We take a first look at Office 2010

Review Revamped Office targets Google

After the huge overhaul that was Office 2007, it was difficult to see where Microsoft could really go next. If you’d asked us three years ago, our money would have been on tinkering changes to the way the suite worked with backend tools such as SharePoint.

We were half right, most the changes are of the fine-tuning sort. But to our surprise, there’s a lot more to the new suite than just backend bodges. Clearly spurred into action by the rise of social media and competition from Google, Microsoft has actually managed to deliver some nifty – if understated – new features.  

Just get the job done 
Productivity software should be as close to invisible as possible. The more time you spend wondering where to find the right tool or menu option, the less productive you’re actually being. That’s why Office 2007 ditched menus, with their hundreds of options, in favour of browser-style tabs.

Office 2010 takes this approach even further. In all the suite’s applications, the BackStage tab can be found on the far left of the interface – to the left of the default Home tab. It contains all the admin and production tools - for instance the tools that allow you to prepare a document for publication - that used to be found on the File menu. Finding what you need on the Backstage tab is much easier than it was on the Office Button, which won’t be missed.  

Other improvements across the suite include an improved Ribbon. You can now create and customise your own tabs, allowing you to put all your most frequently-used tools in one place. The context menu includes a preview function, so you can see what pasted text will look like with and without its formatting – then choose which you prefer. And an improved auto-save version gives you access to the last five auto-saved versions of your document. All the Office programs now include native support for PDF documents too: no more separate plugins to download and install.

Moving from the suite a whole to specific programs, Microsoft Word has an improved search function. The new Navigation Pane allows you to view thumbnails of your document’s pages (in a way that looks a lot like the navigation side panel in Adobe Reader) and when you search for a word, all the instances of that word are highlighted in your document and appear, neatly displayed, in the Navigation Pane itself.

Word’s search function feels as if it’s finally been dragged into this century. Meanwhile, Outlook now has customisable Quick Steps, which allow you to perform previously multi-click operations – for instancing moving mail to a specific subfolder – in a single click.   It feels very much as if Microsoft has actually listened to its users and tidied up a lot of the little things that until now have made life frustrating and slowed users down. If you’re prepared to spend a little time and effort finding out how the new features work, they should help you get the job done quicker.   

Word 2010 opens documents from unreliable sources, for instance the internet, in protected mode. This prevents Macros and other hidden code from running unless you unprotect the document but it also does away with annoying warnings, “Are you sure you want to open this document?”.

Don’t be dull 
One of the big changes in Office 2007 was the new emphasis on design and aesthetics. The addition of themes and text styles made is possible for users without a design background to create interesting and polished-looking documents. Office 2010 continues in the same vein, with new text effects in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Using these, you can add reflections, shadows and other artistic touches to text that, unlike WordArt in previous versions, remains editable. Word and Publisher now support OpenType type, so font-fetishists can now add ligatures and other fancy features to their typography.

New features in Excel include Sparklines: tiny graphs that sit in the cell next to important data, giving a visual summary of what that data means. Conditional formatting has also been improved to provide a greater range of visual effects, making it possible to easily visualise many different variables and outcomes for a data-set. Another exciting new feature in Excel is the Slicer. This allows you to easily and visually call out certain categories of data within a pivot table, allowing you see at a click how much of a product you’ve exported to a particular market, for instance. 

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