It’s been nearly 3 years since Office 2007 was unleashed upon the world, its revolutionary UI and complexity contentious to this day.
Now, however, Microsoft is readying its successor, Office 2010. With it comes further UI changes where they had not appeared in Office 2007, along with numerous usability and speed enhancements.
Let’s take an in-depth look at Office 2010 now the beta is available to download, and see what we can expect to be working with for the coming years.
You can download Office 2010 from the link at the top of the Office 2010 website. I would not recommend installing this as your primary office suite unless you are willing to take Office 2010 for all the bugs that there will inevitably be in beta software.
Please also note, that I downloaded the 64-bit edition of Office 2010 Professional Plus; this required me to uninstall the 32-bit Office 2007 Ultimate that I had installed, so don’t undertake installation unless you are willing to do that.
Installation
The installation of Office 2010 was just as easy as Office 2007, which is very easy. Although it took a few minutes, it was still faster than Office 2007 and very painless. (Click through any screenshots to see the full resolutions)
Installing Office 2010
Choosing Office Update options
Word and the new File menu
Word remains largely unchanged from Office 2007 – it had the deepest integration of the Ribbon UI (the horizontal menu at the top – for more on Office 2007 and the Ribbon see this post).
Loading Word 2010
Word 2010's largely unchanged interface
It extends this with the brand-new File menu that appears throughout the Office suite. The File menu comes with a sub-menu, that brings up the following pages.
Info
This page is the new central place to access and set all the information about the current document you are viewing or editing.
It includes metadata, sharing preparation, versioning, and permissions.
The Info tab shows you information about the currently open document
Recent
The recent tab provides a much-needed and considerably nicer way of accessing the most recently documents you have had open.
This has greatly enhanced the usability of the Recent list
New
The New menu in Word 2010 has improved the way that you can select templates, and integrates templates from Office.com straight into the interface so they’re very easy to get started with.
Plenty to choose from thanks to Office.com
The Print dialog has been in dire need of a revolution for many years; now it finally has it. The Print tab in the File menu has been radically overhauled and makes it incredibly easy to configure your document to print.
It also comes with a built-in Print Preview, saving yet more clicks over the former printing wizard.
The Print menu needed an overhaul, and it got it
Share
This is something that intrigues me very much – the File menu now has a Share tab.
Currently it has options for sharing by E-Mail, saving to your Windows Live SkyDrive, saving to SharePoint, publishing as a blog post, and much much more.
I will look forward to where this can lead; hopefully you will be able to add your own services to this menu – a huge amount of potential there.
Exciting possibilities with Share
Help
The Help tab has also been improved to make it easier to get the assistance you need directly from the program.
Getting Help has never been easier
These options are available throughout the Office 2010 suite, where the File menu features in all the applications.
Outlook’s vast improvements
Outlook has always been my most-used Office application – if I’m at home, its invariably open all day dealing with e-mail from 6 mailboxes.
Outlook 2007 was a vast improvement over 2003, but the application was tediously slow, blocked other processes while it started, and caused all kinds of mayhem in my mailboxes.
I have only been using Outlook 2010 for most of today, but already I am superbly impressed by it. Here’s a run-down of the latest features.
Ribbon UI throughout
Outlook 2010 has had its Ribbon tweaked, and it now features throughout the program, along with the new File menu. Here’s some shots of it in action.
Outlook Today remains similiar, with the addition of the Ribbon
Viewing a mailbox and an e-mail
Calendar in Outlook 2010
Contacts view (content removed for privacy)
Composing an E-Mail
Conversations
Finally Outlook supports E-mail Conversations (much like Google Mail did from the outset). This means that if you are having an e-mail exchange with a group of people, all of the e-mails will be grouped together and it will be super-easy to find previous e-mails in the exchange.
A Conversation in Outlook 2010
Social Networks
This one is both intriguing and potentially incredibly exciting.
Do you remember Xobni, the Outlook plugin that pops up more information about contacts you’re exchanging e-mail with from social networks like Linkedin, Facebook and more? It seems that Outlook will be able to do this itself when it’s released.
Currently it only supports getting more contact information from SharePoint, but I checked out the Outlook 2010 site, and it seems that authors will be able to write plugins to pull content about contacts from external sites – presumably sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and others.
The information is displayed in a popup box a the bottom of e-mails, and other locations where you’re looking at contacts.
Preview of the contact who sent you a mail, with data pulled in from social networks
Connecting Outlook to your social network
The Office 2010 website says that plugins will be available in the future
Better Contact auto-adding
I don’t know about you, but I was always fed up with how Outlook 2007 seemed to fail every time when I started typing a contact’s name in the “To” field of an e-mail. That seems to have been solved in Outlook 2010!
Finally, Outlook can suggest contacts properly!
Enhanced with Jump List
The last little enhancement comes with Windows 7, and the Jump Lists feature.
Right clicking on the Outlook icon on the taskbar brings up this menu, which makes it really easy to get started on something.
Outlook 2010 Jump List
Ribbon in OneNote and Publisher
The Ribbon’s assimilation of the rest of the Office suite continues with OneNote and Publisher.
OneNote’s menu is particularly cool, in that it only pops up from the tabs when you select them, keeping out of the way the rest of the time.
Other tweaks and the new File menu improve the OneNote and Publisher user experiences a lot too.
OneNote's popup ribbon
Creating a new Notebook in OneNote
The new Ribbon in Publisher
Templates in Publisher
Excel and PowerPoint
Like Word, not much has changed (on the surface, at least) in Excel and PowerPoint, other than the addition of the File menu, and a few enhancements and tweaks here and there. Here’s some shots of what they look like now.
Editing slides in PowerPoint
Templates in the New menu in PowerPoint
Excel's File Info tab
Default View in Excel
Page Layout View, introduced in Office 2007, in Excel 2010
Overall Impressions
Having had a decent chance to play with the applications, I am once again very impressed by the quality of Beta that Microsoft has produced. The applications are all stable, pretty much feature-complete, and working well.
Office 2010 is definitely a substantial evolution of the suite. Critics will say that it does not change much, and that it is not that much different from Office 2007, yet some of its new features pave the way for a lot of great things to come.
When matched up with the Office Web Apps and Office Mobile, this should be a great proposition that I look forward to working with in the future.
Office 2010 looks really cool. I wonder how its going to change for third party applications like Nubli which is an outlook plugin that automatically prioritizes your emails into high medium and low so you can focus on your most important emails.