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At its Professional Developers Conference last year, Microsoft gave the world its first look at Windows 7 in the form of a pre-beta release that struck me as practically ready for prime time-a good sign for a Windows release tasked with restoring user confidence following the little-loved Windows Vista.
At this year’s show, the company has arranged a beta debut for its other flagship product, Office, which has its own unenviable task: getting organizations and individuals excited about undertaking a major upgrade of a platform whose previous versions have been handling users’ productivity chores just fine for going on 10 years now.
Like that Windows 7 pre-beta I evaluated last year, the beta release of Office 2010 has performed with striking stability and polish in my tests. Even many of the help pages, which I always expect to be missing from development releases, have appeared right where I’ve needed them as I’ve trawled through the product.
As for the question of how to stoke user interest in a product upgrade that lacks a flaky elder sibling, the Office team has gone beyond its typical “more handsome, more handy” playbook to expand the reach of Office beyond the PC to include the Web and mobile devices in a manner more meaningful than in previous iterations of the suite.
Even if broadened Web access options and more SharePoint-orchestrated collaboration choices aren’t the driver for upgrading to 2010, I imagine that most Office users will find items out of those handsome and handy categories to like in the new release.
Setting aside enhancements in the areas of cut and paste, picture and video editing, data visualization, and Web-based access to Excel and PowerPoint that I discussed in my review of the Office 2010 Technical Preview release, I took note in the Office 2010 Beta of new ways to slice and dice data in Excel, a raft of application-building enhancements in Access, and new uses for the side pane in Word.
Microsoft is making the beta release of Office 2010 available for download through MSDN.
I conducted my tests of the suite on a single-core desktop machine with 1GB of RAM and running the 32-bit version of Windows 7. I also tested on a virtual machine running the 64-bit version of Windows 7, as well as on a VM running 32-bit Windows XP Service Pack 3.
Office ran happily on all three setups. However, I missed the opportunity to test Microsoft’s new PowerPivot add-on for Excel, which expands the maximum number of rows that Excel can crunch well beyond the app’s typical million-row limit, due to problems I experienced with the add-on’s installer.
Look for coverage of PowerPivot-as well as of Outlook, PowerPoint and other 2010 features-in our future reviews of the Office suite.
Word 2010
Word
In 2002, eWEEK Labs conducted a head-to-head evaluation between OpenOffice.org and Office 2003 with IT professionals and end users at FN Manufacturing, a company considering the move away from Office. One of the Office features that proved most popular with the FN Manufacturing and other testers was the suite’s task pane-a sidebar through which Office applications could expose various features, such as thesaurus lookup.
These days, the sidebar concept is as useful as ever, particularly given the wide displays that have grown more popular for desktop and notebook monitors.
Word 2010 sports a handful of nice sidebar enhancements, starting with the application’s Navigation Pane, which replaces Word 2007’s Document Map feature. I used the Navigation Pane to traverse Word documents by jumping from heading to heading. I liked the way I could reorganize topics within a document by dragging the headings around within the pane.
Also situated in this side pane is a useful search feature. I typed the words I sought in my document, and the search pane would fill in with results and a bit of context from around the found term-more or less like search engine results do. By default, the search pane tool looks for text, but I could also seek out graphics, tables, equations, footnotes and comments by selecting one of these options from a drop-down menu in the search box.
For example, if I were converting a large Word document from a previous Word format, I could select “graphics” from the drop-down menu and cycle through each graphic in the document, looking for needed placement tweaks. This is especially useful, since slight graphics misplacement is one of the most common format-conversion casualties.
Word 2010 also sports contextual spell-checking. I typed the sentence, “I can’t wait to meat you,” and Word duly corrected me with a blue squiggly line instead of the red one with which it would mark a misspelling.
Excel 2010
Excel
In addition to the impressive enhancements around Sparkline charts and conditional formatting that I’ve covered in my Office 2010 Technical Preview review, Excel 2010 packs a handful of interesting tweaks to its PivotTable and PivotChart features.
I checked out these changes by linking a fresh Excel spreadsheet to a set of NBA statistics from last season. I then created a quick PivotChart to display players’ average offensive rebounds per game. With a few hundred players in my data set, I was faced with a rather unwieldy chart-and a great opportunity to try out Excel’s new search filter capabilities.
Clicking a “Player” button on my PivotChart brought up a menu with a bunch of sort and filter options. I used these options to trim my set of Players to the top five performers in terms of average offensive rebounds per game. From the same menu, I could remove certain players from consideration by unchecking boxes next to the players’ names in the dialog.
As with the filter button, I could modify other aspects of my PivotChart (and the PivotTable underlying it) using buttons situated on the chart. All in all, I expect that the new options for manipulating charts will help flatten out the learning curve for users who haven’t quite gotten comfortable with these Excel features.
Another addition to Excel’s PivotTable and PivotChart toolbox is the Slicer-a graphical element that allows users to modify data under analysis by slicing it up by particular categories.
I inserted a Slicer into my offensive rebounds chart that let me consider only wins or losses in determining my top five performers. For example, when taking into account only losses, Golden State Warriors’ Andris Biedrins was second in the league in offensive rebounds per game. Considering only wins, Biedrins didn’t crack the top five.
Access 2010
Access
Users who prize Access as a tool for roughing out database-backed applications will find a handful of welcome improvements in the 2010 version of Office.
I began putting Access through its paces by selecting one of the template applications offered up from the tool’s start page. The first thing I noticed about the new database app I created was an information bar across the top of its interface, alerting me of blocked active content.
By now, macro-blocking has become a very familiar part of Office applications, and the experience that the Office team has accrued while dodging malware writers really shows in the interfaces around trust management. For example, I was pleased to find that clicking for more information on the blocked-content notice did not call forth a dialog box with tough-to-relocate information. Rather, I was sent to the Backstage area for Access-the landing page for meta-document operations and information-where I could read what Access had to say about the active content and then decide whether to enable the content, knowing exactly where to find that information when I was ready to act on it.
I opted to mark the database as a trusted document, which cleared the way for the active content. I noticed, however, that when I e-mailed the database to myself for testing on a different machine, the trusted status did not carry over to the second machine. I had to mark the document as trusted again. I also could have configured a trusted location and ferried the database from one machine to the other through that trusted channel. This document trust scheme appears in other components across Office.
The application template I’d selected was for a project management application, with tables and interface forms for users and tasks, among other things. I was interested to see that both the user and task components of the template were available for easy use in other applications in the form of Application Parts, available under the Create tab of the Access ribbon.
Access 2010 now supports triggers-database operations that can be scripted to occur, for instance, when records are inserted into a database. In Access, this feature is called Data Macros. Along similar lines, I was pleased to see that Access now supports calculated fields, derived from other fields in a record.
Executive Editor Jason Brooks can be reached at [email protected].