Office 2010

Last week, I wrote two columns about Office 2010, one on Microsoft releasing the requirements for the new suite, and the other on a report detailing the pros and cons of upgrading. Well, my timing was pretty good because Microsoft (News – Alert) just announced that Office 2010 is moving from mere beta status to Release Candidate mode. The RC will be made available only to a select group of business users who are members of Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program. Still, as Office 2010 inches closer to its final release, I thought it’d be helpful to look at some of its new and enhanced features.

Like previous editions, Office 2010 will be available in several flavors, each with a different set of applications. Home and Student, Home and Business, Professional, and Professional Plus are just four of the versions slated for release. Each will include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote as the core apps. The higher levels, such as Professional Plus, will add Access, Outlook, Publisher, and more.

Office 2010 carries with it most of the features introduced in Office 2007, such as the infamous Ribbon, which most people seemed to either love or hate. But the new suite improves on such features by offering you greater ability to control and customize them.

Let’s start with the Ribbon. This was certainly the most controversial change in Office 2007, prompting many users to scream “What have you done with my menus?” Like many people, I eventually grew to like the Ribbon, but I didn’t like its lack of flexibility. You were stuck with the icons and commands that Microsoft chose for each Ribbon, whether you used them or not.

In Office 2010, Microsoft has given you the ability to customize each Ribbon. You can add or remove different Ribbons and different groups to each Ribbon. You can change the order in which each Ribbon and its various groups appear, create new groups, and add or remove commands to each custom group. You can easily set up each Ribbon to display the commands you use the most and better match the way you work.

Office 2007 offered no dedicated menu for saving, opening, and working with your files. Of course, you could use the Office button or customize the Quick Access toolbar to run commands to save, open, and manage your files. But as an added option, Microsoft has created a dedicated menu in Office 2010 called Backstage. Click on the File menu, and you’ll see commands to save, open, close, and print your documents; open new and recent documents; find information on your current document; access Help menus; and run options to customize each application.

Aside from those general enhancements, certain applications have been given their own makeovers. Outlook probably shows the most dramatic changes, at least on the surface. Outlook 2007 didn’t offer certain features, such as the Ribbon. But now Outlook 2010 has caught up with the rest of the suite, sporting both the Ribbon and the Backstage menu. Beneath the surface, you’ll find handy options for reading and managing your email. You can now sort your emails by threads to more easily follow ongoing messages in a single conversation. You can also delete all emails from a single thread in one shot. I also like the new Quick Steps feature in Outlook. Quick Steps is a kind of user-friendly macro system that lets you easily record actions for things you do over and over again. For example, you can record a quick step to store an email in a specific folder or send an email to a specific person.

Word 2010 also benefits from some nice enhancements. The new Navigation pane makes it much easier to jump around your document by clicking on headings and subheadings or thumbnail views of each page. You can even search from within this pane, and each instance of your search term shows up, allowing you to click on a specific one. A new Paste option command also lets you choose whether you want to paste an item as plain text or with its original formatting.

As I discussed in a prior column, Office 2010 will be Microsoft’s first suite to come in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. But I don’t think this will have any impact in the business world. The 64-bit edition will be something IT pros may want to check out themselves—I’ll certainly try running it on my own personal PCs. But given the driver compatibility issues with 64-bit operating systems in general, I don’t expect too many companies will be dolling these out to their users.

Office 2010 is slated for release sometime in the first half of this year. It certainly offers some handy new features. But we all know that testing and deploying a new version of Office can be an expensive and time-consuming project. Sooner or later, you’ll need to decide whether or not the new suite will have a home within your company. If you haven’t yet checked out the beta, now’s as good a time as any.

Tags: access outlook, adoption program, beta status, business users, controversial change, core apps, custom group, flavors, flexibility, menus, Microsoft, microsoft news, new groups, news alert, office, Outlook, previous editions, pros and cons, release, Ribbon, ribbons, select group, suite, technology adoption, wikipedia

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 1:05 am and is filed under Systems, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.