Microsoft Office 2010

With Office 2007 Microsoft made the brave decision to throw away the old interface of menus and introduce the Ribbon instead. While the new interface was admittedly a little hard to get used to, as the options weren’t where you remembered them, it started to make sense after a while and was very simple to use, bar a few complaints.

With Office 2010 just released, we wanted to find out if Microsoft had ironed out the last few problems, making this a must-have upgrade (in the same way Windows 7 improved on Vista). Over the next few pages we’ll look at the shared features of each version of Office, and go into more detail on the key applications of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. You can find out which products are included in each version of Office 2010 over on Microsoft’s website.

Tie a ribbon

The main change between Office 2010 and Office 2007 is that the Ribbon is now fully customisable. In 2007 you were stuck with the default layout and couldn’t do anything about it. In 2010 it’s as simple as right-clicking and selecting Customize Ribbon. You’ve then got a simple list of commands that you can add into existing Tabs and Groups, plus you can create your own custom Ribbon entries. It’s a little thing, but one that makes Office much easier to use, particularly for people that are used to the old menu systems.

Another big new addition is the revamping of the venerable File menu. The menu, now a tab over the Ribbon, has been changed to a full screen interface, with links to all the tasks you’d expect. This larger interface is called Backstage View, and deals with creating, saving, printing and sending files. The extra space means you don’t need extra windows popping up; for example, press Print and Backstage shows all the key printing options and a big print preview in one place.

One other useful feature that runs across the whole suite is improved copy and paste. Right-click on a document and choose paste and you can then switch between different paste options – letting you instantly choose to keep the original formatting, blend formatting between the documents or paste text-only – as you mouse across these the document gives you an instant live preview of the results.

Share and share alike

The other key cross-application feature is better sharing of documents using co-authoring and the web apps. In the same way as you can have multiple people working on a document in Google Docs, co-authoring lets multiple people share work on office documents. Strictly speaking, you don’t need Office 2010 for this, but the new applications have options built into them to upload files to the necessary online shared space.

Users can upload files to Sky Drive or use Microsoft Office Live (currently in beta and it only supports Internet Explorer and Firefox, but not Chrome). Using Sky Drive we weren’t overly impressed. For starters, saving files online proved to be very slow from our work computer, and the sharing options aren’t that easy to use: restrictions are based on folders rather than files, making security harder to apply.

In addition, there are a lot of irritating features. Uploading a file in Excel 97-2003 format (.xls) rather than the new .xlsx format meant that when we tried to open the file in Excel web app we got an error message telling us that the file was in the wrong format. We then had a problem that uploading a file in the correct format told us that the file was ‘locked for editing by another user’. To view the file online we had to close down our local copy of Excel.

Office Live Workspaces should bring more flexibility to sharing documents, as it operates more like Google Docs. However, the current beta version doesn’t support web apps. As it stands sharing files and editing online is far from ideal and Google Docs is currently the better application.

Word 2010

Word is the application that’s arguably had the least done to it, as it already pretty much did everything anyone needed. There are some new tools to make working with pictures easier, allowing you to adjust colour saturation and temperature, plus image cropping and correction.

While these tools make importing images a little easier, they’re far from essential as any half-decent photo editor can do the same. They are available, however, in practically every application, so you don’t need to open another application to make basic changes to images.

We like the new Find tool. This opens up a side-bar of results, giving you a short cutting of the surrounding text for each result. This makes it very quick to skip to the result that you want. It’s also helpful that your search text is highlighted in the body, so any reference can quickly be spotted on the page.

One key new feature helps you recover documents when you accidentally clicked the No button when you were asked if you wanted to save them. This feature keeps the last AutoSave for any document that hasn’t been manually saved and given a filename. However, it only works after a document has been AutoSaved, which by default is every ten minutes. In other words, close a document down without saving before 10 minutes is up and your file’s as good as gone forever. Thankfully , it’s easy enough to reduce the time between AutoSaves.

Unsaved documents can be accessed by clicking the Recover Unsaved Documents button in the Recent files menu. With a faster AutoSave time set, this feature could well prove invaluable.

Excel 2010

Many of the improvements to other Office programs have focussed either on more efficient working or more polished-looking content. There’s some of this in Excel 2010 too, but there are also interesting new number-crunching and data-analysis features. Probably the one we liked best was the Slicer.

This is a simple tool for quickly selecting and displaying information in a Pivot table. In our screenshot, for instance, we’ve used the Slicer to quickly home in on just two cells in a table of 442 cells: allowing us to make a direct and meaningful comparison in seconds.

Usefully, Microsoft has also added a search function to Pivot tables, making it even easier to find a single variable. Another exciting new feature, for business users, is PowerPivot, a free download that allows you to import many millions of rows of data from sources as varied other Excel workbooks, web sources and SQL databases.

As with the rest of the suite, Excel 2010 has also been improved in order to make it easier to share and collaborate online. The web-based co-authoring tool allows you to collaborate on files that have been saved to Windows Live SkyDrive. And with the Accessibility Checker you can make sure that the files you create will be readable for as wide and audience as possible.

Microsoft has also added the equation tool (for showing mathematical equations) previously only available in Word 2007, to this version of Excel. Given that working with numbers is Excel’s primary function, it was odd not to have done this in the first place.

PowerPoint 2010

As with so many of Office 2010’s programs, PowerPoint is playing catch-up with online-based apps. Presentation services such as Prezi, with their panning and zooming graphics, made previous versions of PowerPoint look staid and dull. Microsoft has hit back with new features designed to add pizazz to your presentations.

You can add and edit both video and audio content to your slide. Editing features include colour and contrast correction, some visual effects and the ability to insert bookmarks and control how the media plays back within your presentation. It’s all fairly simple, but enough, if used wisely, to add a bit of extra slickness to your pitch. You can even use a video as the background for a slide, though this can be a bit distracting. Also new is support for Apple’s Quicktime video format, which can be embedded and edited just like other common video formats.

In much the same vein, Microsoft has added some fancy new slide transitions. Instead of simply fading from one slide to another, each successive slide can now sear itself into your retina with a flash or loom suddenly out the screen at you. It certainly got our attention.

Don’t forget that the PC you run the slideshow on must also have PowerPoint 2010 installed for the new effects to work. Run your slides even on PowerPoint 2007, and your videos will appear as static images and all the new flashy transitions will be replaced by old ones. So make sure you take your own laptop with you when you go to see clients.

Improvements to the program’s working environment include the ability, supposedly, to ‘broadcast’ presentations through the free WindowsLive service. We say supposedly because, like so many of Office 2010’s social features, it doesn’t appear to be up and running yet. Other very welcome improvements are the ability to have two presentations open side-by-side (long overdue) and to easily print your slide notes.

Outlook 2010

Three years after most Office programs, Outlook finally has the Ribbon. So the program’s tools and features can all be found on a range of tabs, rather than hidden behind menus. It might not sound like much, but it makes it a lot easier to find what you’re looking for. Like most of the other programs in Office 2010, Outlook also has the new picture editing tools, BackStage view and paste with live preview.

There are also plenty of changes specific to Outlook. There’s a new conversation view, which groups emails together in threads (like Google’s Wave). Coupled with the cleanup tools, which delete mails containing duplicate information, this is actually surprisingly handy.

There’s also the new social network connector. This plugs Outlook into your social networks, so you can see status updates from within Outlook and download contacts from your networks to your Outlook address book. It’s a nice idea, but there’s only support for LinkedIn and MySpace at present, with Facebook and Twitter conspicuously missing. If you use Outlook with a POP3 or IMAP mail account, besides QuickSteps (new shortcuts on the Ribbon), that’s probably about all the changes you’ll notice.

For Exchange Users there are a few extras. Best of all, is the team calendar. Anyone who’s listed in Active Directory as being in your team, you can see and (assuming the right permissions) modify their calendars at a single click. There’s also a new calendar preview function. When someone sends you a meeting request, the relevant portion of your calendar is previewed in the mail. So you can quickly see whether you’re free. The room finder we were less impressed with – it didn’t seem to offer that much of an advantage over the All Rooms button in Exchange 2007.

OneNote 2010
OneNote is Office’s little used information gathering and casual work coloration tool. Some of the most interesting changes here are in the ways it works with other data stores. You can now add notes straight from Internet Explorer, though only from the Tools menu, with this feature crying out for a plug-in.

You can dock OneNote permanently to side of your desktop, even if it rather irritatingly refuses to resize content to its narrow window size. And you’ll soon be able to create online notebooks using the OneNote web app, just like you can with competitor Evernote.

At least, Microsoft says you’ll be able to do that. It hasn’t actually managed to make the feature available at the time of launch. Good ideas all, but their application could have done with a bit more polish.

Conclusion

Not covered here in detail are Publisher and Access, the key extra features you get with the, far more expensive, Professional Edition of Office 2010. Publisher still doesn’t live up to stand-alone DTP packages, while Access (a database management system) isn’t of widespread interest to most home and small business users. If you need to build a database for your company, then you might want to consider buying this edition, but there’s nothing here for anyone else.

Office 2010 isn’t the massive overhaul that the 2007 edition was. However, there are numerous small improvements. If you use multiple Microsoft Office applications every day, for either personal or business reasons, then we feel it’s a worthwhile upgrade for Office 2007 owners – and an essential for Office 2003 users. If you only use the most basic aspects of Office applications, or use them irregularly, then try the free OpenOffice or Googledocs first – as these should cover all your needs, and the latter’s simplicity of use online betters Microsoft’s at present.