Sounds like the main user complaint about Office 2007 that I heard about has been addressed with a compromise in the UI--the 'Ribbon.' It appears that MS came up with a compromise by keeping the Ribbon and returning the traditional 'File' and alt keyboard functions.
I need to see about downloading a beta now!
In Depth: Hands on: Office 2010 review: "
Office 2010 is due in a few months, but the beta release is available now. It has interface changes, bug fixes, one secret new feature – and although it's still a long way from being finished, it shows much more clearly than the technical preview what you'll be waiting for.
Like Windows 7, the Office line-up has gone on a diet; instead of six different versions, there are just three (for home users).
Office Home and Student 2007 sold a copy on Amazon every 90 seconds at its peak last year; the 2010 version has the same apps (Word, Excel, PowerPointand the under-rated OneNote) and the new Home and Business version has those apps, plus Outlook.
Office Professional 2010 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher. There's a free version of Office that you'll only get on new PCs called Office Starter. This replaces the ageing Microsoft Works and gives you versions of Excel and Word without all the business features, plus a small ad for Office on the task pane (that doesn't go away).
NEW ICONS: Office 2010 intros a new interface, new icons – and a secret new feature in Outlook
There are also new ways of buying Office; you can buy a 'product card' with a licence key to unlock a trial copy of Office on a new PC (particularly useful for PCs with no optical drive) or you can install a streamed version called Click-to-Run.
We tested the business version, Office Professional Plus 2010 which has Access, Excel, SharePoint Workspace (the Groove replacement with added SharePoint features), OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word and InfoPath (Visio and Project are still separate apps).
Some of the changes from the technical preview are small; others are more significant.
HOME AND PRO: The beta is the full Office Professional Plus version, but most home users will want Office Home and Student, Office Home and Business – or the free Office Starter on new PCs
We also looked at the Windows Mobile apps, and the business versions of the Office Web apps.
The Windows Live Office Web apps aren't in the beta but Microsoft tells us that the Excel and PowerPoint Web apps available now are feature complete and the Word and OneNote Web apps will have the same functionality as the business versions.
The rest of the web apps will be finished with the rest of Office 2010, in the first half of next year.
Hands on: Word 2010 review
The look of the beta apps is subtly different from the technical preview. They've still got the ribbon, but the File menu is back by popular demand; the Office button still opens the Backstage menu but it's now labelled File instead of sporting the Office logo.
The overall interface colour now defaults to silver; blue and black are still there as options but it turns out the deeper colour is a distraction (and will affect your perception of other colours). And positions of buttons on the ribbon change slightly, especially for the context-sensitive tabs, usually into more logical positions.
FEATURE PACKED: The Word interface is clean and simple but packed with features (though only a few are new)
Word shows off the improved Backstage menu well. If you use Recent files frequently you can promote a number of them to the Backstage menu itself. There's a new Add-Ins menu to keep third-party programs tidy.
You no longer have to keep clicking links to see all the metadata and properties for your document. And the Print pane has been rearranged, using less space for headings and more space to explain the different settings you can choose.
FASTER PREVIEW: The interface is clearer, the preview works faster and Word's new Background Removal tool does just what you want it to
As in the technical preview, there aren't any major new features in Word itself; the new navigation pane for searching still works well, especially now things are faster. Oddly, there are still two versions of the new Text Effects on two different tabs and the advanced Open Type typography would benefit from a clearer preview.
TEXT EFFECTS: Word still has a text Effects button on the Home tab that gives you presets plus custom effects and the WordArt button on the Insert tab that only gives you the presets
The photo correction tools and artistic effects are also mostly the same as in the technical preview but they're arranged more logically and they preview more quickly.
PROTECTED VIEW: Warns you about documents you've downloaded and no longer wrongly identifes shared files
The background removal tool is also faster, which makes it more usable because you can see instantly what effect marking the areas you do and don't want is having. The interface is clearer too. Text flows around the shape you create so you can make very effective cutouts of complicated shapes in an image very easily, turning a flower or a building in a photo into a single element that stands out on the page.
NO CHARTS: The Word Web app doesn't have all the features of Word so there are some elements you can't edit – like charts
The beta fixes a bug in Protected View; documents you've downloaded are correctly marked as potentially unsafe but documents on servers and NAS boxes aren't distrusted any more, and you can no longer have to mark a document as safe just to search it.
Hands on: Excel 2010 review
Excel gets the same general improvements in the interface; the look is cleaner, you can add Recent files to the backstage menu and the print preview lets you see the margins and zoom out to see the whole page or zoom in to read the cells.
DIFFERENT SHEET: If you put your charts on a separate sheet you won't have to wait for it to rebuild every time
The main new feature in Excel for the beta is an extra for businesses called PowerPivot; if you need to work with millions of rows of data, this lets you scroll through it seconds.
Even without that, Microsoft is promising performance improvements for Excel charts; complicated charts are certainly far faster to render than in Excel 2007 (which introduced a powerful but slow new charting engine) although not quite back to the speed of 2003.
STATS FUNCTIONS: Excel 2010 gets newly accurate statistical functions
If you put your charts on a separate sheet even Excel 2003 took a second or two to redraw the charts; in the beta these appear pretty much instantly as they're cached. And spreadsheets load and save more quickly (especially if you're still using the binary XLS format).
ACTIVE SHEETS: To save paper, the default print setting in Excel is Print Active Sheets; the preview pane in the Backstage menu makes it really clear what you get and how you can use even less paper
Statistical functions in Excel have been notoriously inaccurate; for this version Microsoft promises a complete rewrite – not before time - and the new functions will be signed off for accuracy by professional number-crunchers.
DASHBOARD: Create a 'dashboard' for exploring the results of a pivot table
If you use pivot tables, the new 'slices' make it easier to explore the information without getting confused; instead of having to turn columns and categories on and off in a task pane you can create your own interface by picking slices of data to put on the spreadsheet.
Click to select the data you care about and the pivot table updates; it's much easier to work with.
COLOUR IT IN: Have you had a good month, a bad month or a terrible month? Excel makes it easier to colour in your spreadsheet to make it obvious at a glance
As with the technical preview, the mini-graph (called sparklines) and conditional formatting icons and colour bars let you add instant visualisations to your data that give you a picture of what the numbers mean without creating a chart for every cell.
Expect to spend some time learning to make the most of them, but these give you the kind of visualisations we're getting used to seeing in Web 2.0 apps inside your spreadsheet.
Hands on: PowerPoint 2010 review
According to Microsoft's figures, you're likely to use PowerPoint for pulling together information you've been working on in other programs rather than working on your content there (unless you're a student, in which case PowerPoint is the app you use the most); that's based on the sheer number of keystrokes people use inside the different apps.
Because of that, PowerPoint makes it easier to organise information; you can put slides into sections and if you have two presentations open they're two separate windows (if only Excel did the same thing).
PLAY AND PAUSE: Correct, colourise, style and trim your video; if you play and pause before you trim the first marker is place where you pause
You can also merge two presentations; handy if you're collaborating, or if you want to join two slideshows into one without a lot of dragging and clicking. Incidentally, PowerPoint is a lot better at recovering unsaved files now, and as with most of the Office apps you can recover previous versions of your current document.
SNAZZY EFFECTS: They're the same as in the technical preview, but the new slide transitions do make presentations look much snazzier
HANDY FEATURES: Backstage comes into its own with clear explanations for a range of useful options; that's worth the space
PowerPoint has the same paste preview and image editing tools as Word; again, performance is improved slightly from the technical preview and some of the context ribbon tabs have a slightly more logical order. You also get a lot more tools to work with images and video – and a whole new set of transitions.
STYLE IT: You can apply video styles to online video; the borders will work but crops and rotations just put a border on the page – they don't apply to the clip itself
Your slides can shred, dissolve, fade, flip, wipe, swipe and generally arrive and disappear in a very professional-looking way (as long as you resist the temptation to use all the transitions in one presentations).
TWO BECOME ONE: Combine two PowerPoint presentations together
Trimming your video clips is the same as in the technical preview (and just as easy); inserting video clips from sites like YouTube is a little smoother although it would still be nice to see a preview in the dialog so you're sure which clip you're putting in. Also, while you can apply video styles to online video clips, reflections, rotations and clipping don't work; we'd like to see PowerPoint warn you of this.
Hands on: Outlook 2010 review
Outlook is the only app with a truly new feature at the beta stage, and it also benefits from the same kind of interface and performance improvements as the other apps.
Conversation view now picks out the message in a thread you haven't replied to, not just the most recent ones, and if you double click on a message in a conversation it will now open in a new window like any other message.
Some mail tips have started working in the beta, even without Exchange 2010; if you reply to a message in a conversation you'll see a warning if it's not the most recent message in the thread – although this also appears if the most recent message is from you and you're sending a second reply, making you think you've had an answer already.
ARRANGE IT: Choose how you want to arrange conversations of messages back and forth
It's now more obvious that when you hover over the names of people in email headers you'll get a contact card with links to send them email and instant messages. And the new feature gives you a lot more information about the people you get email from.
PEOPLE CENTRIC: Today the People Pane shows useful details from the emails, files and meetings you've shared...
…in the future, it could bring in tweets and Facebook updates and Flickr photos
Microsoft calls it the Outlook Social Connector, although what you see in the window is called the People Pane. At this stage it's just gathering information already in Outlook but that's still incredibly useful. If you've used a picture of them on your Windows Mobile phone (or used an app to sync pictures from an online service, you see it here so you know who they are.
CONTACT CARD: Outlook has always had ways of telling you about who is emailing you; it's now easier as you can get this handy contact card view
You get a list of all the emails that particular person has sent you before, all the meetings you've been at with them and all the attachments they've sent you, which can save a huge amount of time.
And you can click on the buttons for other people in the email conversation to flip to their details instead. The Xobni add-in for Outlook has these features and more, but Xobni, good as it is, has the performance hit of running a second index and store on your system; so far, the People Pane is as fast as the rest of Outlook.
ORGANISE YOURSELF: The calendar makes good use of the ribbon with handy options like seeing what you're doing for the next few days rather than assuming you get organised on Mondays
Gathering this kind of info together is going to extend far beyond Outlook. At this point Microsoft is only hinting at what you'll be able to see here but there are tabs for status updates and activities and the interface for adding other providers (which only offers SharePoint at the moment) says 'all your networks'.
With the beta, Microsoft is also releasing a toolkit services like Facebook and MySpace and Twitter can use to let you see updates all in one place.
When you get a mail from a friend, imagine seeing their Facebook update that tells you they're having a bad day, or the tweet that tells you they've had good news – maybe even the last Google Wave you had with them or the text messages they've sent you that you've backed up with Microsoft MyPhone?
Hands on: OneNote 2010 review
OneNote is thehidden gem in Office, and it's now in all the Office versions (except Starter but including the web version); it's a notebook app where you can keep text, URLs, documents, images, audio and video (which you can record directly and have synchronised with the notes you take) and anything else you can see on screen.
SHARE INFO: Send information from the Web or any document to exactly the right place in OneNote
You can print a document to OneNote, or clip information from IE (or Firefox with a third-party add-in), or grab an area of the screen – and rather than being dumped into the unhelpful Unfiled Notes section of old, you can now pick which section to put the information in. You can even put subsequent clips on the same page, so you can grab hotel prices from a range of sites and compare them all in the same place.
LINKED NOTES: Create 'linked' notes from any Office documents; you get thumbnails of the document you're annotating for referring back to later
QUICK ACCESS: The Ribbon interface is a big change and it does take up more room than the menus and taskbars if you're using a tablet PC; to make up for that you can put multiple pens on the Quick Access Toolbar in the beta
You can link any Office document to OneNote, so you can take notes on it – and it's sheer simplicity to share a OneNote page or section with someone else. You email them a link and they can work in the same page; when you go back to the page you see what they've added, marked with their initials – but you can both work in the page at the same time.
SHARE NOTEBOOKS: It's extremely easy to share notebooks and collaborate with other people in them; you can type at the same time but you also get this highlighting to show what someone else has written in your notebook
OneNote is peppered with a host of other small improvements – editing equations, translating between languages, making links by typing them like a wiki link – but the main change since the feature is making it easier to change pen styles on a tablet (OneNote has excellent ink support).
RECORDING: The ribbon interface works well for OneNote's built-in audio and video recording
If you don't want to keep the ribbon open (to give you more writing space) you can now put multiple pens and highlighters on the Quick Access Toolbar so you can change colours more quickly.
Hands on: Publisher 2010 review and other apps
With the Professional version of Office, you also get Access and Publisher. Along with Excel, Access will be the app that takes the most advantage of 64-bit systems (assuming you're running 64-bit Windows).
Most of the new features are aimed at making it easier to build databases quickly but Access is still a professional, powerful and complicated database app, rather than something you can jump right into using.
Publisher supports the same extended OpenType typography as Word; it actually has more options but makes it look much simpler by putting options in the relevant place rather than cramming them into the Font dialog.
ADVANCED TYPE: See the details of the OpenType advanced typography you can use in Publisher…
…or just pick a different look for the font from the ribbon. The page navigation bar and uncluttered workspace make it easier to see your document
It helps that the preview isn't hidden as you change from one set of alternate characters to another but it's even better that you can use the font tools from the ribbon, in the Text Box Tools context tab; that gives you a dropdown preview of all the alternate styles for your font so you can see instantly which one looks interesting and which looks over the top.
Publisher has a clean new interface; the guides and rulers and graphical managers and other clutter are off by default and there's a PowerPoint-style page navigation to show the different pages of your publication.
Guidelines are much less aggressive about snapping your content into position but you get a pink line hinting you're in a good place when you drag an object over the middle of the page or it lines up with something else.
Images larger than the box you're trying to put them in don't push text out of the way. Publisher also makes excellent use of the ribbon for many of its features, with galleries for the different elements and page parts you can insert; but others are still buried in dialogs with no live preview and most of the effort has gone on shifting the interface to the ribbon rather than developing the same new tools as the rest of Office (you don't get the new image editing tools or background removal).
Print preview in the Backstage menu is excellent through; if you're printing on both sides of the page you can turn on page numbers in the Backstage print preview so you know what prints on each side, and you can use the transparency slider to check the back of the page to make sure it's the right way up (handy if you're doing a folded booklet).
WORD ON A PHONE: Word Mobile has richer tools, from paragraph formatting to word count
The Office Mobile apps are only for Windows Mobile 6.5; Windows Mobile 7 will have versions with more significant updates (especially for OneNote Mobile which is all but identical with the current version but does now sync with OneNote beta). Word and Excel Mobile have more options for layout.
Conclusion
The beta of Office 2010 is a big improvement on the technical preview – and that didn't have significant problems. Many of the niggles and bugs that we noticed in the technical preview are fixed, like problems with cut and paste inside Excel or Outlook saying it was 'unable to complete a search' with a large number of results. Generally, the interface and features feel more polished; the Backstage menu is still a little oversized but it's been reorganised to be much more useful.
HAPPY FAMILY: The Office apps look like a family now though they have their own personality; the interface is less distracting and you can concentrate on your documents and the features you're using
Microsoft is claiming major performance improvements for Office 2010, compared to 2007 (which was slower than Office 2003, especially for Outlook and Excel). It's still too early to say whether that's true, but the beta seems speedier.
Picture Style previews and Outlook searches are fast and the apps open faster; the Cancel button has proved popular with technical preview testers who click the wrong app by mistake, but they often open too quickly for you to click it anyway.
It's too early to judge the People Pane as well. With only Outlook to draw on, it's handy as a faster way to see other email conversations and files you've exchanged but if it can connect to social networks like Facebook and Twitter it will be hugely useful.
MINOR CHANGES: These are minor interface changes from the technical preview, but you no longer have to wonder what the Office logo is doing there
The big question with any new version of Office is less 'how good is it?' and more 'is it so much better that I want to upgrade?'. One major feature (co-authoring with the Office Web Apps) won't work until the web apps are finished in the first half of 2010, but trying the SharePoint-based business versions is encouraging.
You wouldn't want to use Office Web Apps instead of the full desktop versions given the choice (especially if you get Starter Edition Word and Excel free on a new PC) but they'll be great when you're away from your PC. The pieces of Office 2010 are slowly coming together and once you've tried it, we think you won't want to go back.
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(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)
