A first look at Office 2010

Mary Branscombe reports as Microsoft reveals an improved interface and promises real-time collaboration and web apps

Published: July 14 2009 13:29 | Last updated: July 14 2009 13:29

The technical preview of Office 2010 is an early look at some of the new features coming in the next release. Updates to the desktop apps are welcome if not revolutionary, but the real shift is that Microsoft is embracing the cloud (and the mobile phone), albeit carefully and without undermining the market for the full-featured desktop versions.

There are some users who dislike the “ribbon” interface introduced in Office 2007 but according to Microsoft product manager Chris Bryant “the ribbon has helped people use more of the Office applications in Office 2007 than ever before”.

He compares it to drag and drop, first introduced in Word in 1991: “Now it’s a fundamental part of the productivity experience; we think the ribbon will be very much the same in 10 years.”

Office 2010 extends the ribbon to all the applications and it does an excellent job of it. It also introduces the option to customise the ribbon completely, which should mollify most remaining critics.

The Office menu, which replaced the File menu in Office 2007 is in turn replaced by the Backstage menu which combines useful tools and settings once found in a variety of dialog boxes in one handy place, including file properties, previews of file templates, print preview, advanced printer settings and options for sharing files (by methods such as e-mail, SharePoint or Excel services) and packaging presentations.

Expect the look of Backstage to evolve as it currently takes up rather more space than necessary for many of the features it includes.

Otherwise, the interface of Office 2010 is generally cleaner and more efficient than the previous version, using the space better and presenting appropriate commands more intelligently.

Microsoft has gone back to basics on the core application features such as text formating, copy and paste, printing and integration between the different applications says Mr Bryant, noting that around 20 per cent of all commands used in Office are about copying and pasting.

“The long-term mission of Office is really to deliver that best productivity experience. We spent more energy and more time implementing those essentials and making sure they work the way people expect.”

Integration includes making more features common across applications. Some of that is playing catch-up. PowerPoint 2010 can now compare and merge presentations the way Word lets you compare and merge versions of a document.

But new features such as a preview that helps you pick the right format for pasting information such as tables, instant translations and tools for editing photos inside applications (adjusting the brightness, contrast and colour tone or adding Photoshop-style artistic effects) are in almost all the Office programs.

PowerPoint has basic video editing tools; they don’t replace sophisticated video editing software but if you only need to adjust the contrast or brightness and select a section to play then being able to do it all in your presentation will save a lot of time.

PowerPoint also gets the first connection to the cloud: you can embed videos from online services such as YouTube into slides and upload your presentation to the PowerPoint Live service, send the URL to participants at different companies and control the presentation in their browsers (which can be Firefox or Safari as well as Internet Explorer).

Excel’s new sparklines place mini-charts into tables, highlighting trends and key figures more clearly and new Slicer tools make it easier to explore large PivotTables and PivotCharts.

Outlook has Quick Steps and Mail Tips to streamline common tasks and help you avoid common mistakes, plus a very welcome Ignore tool for dropping out of e-mail conversations that take on a life of their own. Word gets an improved navigation pane for browsing and searching within long documents.

Useful as they are, these features are not compelling reasons to upgrade and that underlines the fact that this is very much a preview version (although it’s robust enough to do real work with).

It doesn’t include the Office Web applications (available as a preview in August) or the new version of SharePoint (expected in beta in October) that will enable collaboration between document authors and allow businesses to host the web apps themselves, suggesting Microsoft still has a lot of work to do.

The real test will come when businesses can evaluate whether the collaborative tools and web apps deliver Mr Bryant’s claim of “the best productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser”.

Most collaboration today is what he calls “linear”: using e-mail to send documents. “Today, not many people co-author in real time, but we think it will be a fundamental expectation of the future.”

Both the desktop and web applications will allow real-time collaboration, and Word will allow desktop and web users to work on the same document; Microsoft is also promoting its note-taking app, OneNote, as a collaborative tool for both storing and sharing information.

Similarly most people expect to use a PC (usually their own) to edit documents but that attitude is changing: “The freedom to work from anywhere is becoming a fundamental expectation.”

For Office to remain a key business tool, Microsoft has to judge those expectations correctly and satisfy them on the platforms business users care about.

The Office web apps need to deliver the same rich features and formats as desktop Office programs rather than the basic tools of most web apps today.

Businesses will welcome the flexibility of hosting the web applications on their SharePoint servers at no extra charge and making those available through an extranet. But apart from the promise that the web apps will be included in the Office Professional Pro edition for enterprise and free to consumers and small business users through the Live service, Microsoft hasn’t finalised business models or what collaboration will be possible across these kind of boundaries.

Those issues will be as important as the features in the desktop or the web apps.

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