Office 2010 Revealed.......

I had a feeling that 2010 wasn’t going to be an upgrade to Office like what Windows 7 is to the Windows family. Having said that, Office 2010 Technical Preview does show some promising upgrades.


New Splash Screen

You don’t really figure out the awesomeness till you see the close & minimise options & the sleek animation



In between my office time I did find some time to play around with the leaked version of Office 2010 & found some improvements over Office 2007. One of the biggest additions to Office 2010 will be its online collaboration capabilities I wrote about & we have some proof of that in the current Preview build. Here are some noticeable improvements in the technical Preview build:

1. Built-In Screen Capture Tool:
A really handy addition & at the same time a beautiful implementation of the same. Word & Powerpoint both have the ‘Screenshot’ feature under ‘Insert’ & the useful part is that it caches screen shots of the currently open windows for one-click insert. At the same time also gives you the marquee select option. Screen shot of the ‘Screenshot’ feature:




2. Background Removal Tool (for images):



This is a feature that I’m sure quite a lot of us will be using. A neat addition to picture properties is ‘Background Removal’. To show you the power of this tool, here is an image that I inserted into a Word 2010 document:



And after using the tool this is what I got:


NOTE: No use of Photoshop AT ALL!
The tool also let’s you have certain amount of background left with edges & effects, screen shot:



Here is the Background Removal tool options tab:



3. Protected Mode:

I found this to be a good addition as a feature. Every time you download a document from the internet & open it, Word 2010 will open it in a ‘Protected mode’ that won’t allow you to edit the document unless you enable editing of the document
You can edit which file types are to be opened in the protect mode from the Trust Center panel. Screenshot:



4. New Smart Art Templates:

I gotta admit, I love ‘Smart Art’. It’s right up there amongst the best features in Office & in Office 2010 there are new templates added. Existing categories have new templates & there’s a new category as well. Screen shot:



5. Author Permissions:

As I had talked about co-authoring a document & collaborating over the Internet will be one of Office 2010’s USPs, the ‘Protect Document’ option under ‘Review’ in Office 2007 has now been renamed to ‘Restrict Editing’ & a new tab titled ‘Block Authors’ has been added. Screen shot of the option in Word 2007 & Word 2010 side-by-side:



6. Completely Revamped Options Under the Office Button:

Office 2010 has introduced a huge a change in the document options that are presented to you under the Office button. One of biggest pains was the meta-data that can be added in a document. Quick access to permissions, document meta-data under document info. With Office 2010 you now have the option of saving your document to a SharePoint location as well. Screen shot:



7. A Kick-Ass Print Control Panel Under the Office Button:

This is a fantastic addition, clicking ‘Print’ under the Office 2010 button opens a plethora of printing options. No need go through a ‘Print Wizard’ you can select all your print options from here & hit print. Screen shot:



8. Jumplists in Outlook 2010:

As you’ll might have seen, Outlook 2010 now makes use of Windows 7’s Jumplist feature for quick access to certain processes. Screen shot:




9. Inserting & Editing Videos Is Painless & Fun:

I’ll be honest, I never really enjoyed inserting videos in my presentations ‘coz it wasn’t a pleasant experience. It sucked. Not anymore, check out these options, screenshot:





10. Compress Media While Saving Presentations

As shown above, the all new file menu, known as — Backstage gives you options to compress the media files inserted in the presentation to reduce file size, it even gives an esitmate of the presentation size. Screenshot: