Office 2010: A Review by Paul Thurrott
| Published: May 29, 2010 | Author: Adam Smith |
The following is an excerpt from Paul Thurrott’s ‘Supersite for Windows‘ website. Paul is a well known Microsoft commentator and has written a number of books including Windows 7 Secrets and the upcoming Windows Phone Secrets.
Paul can be heard on TWIT’s Windows Weekly Podcast (subscribe here in iTunes) discussing all of the lastest news in the world of Microsoft.
For a full review of not just Office 2010, but the forthcoming Office Web Apps (a cloud based version of some of the Office programs including Word and Excel) and Office Mobile for Windows Mobile phones go to Paul’s ‘Supersite for Windows’ website.
Update: Pricing is now available on our ‘latest prices‘ page.
An the excerpt of Paul’s review:
What’s new in Office 2010
Looking broadly at the suite of applications that comprises Office 2010, Microsoft has made a number of changes that affect all or many of those applications. The first and most obvious change is that Microsoft has finally implemented the desirable and innovative ribbon user interface across all of the Office applications, whereas in Office 2007 only a subset of applications included this interface, while others used the older and less useful menu and toolbar-based UI.
The Word 2010 ribbon UI.
Simply implementing the ribbon across the various Office applications would have been a big deal. But in Office 2010, the ribbon is better than ever and it benefits from three years of feedback and the resulting improvements. There’s a new color scheme, which is much nicer than the weird soft blue from Office 2007, but the big deal is that the ribbon is now completely customizable. So if you find yourself moving off of, say, the Home tab in Word in order to just access a single command, or a small number of commands on the Review tab, you can customize the ribbon so that those commands are right up front and center. You can create your own ribbon tabs and your own tab groups, and you can even hide tabs you don’t want. Nice!
Office 2010 offers an amazing level of ribbon customization, which puts this UI over the top.
Another huge change in Office 2010 is that the Office button from Office 2007 is gone, replaced by a more logical and obvious File button that works like the old File menu from older Office versions. But instead of opening a traditional File menu, you’re greeted with the new Backstage view, which combines the functions from the old File menu–Open, Save, Print, and so on–with a wide range of useful application-wide options, including sharing options (for saving documents to SkyDrive or SharePoint, publishing a blog post, changing file types, or creating XPS or PDF documents) and traditional application options.
The Backstage view provides a single place for application- and document-specific options.
I wish I could praise the Backstage view further, but like the ribbon in Office 2007, it’s unfinished in Office 2010. Microsoft confirmed to me that it had intended to go much further with Backstage view but simply ran out of time. So what we get in this first version is a strange UI that sometimes occupies the entire application window (hiding the underlying document or other content), whereas clicking on certain options actually closes Backstage view and jarringly opens a floating pop-up window. This is going to change so that all of these items simply render onto the full application window, but not until the next Office version.
Sadly, some Backstage items actually close the UI and open a separate, old-school window.
Most Office 2010 applications now support a handy Paste with Live Preview feature that takes the guesswork out of how content copied from one application will look when pasted into an Office 2010 application. It works via the Paste Options pop-up that debuted in Office 2007, or through the Paste button in the Clipboard tab group in the Home tab. As you move across the various paste options–like Keep Source Formatting, Merge Formatting, and Keep Text Only for textual data–the content will appear in the current document styled appropriately. And as you mouse over each paste option in turn, the content will change to match the effect. When you click one of the options, the content will be pasted in the manner you selected.
Live Paste Preview lets you determine how content will look before you paste it into a document.
Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Publisher pick up some amazing photo editing capabilities in this release, part of a trend in Office 2010 around dramatically better support for rich media. So if you need to work with photos or other images in Office 2010, you’ll get a number of interesting borders, effects, layouts, and styles. You can do things like remove the background, make color corrections, apply artistic effects, and more. It’s all very powerful, but the point here is that it all works in Office, so you don’t need to find, acquire and learn a third party application to make these changes, or switch in and out of Office while you’re working.
Office 2010 picks up some amazing picture editing functionality.
And of course there is the aforementioned 64-bit compatibility. Again, this isn’t something that comes with any particular benefit beyond Excel, but if you do need to work with massive, memory-intensive datasets and gigabyte-sized spreadsheets, Office 2010 can handle it.
Changes in specific Office 2010 applications
Word replaces the old Document Map with a new Navigation pane, which has proven quite useful for the longer documents I create, especially for books. It provides three tabbed views, Headings (where the document is organized by the various sections as denoted by headings), Pages (with miniature thumbnails of each page in the document), and Search Results. That last bit is an exciting change: Finally, the old Find dialog box is gone, and when you search for information in a document, the Find dialog doesn’t cover it up. The search results pane is particularly nice because it lists each instance of your search results, letting you click around and go quickly to each one. This is a wonderful change to Word, and something I’ve been asking for for years.
Word’s new Navigation pane is excellent for navigating through large, complex documents.
Goodbye Find dialog: Word finally searches documents in a more elegant fashion.
Outlook has been significantly reworked in this version and if you use Outlook at all, the changes to this application will be reason enough to upgrade. Outlook picks up the ribbon, of course, something that was sorely missed in Outlook 2007, but it has also been upgraded in other major ways. Key among these changes is the new Conversation View, which is now turned off by default (it was enabled in the beta). It provides a way to bundle all of the messages in an email thread into a single collapsible and expandable entry in the inbox (or other mail folder), helping to de-clutter your email. It also works in tandem with other new Outlook features like Clean Up (remove repeated sections of an email thread) and Ignore Conversation (stop receiving updates to unwanted email threads), giving you further control over email craziness.
My favorite Outlook feature, however, is Quick Steps. This is essentially a way to perform multiple actions on an email message using a single click, and you can modify the existing Quick Steps, or create your own, fairly easily. For example, Outlook comes with Quick Steps like Move To, Team Email, Reply and Delete, and others. And I’ve created my own Quick Step, called Archive It, which marks the current email as read and moves it to an Archived folder on the server. There is one major limitation to Quick Steps, however, and I’m surprised no one else has latched onto this yet: Their email accounts specific if what you want to do (as I do with “Archive It”) is move messages to a specific server folder. So if you are managing multiple email accounts in Outlook 2010, you may have to duplicate some Quick Steps buttons, even if the accounts all use the same server folder structure.
Quick Steps let you perform multiple actions to an email message using a single click.
Outlook 2010 supports multiple Exchange accounts–a common request–MailTips for helping to ensure that certain impertinent emails aren’t sent by mistake (this one requires Exchange 2010) and a new Social Connector that lets you view and contribute to social network services like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Windows Live, all from the familiar and always-open Outlook interface.
Excel picks up some interesting new visualizations in this release, including sparklines, which are essentially single-cell mini graphs. They’re particularly good for showing trends graphically. Excel 2010 also supports conditional, rules-based cell formatting. This formatting is graphical, too, so you can very easily highlight negative values or other information using gradient background fills, borders, data bars, or icons. The biggest change in Excel, however, may be the addition of interactivity to PivotCharts, which lets you filter the information used to create charts in real-time.
PowerPoint gains stunning video capabilities in this release, making the application a viable video editing package in addition to its other skills. The depth of this functionality is astonishing, and if you’re working with video at all, you’ll appreciate that, as with the photo and pictures capabilities mentioned above, it can all happen directly in Office, without having to buy, learn and use a third party solution. And this is full-featured video editing, folks: You can trim video, add effects, change the poster frame (the image that represents the video when it’s not playing), play video in the background, compress the video, and more. And for all you people using PowerPoint to share photos with others (you know you’re out there), PowerPoint can now export to video, so you can turn a PowerPoint-based photo slideshow into a high-quality video that can be shared via YouTube or wherever. This is powerful, exciting stuff.
PowerPoint’s video editing features are exceptional.
Even better is a new feature called PowerPoint Broadcast that should be of interest to all PowerPoint jockeys: Now you can broadcast your presentations over the web to remote viewers, for free, using a Windows Live (or, within a corporation, with SharePoint).
For you OneNote fans out there, you’re about to be joined by a much bigger crowd of people: Microsoft expects OneNote to join the ranks of Word and Excel atop the Office usage chart, and to make that happen, it’s ensured that OneNote now has as much visibility as possible. So it’s available in every single mainstream Office edition (i.e. not Starter) and is one of only four Office applications that have been ported to the web as part of Office Web Apps. As such, OneNote users can now share notebooks via the web, and that should prove hugely popular with school classes and other groups.
