Labs Gallery: Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview in Pictures

by Jason Brooks

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.

In Outlook, the Backstage area contains account and folder settings, alongside import and export options.

OneNote has a feature for recognizing and copying text out of pasted pictures.

OCR isn’t easy, and OneNote made its share of mistakes. Maybe the PowerShell Blue background threw it off.

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.

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.

Not surprisingly, my handsome data bars disappeared when I saved my spreadsheet to ODF format.

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.

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.

After I dragged a cell down the sheet for an autofill operation, a similar Smart Tag appeared to offer more options.

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.

Support across Web, Desktop and Mobile platforms is a major Office 2010 theme.

I could also add text and images to my notebooks from the Web, through integration with IE 8.

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.

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.

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.

I could strip the formatting from a block of text or paste it as an image. Here I’m pasting into a OneNote notebook.

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.

PowerPoint 2010 has also picked a new, slick-looking Smart Art elements, along with some fancy new slide transition effects.

In its 2010 release, PowerPoint gains the ability to trim embedded video clips right within the application.

PowerPoint 2010 includes a feature for embedding Web-hosted videos, but I had trouble getting this feature to work.

In PowerPoint, I visited the Backstage area of a presentation with embedded video to shrink the size of the video.

PowerPoint now offers the option of saving presentations as WMV video files.

Outlook 2010 picks up new e-mail thread management capabilities, such as conversation grouping.