Microsoft Office 2010 -- Don't Count Microsoft Out Just Yet

Even the mainstream, non-technically-oriented media is keeping close tabs on the Microsoft vs. (insert another giant tech company name here) battles being played out in the public arena.

Quick Clicks: Microsoft Office 2010

But it would be foolish to predict a fall anytime soon for Microsoft. The technology icon is trying to revamp its tarnished image from the clunker that was Vista -- plus other criticisms -- and is getting back to offering the kind of technology that made it the software superpower it is, in the form of Windows 7, Exchange 2010 and now, Office 2010.

The first thing users will notice within any of the applications in the Office 2010 suite is a reworking of the Ribbon. Microsoft responded to a host of complaints over how hard it was to find basic commands with the Ribbon's UI.

Gone is the big, round button in the upper-left corner of the application's window. It has been replaced by a tab with a drop-down arrow. When the arrow is clicked, in Word for instance, an entire new window is brought up. This window features the menu items that would show up previously by clicking on the round button in Office 2007 including Save, Save As, New, as well as Document Properties.

We have mixed feelings about this element of the Ribbon redesign. Although replacing the large button (which users could understandably mistake as simply a logo) with a tab that has an interactive drop-down arrow is a good idea, bringing up an entirely new window of commands seems like an unnecessary extra step and could potentially confuse new users.

Every application in the Office family has the new Ribbon UI, and it has been added to OneNote 2010, SharePoint Workspace 2010 (formerly known as Microsoft Office Groove 2007) and the new Office Web Apps.

Although every application has gotten individual tweaks, there have been changes made across the board to the entire suite. All applications support something called Microsoft Backstage, for instance. Backstage is a nice, comprehensive view that allows users to conveniently see all printing options and Print Preview on the same screen without clicking through a lot of dialog boxes, a definitive plus in the reworking of the interface.

Office 2010 supports Paste Preview. This is where you can view the formatting of content before it's pasted into a document. There's also a Paste Options menu, accessible by pressing the Cntrl button after pasting an object.

You have the option to install a 64-bit version of Office 2010 during install. This is especially helpful for extremely large, complex Excel spreadsheets, which are size-limited at 32 bits. With 64-bit-capable Excel, spreadsheet sizes can reach into the Gigabytes.

Office 2010 directly addresses competitors offering cloud-based productivity suites. The big emphasis with Office 2010 is on collaboration. For businesses, the collaboration features are achieved with SharePoint Server 2010 or Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services running on the back end. Personal users can collaborate using Windows Live. Office Web Apps can be accessed though Windows Live and gives users the core set of Microsoft Office tools.

Using Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2, Office 2010 can be integrated with realtime communications, chat and desktop sharing. Users can view the availability of a person while, for example, co-authoring a document in Word.

Mobile users are targeted, too. Microsoft Office Mobile applications support the new features of Office 2010. Although there are new features and enhancements in all applications in the productivity suite such as OneNote, Publisher and Visio, here's a rundown of specific new features of the four major applications: Excel, Word, Access and PowerPoint:

Access:

Access now has the same intuitive Expression Builder Excel has. For those not well-versed in the art of development, plain text can be typed in and Access will auto-convert it to the correct code syntax.

There are 29 preloaded application templates. It's a lot easier to modify an existing template in some cases than to create an entire database from scratch. Some of the database templates include ones for Customer Service, Asset Tracking, Education and Personal Use. There is also integration with Web 2.0; users can enable Web-style navigation within a database.

Excel:

A handy new feature in Excel is the ability to create Sparklines. Sparklines are mini line graphs that can be viewed alongside any individual cell to give a quick graphical view of trends.

Pivot tables also get an update. "Slicers" gives enhanced PivotTable filtering; users can drill through large amounts of data quickly. Search capability within tables and PivotTable filters has also been added.

Microsoft is offering an add-on for Excel that is a feature of its Project Gemini -- a recently announced business intelligence initiative. This add-on lets a user model any type of business scenario. It is a solution for accessing, integrating and sharing large amounts of data.

Among other enhancements in Excel are improvements on chart and table handling, improvement in converting digital handwritten notes or images into text or objects and improved accuracy of a number of key statistics and financial functions.

PowerPoint:

Some of the most impressive new features are in PowerPoint. As far as presentation-making goes, PowerPoint is still leaps and bounds ahead of any of the competition's presentation applications.

SmartArt has added additional graphics that can make a presentation stand out. With SmartArt, grouped or nonsequential information can be shown in a slide in different layouts such as hierarchical, pyramid, cyclical and more.

Animation can be added to stationary objects and the Animation Painter lets you format animations in much the same way as you would format text. There have been a number of slide transitions added, some with 3-D effects.

The multiwindow capability is a welcome addition. Users can run two presentations on a single monitor, side-by-side or in separate windows.

One of the most eagerly anticipated features is the ability to insert video from online sites into a presentation. Video from sites such as YouTube can be embedded within a slide and edited with the video editor.

Word:

Text effects have been enhanced in Word. Glow, Reflect and Shadow effects can be applied for some high-level formatting. Text formatting is also heightened with fine typography, in which users can add ligatures, true small caps or different style alternatives to text.

Users can also directly insert screenshots without leaving Word, a feature that works nicely and keeps the formatting of the copied image intact.

Improvements have been made in other areas as well, among them are picture editing, support for math equations and a beefed-up search.

During testing Office 2010, we encountered a couple of instances of program crashes in Excel and Access. There is also a certain feel of sluggishness, especially when loading a 90-page Word document full of images. We tested on a Vista SP2 machine with 4 GB RAM and dual 2.53GHz processors. Office 2010 is still in development so, hopefully, by the time the RTM comes out Microsoft will have any potential performance issues addressed.

Installation was fairly quick; it took about 14 minutes to do a full install of the suite. Performance in Word and PowerPoint seemed superior to performance of the same applications in Office 2007.

Microsoft is reducing the number of SKUs in Office 2010 from eight to six. Office Enterprise, Small Business and Ultimate Editions are gone. Enterprises instead will be offered Office Professional Plus, which will include OneNote and SharePoint Workspace, and Office Standard, which will include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and Publisher.

For consumers and small businesses, Office Professional will still be offered. Office Home and Student is another option including Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. A new SKU for that market is Office Home and Business Edition, which includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote and Outlook. This new version replaces Office Small Business.

Office Web Applications is free for consumers and available through Windows Live. It will also be delivered as a subscription service through SharePoint online hosted by Microsoft or its partners. It will be included as part of Software Assurance for volume license customers who purchase Office 2010 ProPlus or Office 2010 Standard Edition.

Office 2010 is certainly feature-rich and full of great enhancements. The collaboration capabilities are an added bonus. However, more productivity suites are being increasingly offered as a SaaS option. With Office 2010, a user still needs on-premise installs of Office and SharePoint to use a lot of the collaboration functionality.

Will users opt for the rich feature set of Office 2010 or will they want to move to a completely managed solution like Google Apps Premiere, which is not quite as feature-rich? It remains to be seen. If Microsoft can streamline performance of Office 2010 by the time of the RTM, it may put it well back in the game.