First Hands-On: Office 2010 (Verdict: Being Able To Edit Photos in Word and Ignore E-Mail Chains is Awesome)

It seems like just yesterday that we were helping Office 2003 users get acclimated to Office 2007’s icon-heavy Ribbon interface .

Today, Microsoft announced that its successor, Office 2010 (along with SharePoint Server, Visio, and Project 2010), has entered Technical Preview, and boasts the same Ribbon layout that you’ve hopefully gotten used to by now. (For the record, even Windows 7 ($79.95) programs such as Paint have it, which should boost the learning curve.)

Technical Preview is another way of saying it’s in private beta for now; according to Microsoft, the software should enter public beta later this year and will ship to consumers during the first half of 2010. Microsoft has not announced pricing yet.

Although Office 2010 more or less looks like its predecessor, it boasts several new features: Backstage view for changing settings in a document; easier integration of photos and videos; several advanced features in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; grouped conversations in Outlook (along with the option to ignore endless group threads); and, for power users, a 64-bit version.

Microsoft also announced that customers with a Windows Live account or SharePoint server will be able to view and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents from a browser. Although users can view documents using any mobile browser, Windows Mobile 6.5 users, in particular, will be able to edit them.  However, these features are not yet available for testing.

I’ve had some time to play around with the new software, and today I’ll walk you through Office 2010, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, with plenty of screenshots along the way. Read on for a detailed first look, and don’t forget to check out the gallery on your way out.

Same Interface– Almost
Again, Office 2010 looks identical to Office 2007, at first glance, since the Ribbon UI has remained unchanged (save for a new feature here and there). What’s different is the way users do basic things, such as open a new document, prepare a document for printing, or name and save a project. In Office 2007, users can access all of these high-level functions by clicking on the Office icon in the upper left corner; a drop-down menu would appear.

Now, clicking on the Office icon in any application (e.g. Word) brings users to Backstage view, a full-screen page whose functions—printing, saving, creating new documents, et cetera—run along the left-hand side (you can exit this page at any time by pressing the Back button, tucked away in the upper left corner, or by pressing Escape).

Avram Piltch, our online editor, who has also been testing Office 2010, complained that this adds extra steps. I tend to agree. It was easier, for instance, when you could just click the Home button and then Save As. Now, the default way of doing things is to click the Home Button, watch Backstage open at full screen, click Save As, then watch Backstage close while the same old Save As dialog box opens.

Luckily, Office 2010, like its predecessor, has the Quick Access Toolbar, a customizable row of icons from which you can launch specific tasks. For example, we chose to create icons for “New Document,” “Open,” “Save,” “Save As,” “Undo,” “Redo,” and “Print Preview.” By doing this, we can click on an icon and circumvent Backstage altogether.  To customize which icons appear, where on the screen, and in what order, click Backstage > Options > Quick Access Toolbar.

The one benefit of Backstage that we’ve found so far is that it makes printing easier, since the Print options shows all of the settings and a preview side by side on a single screen.

Photo Editing in Word
You won’t find any new text formatting features in Word 2010. The big news is that the Word processor now includes built-in photo editing tools. Start out by adding a photo from the Insert menu, and once you do the menu lining the top of the screen will automatically change to Picture Tools, which includes drop-down menus for applying filters, effects (shadows and glowing halos, among four others), and altering properties such as color saturation, brightness, and contrast. There are separate icons all the way on the right side for cropping and rotating photos; the only tool I think is missing is a red-eye remover.

Although the effects are easy to apply, I wish they had more illuminating icons, as well as previews. They have rollover explanations, but, as you can see with this screenshot of the Glow options, the icons for a red and olive green glow look the same, when they should themselves be color-coded. The artistic effects (e.g., a mosaic look), color options, and Corrections options, which include brightness and contrast, however, have distinctive icons and rollover previews.

The Picture Tools menu also includes a Background Removal Tool, whose primary function should be self-explanatory. Although you can mark specific spots you’d like to remove or include, it’s easier to just drag a box around the subject. When I closely framed a photo of penguins however, the tool did an accurate job of removing the snowy landscape in the background while keeping the penguins intact.

I did notice, however, that this tool slowed down my system, a Lenovo ThinkPad X300. As I resized the box the computer took a few seconds to show the changes onscreen. Also, it was slow in switching to another open document window while undoing this background change and reverting to the original photo. These changes are non-destructive; you’ll always have a copy of the original, unedited picture. At any time, you can press the Reset Picture button in the upper pane.

Other Word Features
Word 2010 also allows users to take and insert screenshots of other open applications, and crop them, too (this works in Excel and PowerPoint as well). On a less esoteric note, there’s now a left-hand pane in which users can easily track changes in the document. For instance, if you do a word search you’ll see all of the instances of the word appear in a list in this pane; that’s easier than scrolling through every page of the document (Microsoft, by the by, told me the average Word doc is 11 pages long).

Excel
For some people, the biggest Excel news is that users can now opt for a 64-bit version; if any Office app could benefit from this performance boost, it’s Excel’s intensive number-crunching.

On the feature front, the Excel 2010 introduces Sparklines, which are basically graphs within a cell. Say you keep a spreadsheet following the progress of various stocks. For each stock, in addition to reporting it’s rise or fall in percentages, or even up or down arrows, you could add a Sparklines column that charts the stock’s history (that history, of course, depends on how far back you want to go, and how much numerical data you’ve included in your spreadsheet).

You can have these Sparklines appear as line graphs, columns, or win loss graphs. Inserting them is as easy as setting up a formula, such as a cell that tallies an average: just include the range of cells from which it’s drawing data (e.g., B3:D3) and the location of the cell where the Sparkline should appear (e.g., E3).

Meanwhile, a new feature called Slicers allows users to insert interactive boxes alongside the spreadsheet. For example, a slicer might allow a viewer to quickly sort the results of a marketing survey by location, or some other demographic information. That’s good news for groups collaborating on a document; each user might want to view the information differently, but not fundamentally change the way the spreadsheet is organized. Users can publish slides to a SharePoint server; if you don’t have one, you can always build slicers into a spreadsheet before, say, e-mailing it to team members.

PowerPoint
Although there’s no evidence PowerPoint 2010 was developed with Keynote ’09 in mind, several of its new transitions remind us of ones introduced in Apple’s latest presentation software. There’s Rotate and Flip, for instance, as well as Animation Painter, which creates animation between two consecutive images, not unlike Apple’s new Magic Move transition. Other new transitions include a Gallery effect and a flipping effect. According to Microsoft, more transitions will make their way into the final version.

PowerPoint 2010 adds video editing options. As with photos (in both Word and PowerPoint), you can add effects to videos. The same effects—glow, shadow, et cetera—apply, although in this case, reflection is my favorite.

In addition to applying effects, you can choose the screen grab and trim the video at both ends.

One feature I’m intrigued by but didn’t get to chance this time around is the ability to broadcast PowerPoint presentations to other devices, including computers and phones. The way it works is that your recipient will receive a link to your presentation in their inbox. It sounds neat, to be sure, but remember that you need a SharePoint server to do this.

Finally, like Keynote, PowerPoint 2010 allows you to compress your presentation, a feature that comes in particularly handy when it comes time to e-mail the slide deck to colleagues. It’s worth noting that you can compress any kind of Office document; with PowerPoint presentations, though, especially ones with video added in, it’s especially useful.

Outlook
Outlook, Microsoft’s desktop e-mail client, has some of the new features that I’m most excited about. Take conversation view, for instance: although Outlook still downloads individual e-mails from a conversation, when you click on one you’ll see a sub-menu of all the other e-mails in the thread,  including ones from your inbox and sent mail folder. To me, it represents the best of both worlds: I like the way, say, my Gmail account efficiently groups related e-mails together. But I sometimes find Gmail’s conversation layout overwhelming, particularly in epic conversations where not every e-mail is relevant. So, it’s nice to have the option of isolating just the message I’m looking for.

Speaking of endless e-mail chains, Outlook 2010 has an Ignore feature that allows you to opt out of an exchange on which you’ve been CC’d. It’s way more efficient (and polite, probably) than clicking Reply All only to ask that someone—anyone—remove you from the thread.

Also new in Outlook 2010 are Mail Tips. This feature, which requires an Exchange server, provides useful information as you’re composing an e-mail. Say, for instance that you’re composing an e-mail to someone in your company who happens to be on vacation. You’ll see his or her out of office message—including instructions on who to contact instead—before you send the e-mail. That’ll save you the hassle of e-mailing someone only to resend the message to someone else. According to Microsoft, these Mail Tips can be customized, but on the Exchange side, which means you might have to ask your IT guy for help.

As for getting started, setting up both a Gmail and an AOL account was easy: all we had to do was enter our e-mail address, password, and name. Bonus: Microsoft automatically flagged the starred items in our Gmail inbox.