Microsoft Office 2010: What’s New

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I have been using Microsoft's Office 2010, that is currently in beta, with general availability scheduled for June 2010. There are many new features or improvements tighten integration of Office applications with SharePoint, and improvements to core Office applications such as Word and Excel may not, on their own, justify deployment for many organizations. Although most users will find that they like one or two of the improvements, organizations not using SharePoint are more likely to make their decision based on costs and their interest in standardizing on a version of Office under Mainstream support.

The core applications of the suite deliver new capabilities to streamline repetitive tasks and make important features more visible and accessible to users. Among changes to the core applications is a new Backstage feature as well as improvements to a variety of features including the Ribbon, user-customization, paste, and 64-bit support.

• Backstage. The File menu, which was replaced by a round button depicting the Office logo in Office 2007, returns in Office 2010 as the File tab on the Ribbon. Although the Ribbon tab's label reads File, the Office team promotes this tab as a new user interface feature called Backstage. The File menu, or Backstage, provides access to the usual File menu commands, such as creating, printing, saving, and sharing Office documents; documents' properties; and reversion to saved copies of the document or worksheet being edited. It streamlines several formerly separate commands: selecting a printer and print preview appear together, for example.
• Ribbon user interface. With Office 2010, all core Office products get the Ribbon. The Ribbon is a user interface introduced for some applications in Office 2007. It replaces Office 2003's menus and toolbars with a tabbed interface that groups common, logically related tasks together in a row of large icons. The commands on the Ribbon change dynamically, presenting commands relevant to what the user is doing at the moment. The user can preview the effect of most formatting commands before committing to them. In addition, galleries show formatting commands with common combinations of options preselected, enabling users to quickly find an attractive choice and see how it will look.
  Current Office 2007 users will not find the changes to the Ribbon for Office 2010 disruptive, but users who are new to the Ribbon often require time to master its idiosyncrasies. For example, while the Ribbon has a Tab labeled Insert, access to the commands to insert a footnote or endnote are on the Ribbon's Review tab, rather than the Insert tab. Likewise, a new tab to access the Backstage is labeled File.
• User customization. Users can personalize the Ribbon by creating custom tabs and custom groups for frequently used commands. In Office 2007, users could add commands to a small "Quick Access" bar that appeared above or below the Ribbon, but could not change the Ribbon itself. Although users can add commands to custom groups, users still cannot change the default tabs and groups on the Office 2010 Ribbon. Ribbon customization is on a per-application basis: a customized Word Ribbon is not available in Excel, for example. For more extensive interface customization, the Ribbon and Backstage can be extended programmatically using custom XML to define the structure and components, and custom code to give those components functionality.
• Protected View. To eliminate the pesky "Are you sure..." dialog boxes that appear when opening a document that came from a source such as the Internet, Office 2010 opens such documents in Protected View-a read-only view. This view is not the result of a file conversion; instead, the file is opened in a sandboxed instance of the application (running in an isolated environment with no access to other memory or local disks) and kept there until the user indicates she wants to edit the document by selecting the Enable Editing button on the Protected View bar.
  Protected View will be invoked to open documents downloaded from the Internet, e-mail attachments (organizations can set policy to enable it only for attachments that came from outside the organization), files opened from unsafe locations such as the Temporary Internet Files folder, and files that are blocked by an Office File Block Policy, which uses the Registry to control which files an Office application can open.
• Autosave versioning. Prior versions of Office periodically saved an open document in the background so that in the event of an application problem, the background file offered the potential to recover some of the recent changes to the file. In Office 2010, the Backstage exposes the periodic autosaved files from the current editing session and allows the user to make an autosaved version the newest version of the document. These autosaved versions are purged when the user saves a version or closes the document. The last autosaved version is also kept in the case of a user exiting the application without saving the file.
• Paste Options Gallery. The Office team indicates that data collected from instrumented versions of Word show that 20% of a user's clicks relate to copy and paste actions. Changes to the paste function make it easier for a user to select the correct paste mode: preserve formatting, select a specific format, or paste text with no formatting. This gallery appears in three places: on the Ribbon, on the right-click context menu, and in a Paste Recovery user interface element that appears near content which has been pasted. The gallery also features a preview mode, which appears when the user hovers the cursor over the individual paste items. The Paste Options Gallery changes depending on what was copied and where the content is being pasted-for example, pasting data from Excel might offer different options in the gallery than pasting content from Word.
• Improved graphic handling. Inserting and editing images is easier with Office 2010, as tools are provided within each application to sharpen, soften, and change the brightness, contrast, color saturation, and tone of any graphic. A new screen-shot command makes it easier to insert a screen shot into a document. (The use of these Office 2010 features does not require installation of the optional Windows Live Photo Gallery application, which offers similar capabilities for all Windows users.)
• 64-bit support. Office 2010 includes a 64-bit edition. The 32-bit editions of the Office 2010 products will continue to be available, but most computers now ship with a 64-bit multicore processor, and users are migrating to 64-bit versions of Windows to take advantage of four or more gigabytes of RAM. Consequently, users might want to migrate to the 64-bit versions of Office applications, which could improve performance for Excel users with large spreadsheets that rely on extensive and complex calculations.

Although these new features or improvements are generally available for all applications in the Office suite, some features, such as Protected View, are not available in applications such as Access where opening suspicious documents is not likely.