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Labs Gallery: Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview in Pictures
by Jason Brooks
Backstage Pass
All of the Office 2010 components feature a new "Backstage" area, in which "meta document" options such as saving, opening, printing and exporting are gathered.
Outlook Backstage
In Outlook, the Backstage area contains account and folder settings, alongside import and export options.
Copy & Paste
OneNote has a feature for recognizing and copying text out of pasted pictures.
Copy & Paste, Continued
OCR isn't easy, and OneNote made its share of mistakes. Maybe the PowerShell Blue background threw it off.
Data Visualization in Excel
The Conditional Formatting capabilities of Excel 2010 are much improved, with great-looking and easy-to-apply visualization tweaks like these in-cell data bars.
ODF Support in Office
The OpenDocument Format support that Microsoft added to Office 2007 in SP2 carries over to Office 2010. I could save files in ODF format, and open ODF documents in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
No Bars for ODF
Not surprisingly, my handsome data bars disappeared when I saved my spreadsheet to ODF format.
Sparklines
Another bit of data visualization fun comes in the form of Sparklines in Excel. I could spawn quick, in-cell charts with highlighting for high and low points on the curve.
Second Guess Your Paste
When I pasted a section of text from PowerShell into Excel 2010, I didn't mean for my data to get stuffed into a single column. I was happy, then, to find a Smart Tag that offered to rerun the operation through Excel's text import wizard.
More Paste Smart Tags
After I dragged a cell down the sheet for an autofill operation, a similar Smart Tag appeared to offer more options.
No Bars for XLS, Either
Just like ODF, the classic XLS format lacked support for Sparklines and other in-cell chart goodies. However, unlike saving in ODF, which spawned a generic warning message, Excel 2010 told me explicitly what wouldn't work when I tried to save in XLS format.
Office 2010 Everywhere
Support across Web, Desktop and Mobile platforms is a major Office 2010 theme.
OneNote Scrapbooking
I could also add text and images to my notebooks from the Web, through integration with IE 8.
OneNote References
In OneNote, I could paste chunks of text from other documents on my system and retain a link back to the source document for future reference.
Paste Preview in Word
Here are three paste preview options for a chunk of text and images that I clipped from the Office 2010 Reviewer's Guide: Keep Source Formatting, Merge Formatting and Keep Text Only.
Text-Only Paste
Several of the Office 2010 applications include Paste Preview options, which allowed me to sample different formatting types before pasting chunks of text and images into a document or presentation.
Picture Paste
I could strip the formatting from a block of text or paste it as an image. Here I'm pasting into a OneNote notebook.
Inserting Screenshots
PowerPoint and Word both have a Ribbon option for inserting screenshots of active windows into documents or presentations. I could also grab new screen clippings to insert.
Smart Art
PowerPoint 2010 has also picked a new, slick-looking Smart Art elements, along with some fancy new slide transition effects.
Video Trimming
In its 2010 release, PowerPoint gains the ability to trim embedded video clips right within the application.
Video Insert Snafu
PowerPoint 2010 includes a feature for embedding Web-hosted videos, but I had trouble getting this feature to work.
Backstage Compression
In PowerPoint, I visited the Backstage area of a presentation with embedded video to shrink the size of the video.
Save Presentation as Video
PowerPoint now offers the option of saving presentations as WMV video files.
Thread Management
Outlook 2010 picks up new e-mail thread management capabilities, such as conversation grouping.
Dedupe Your Threads
Outlook 2010 sports a "clean up conversation" feature that removes the redundant text that builds up in e-mail threads through repeated replies.
Office 2010 Hits the Web
Perhaps the most compelling feature of Office 2010—the new Web-based versions of the suite's components—was one that wasn't yet available for testing. Microsoft demonstrated Web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook for me, and they certainly seemed impressive.
Office Embraces Firefox
What really impresses me about Office on the Web is Microsoft's decision to support the Firefox and Safari browsers as first-class consumers of the applications. Goodbye, ActiveX. Hello, AJAX.
Background Removal
Word 2010 sports new picture manipulation abilities, such as the nifty Background Removal tool. I selected the foreground area, clicked to add or remove spots from the background selection, and ...
Drop Shadow Support
The Background Removal tool swapped out my picture's background for a transparent one. In this picture, the head could use some more work, so here's hoping that the drop shadow that Word helped me add will draw your eye from the imperfection.
Navigation Experiences
Word sports a cool new sidebar search tool in Version 2010, which I used to tally up and locate all 27 instances of the word "experience" in the Office reviewer's guide.
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Just when Windows users started to become accustomed to seeing .docx extensions and to finding their way around on the infamous Office 2007 Ribbon, Microsoft is shaking things up again with a brand new version of its omnipresent productivity suite, Office 2010. eWEEK Labs has been trying out the Technical Preview version of the new suite, and we've encountered a raft of really useful new features, particularly around data visualization in Excel. What's more, Office 2010 is mercifully devoid of major file format or interface metaphor shifts.
This Technical Preview will be accessible to a limited group of testers, but you can try to get added to the list by signing up at www.office2010themovie.com. Expect to see a broad public beta later this year. Until then, check out the screen gallery below for our take on Office 2010 so far.