were on. In Internet Explorer (maybe even other browsers), it would record what the URL was. No more random notes with unintelligible snippets of profound ideas taken out of context!

Several other small, time-saving features are out with the beta.

• Specific section targets when sending to OneNote
• Improved notebook searching (text or audio).
• In a shared notebook, OneNote will highlight the information you haven’t read yet.
• OneNote will also translate a foreign word for you by hovering over it with the mouse.
• Finally has decent contextual (right-click) formatting.
• Drag-and-drop page ordering and ranks (now three-tier).

Well, that’s about it for now. I will update this post as I discover new features, bugs, or anything else of significant interest. Until then, download the beta here and see for yourself how awesomely awesome the next version of Microsoft Office Suite 2010. The retail version is expected to be released in the first half of 2010.

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