Office 2010 will be hitting our shelves (but more likely our downloads folder) in about June this year according to Microsoft, but in November 2009 Microsoft released their new beta version to the public to try. This is a public beta, unlike the technical preview I showed you back in May which was invitation only. The beta adds many new additions and stylings that weren't present in the technical preview. This article will provide a small preview into some of the new features available in Office 2010. You can download your own version of the Office 2010 beta at www.microsoft.com/office2010 .
Custom Ribbons
Office 2010 offers something that I thought was sorely missing in Office 2007 which was available in 2003. In every version of Office from Office 95 I believe (maybe even earlier) you have been able to customise the menu bar and toolbars. You could remove all the buttons you didn't need, rearrange the ones you did want into the order you wanted and add the buttons that weren't there by default. In Office 2007 they got rid of the old style menu bars and toolbars and replaced it with the new more efficient Ribbon (which is being used even more in Office 2010 and Windows 7), but in the process of doing that, they lost the ability to allow you to customise it to your liking. Well in Office 2010, that feature is back! You can create your own tabs with your own buttons or you can modify the existing ones. You can also hide the original ones you don't need anymore.
Ribbons For All Applications + New Outlook Features
In Office 2007, because the ribbon interface was still being tested to the mainstream public, they only introduced the ribbon into core applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access). In Office 2010, Outlook, Publisher, OneNote, InfoPath, Visio and Project are introduced to the ribbon interface. Outlook and Publisher are the two big ones for me to gain the ribbon, even though I do not use Outlook, instead I prefer Windows Live Mail. Outlook also gains some new features including conversation view, which combines messages about the same topic into one long thread to clean up your mailbox, and the ability to start ignoring a conversation. Outlook will be a big selling point for Office 2010.
Backstage and Printing
Backstage replaces the File menu (that menu coming out of the big round Office Logo) in Office 2007. It provides more functionality and and information than the old File menu. One of the biggest improvements for me is the new Print section. In every version of Office before 2010, the print and print preview functions were separate. You choose File, Print Preview and then you went and chose File, Print after that. In Office 2010 these functions have been combined. When you goto the Print button it has a narrow column of all the option which used to be in the Print dialog and then on the right side, is the preview of what you're printing, depending on the options you pick.
Backstage also allows you to do other things such as change the properties (attributes that relate to the document such as it's title, author etc), create new documents from lots of pretty good templates, open recent documents, convert files to other formats such as Adobe PDFs or documents that open in Office 2003 etc, get help, change Office Options and the normal Open, Save, Save As and Close! The Share screen also lets you save documents up to the cloud to Windows Live Skydrive where you can work on them using a free version of Microsoft Office which works on the web if you don't have an Office 2010 computer with you on the go.
Better Multimedia Support
Office 2010 definitely improves the multimedia support (pictures, music and video) across all applications but PowerPoint benefits the most. You can now do 2 things that I've been asked about a lot. The first is you can embed YouTube videos into a slide directly. Just pick the Video from Website option in the Video menu on the Insert Tab and paste in the embed code. You can also trim and edit video clips directly inside PowerPoint which makes using video in presentations a lot easier.
In conclusion - if you have Office 2007 and you're happy with it, then stick with it, but if you are using Office 2003 and wanted some of the bugs ironed out of Office 2007, then 2010 will be great for you! It should be available around June/July 2010.
