RSSTop 5 obvious feature enhancements to Microsoft Office 2010
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published July 13, 2009, 2:29 PM
Perhaps it was an accident that Microsoft released a series of Office 2010 preview videos this morning, instead of another chapter in its non-revealing "Office 2010: The Movie" theatrical trailer. The videos themselves were pulled down from Microsoft's servers, along with the micro-site that accompanied them, but not before search engine caches everywhere captured them, and not before blogger Long Zheng gathered them in one place.
This morning, these Microsoft-produced videos show extensive screen shots and demos of each primary Office 2010 component at work, although the appearance of the early code-name "Office 14" in a few of those shots indicates that videos may not necessarily be depicting the most recent build, being distributed to Technical Preview participants as soon as today.
None of the changes we see from these videos depict dramatically new features, especially when compared to the startling differences for many users between Office 2007 -- the first to include Microsoft's "Ribbon" front-end model -- and Office 2003. There are multiple noticeable tweaks, and there's an obvious effort by designers to make these applications cleaner looking, a little more like the 2003 edition.
Of the changes that Microsoft is willing to take credit for and claim this morning, here are the five we noticed that could impress customers gauging whether the upgrade is worth the money:
5. 3D rendering model in PowerPoint. Many companies' marketing divisions in recent years have taken to editing videos using an application specifically for that purpose, just to get 3D effects and transitions into a presentation that may then be imported into PowerPoint. The 2010 edition shows that more of the features of Windows Presentation Foundation (including some that were previewed for Office 2007, but which didn't make it in time) are now opened up for availability directly through PowerPoint.
The Application Painter feature, demonstrated here, is derived from the Format Painter feature first created for Word before the turn of the century, and then carried over into Excel. The idea is that the paintbrush tool is "loaded" with the last animation effect used on an object, so that same effect may then be applied to new objects entering a scene without having to create some explicit style for them, or to repeat all the steps used in formatting the first one.
4. Search integration with Document Map in Word 2010. Document Map was a feature that was actually created for Office XP over a decade ago (in this excerpt, my wife was one of the first to document it). The original idea was to create some means for the author of a long document to build a meaningful, useful table of contents. Up to now, one of the key reasons this feature has gained so little use in business environments is because, once a document already becomes long, it's too late to spend time sectioning it into a map -- all the convenience and time you gain from having the map is wasted in actually creating it.
Finally with Word 2010, there appears to be some genuine effort to make Document Map useful in a real-world setting. Yes, only now can you use a search line (instead of Find-and-Replace) to locate an area in a document that may be worth mapping. Here, the search process is instantaneous, even more so than the 2007 version's old fashioned Home > Editing > Find feature, and hopefully it's also now indicative of the way search and replace will also work in Word.
(The second reason Document Map isn't as well utilized as it could be is because many businesses, including attorneys and publishers, prefer to maintain long documents in multiple files, especially if they're already divided into sections and chapters. Imagine how difficult it would be for many collaborating parties to edit a book, if the entire book were on a single document. Now, Microsoft would say the answer to that is SharePoint, but my experience tells me that the way you would motivate a business to use SharePoint is to take the time to demonstrate it to its employees directly.)
Next: Little cell-sized Excel charts, and a whole new "File Save"...
this may be the best there is, but, since so little changes over the years, I wonder why the price stays up. I would think that each of the changes after the year 2000, being incremental ones, would be a point update in the series. These last two being glitz for those fascinated by 'all the pretty colors and shapes'.
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|Office 2007 is good enough. Office 2010 will be too hard to pirate so I probably won't even waste my curiosity on it. Windows 7 is something I'll play with cuz it's cheap ($50) and doesn't require me to upgrade everyone else I work with so they can work on my docs... An Office suite, for my biz purposes, must be installed on at least 5 machines to be worthy to upgrade, to avoid compatibility issues.
Hence I expect to stick with Office 2007 for at least 5 more years, or come across some cheap ($50) second-hand (but working) licenses of newer vers of Office...
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|I used to support Microsoft Word for Microsoft and have to say that nothing really interesting has been added to the office suite (that real business users are going to make much use of) since Office 2003 and saying that it a bit of a stretch.
Sure, plenty of 'behind-the-scenes' changes have been made along with a few million small tweaks and security fixes but besides those there are no ground breaking features that make the newer versions a real must have.
Office has sold and will continue to sell as there is realistically no alternative for businesses that have to maintain proper application support levels and will also continue to be included with OEM bundles until Windows stops being the OS of choice.
If you are a die-hard user of a particular office app then you will be able to name a few features which have improved the app and so make it worth while using over a previous release but I don't think any single person can say they must have all the new features of the latest version and couldn't possibley work with the older version if they had to.
Outlook has improved the most but most of those improvements relate to exchange users and so don't benefit the average home or very small business user base.
I for one always remember the old story about what is different between Word 6 and Word 95. If you don't know then I'll tell you...
Word 95 was a win32 release and so provided long-filename support because of having been designed for a 32-bit OS but not being realistically any different in features Microsoft thought of throwing in their ground-breaking additional feature of 'a highlighter tool', woo hoo!
Word 6\Office 4.x licenced customers could request a free of charge
Win32 version of Word named 'Word 6 for NT' which users weren't told about but did support long filenames but had no highlighter tool so essentially Word 95 was a pre-existing app, tarted up a bit with 3d menus and a highlight tool and sold as a new product.
I digressed slightly there by telling that story but the point I am trying to make is that so much of Office remains unchanged, like so many other apps that get undated every two to three years, that it really is a cheat to call them new versions at all.
New money for old rope that's what I say!
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|"so much of Office remains unchanged, like so many other apps that get undated every two to three years, that it really is a cheat to call them new versions at all."
So funny I almost drenched the keyboard with coffee again.
You guys and your "Nothing's new" routine... it never gets old. It's like you actually think you know what you're talking about...but don't. It's great! You, Carmi, and DBBen should take it on the road...you'd be famous.
The rest of us are quite happy with the finally useful collaboration and BI integration in 2007, and it being *more* than just "useful" in 2010.
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|Attention all geeks and Fatty too- LitCrit (I know not your field needs your help.
here's a description. and try to be nice:)
HP Pavilion running Vista Home Premium. After a Windows update and a Norton Internet Security update, existing Adobe Air applications--Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop--will not open.
Have installed and uninstalled Air, Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Still not working.
Seesmic opens the configure box, accounts are listed, but no passwords saved. When I add passwords and click SAVE, the configure box closes. When I reopen the configure box and check settings, the passwords have not saved.
Tweetdeck opens only to an empty frame, no account data loads.
I believe this is an Air issue, because both of these applications went bad at the same time and both of them employ Air for the connection to web.
I have since installed Twhirl, which is working perfectly, which tells me that Air is installed correctly.
Something happened to the settings during the updates. Will someone from Adobe please address this issue?
http://getsatisfaction.c...dont_work_after_updates
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|Sorry man. I'd love to help but haven't ever even heard of a single one of those applications (aside from Adobe Air).
Amusing names though.
I can't wait until someone makes a mash-up app for Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. (MyTwitFace)
Angela should get royalties on that name though. ;)
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|I agree PC. Not being a geek and more literary and not using those programs, I would hope someone here could help. Twatface:) good name for it. Kudos to Angela Gunn.
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|If you'd have really looked (clearly you haven't) in other Office 2010 apps, you'd notice "Quick Steps" under a different name "Customize Ribbon". In all apps, the ribbon is now fully customizable so any of your favorite commands can be added to the tab you want. And another cool thing about Document Map in Word is now you drag and drop the titles/headings inside it to directly rearrange parts of the document.
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|No mention of Office Web?
Flavors:
Free/Ad Supported
On-Premises (VLK Customers) (Self-hosted, *not* part of Microsoft's "Cloud")
Subscription-Based (Part of Microsoft's Cloud)
Saw a screenie of it on Ars and it "looks" far more functional than Google Docs (personal opinion, YMMV...."looks" can be deceiving).
Oh, just caught that last paragraph...funny.
"The biggest improvements Microsoft could possibly make to Office overall are in creating consistency for the Ribbon"
Uh... How is going from a non-changeable, always the same on every installation ribbon to a customizable, different on every installation ribbon "create consistency"???
...just curious. (not an opinion regarding any product, feature or function)
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|How is going from a non-changeable, always the same on every installation ribbon to a customizable, different on every installation ribbon "create consistency"?
Fair question. First of all, the customizable bay only appears to be prominent in Outlook and not the other components. But even assuming that it were extended to all the apps in Office: Back when Microsoft used toolbars, there were hard and fast rules as to where functions should go. This way, even folks who customized the toolbars knew where to place their commands. Granted, this led to overweight menus that took five or six clicks to get to where you wanted to go, and that was the design problem the Ribbon sought to solve. It achieved that, but at the expense of consistency. For example, in Word 2007, "Cover Page" is under Insert but "Table of Contents" is under References; "Caption" is under References but the item you're captioning is under Insert; "Hyperlink" is under Insert while "Citation" is under References; and viewing the page layout is not under Page Layout but instead under View.
Now, if the Ribbon had a more consistent system to it, then it could create a customizable bay or even a completely custom ribbon unit, and developers might be able to understand and follow the rules.
-SF "Consistent About Everything, Including His Own Name" 3
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|"For example, in Word 2007, "Cover Page" is under Insert but "Table of Contents" is under References; "Caption" is under References but the item you're captioning is under Insert; "Hyperlink" is under Insert while "Citation" is under References; and viewing the page layout is not under Page Layout but instead under View."
I can sum up your frustration quite easily (frankly surprised you didn't delve into this):
Action vs Task oriented ribbon. It has nothing to do with consistency.
In your world, you'd put *everything* related to the Page Layout under Page Layout (task oriented). In my world, it would stay as it is (action oriented). viewing the layout and editing the layout wouldn't be remotely related.
It all depends on how you work and I dare say there *is* no Right™ way to do it. Had Microsoft done it's research (or paid attention to it, assuming they did it), they would have allowed the user to choose the style that best fit their orientation.
I agree, it is counter-intuitive for many people; Frustrating, confusing...but not inconsistent once you realize how they went about it. It may *seem* inconsistent, but that is more perception than reality.
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|Not much new here which will justify the super high cost of "upgrade".
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|All Office 2010 needs to be a huge success is to add a "classic mode" that makes it work just like Office 2003.
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|Or at least bring back tear-away menus (which from a few of the screen shots might actually have made it back in)...
:D
Gotta admit, I am glad they allowed customization of the ribbon, but it would have been nice to see more...perhaps it will come in before release?
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|@manola: I'm guessing you don't know why MS went with the ribbon design. It seems that they discovered that about 90% of feature requests were already in Office. The redesign was meant to better expose that pre-existing functionality that was being continually requested. Maybe if people *actually* bothered to see if their software *already* supports a wanted feature *before* requesting it, maybe the ribbon would not have come about.
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|@morris:
Link me the source on that. I would love to have that handy. It sounds ridiculous...so it must be true. ;)
Basic software like "Word" has gotten so complex in the last decade (heck, even before) that most folks probably don't use the majority of the feature-set (or, apparently, even know it exists).
Well, I suppose all you need do is look at some of the comments and articles talking about how "nothing is new" to see that plain as day...
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|http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-144710.html
Sep 20, 2005
In user testing, Microsoft found that nine out of every 10 features that customers wanted to see added to Office were already in the program.
"They simply don't know it's there," Chris Capossela, a Microsoft vice president, told a developer crowd last week. "It's just too hard to find it."
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|Awesome,
In my Google Notebook now.
Thanks!
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|I used to support Word for Microsoft for nearly five years and at the start of that role I was provided with 6 weeks of training on Word 6 alone without even approaching anything to do with the OS.
There are quite literally thousands of features to each release of Office and to expect anyone to find them (let alone use them) is beyond me.
Most if not all users of Word never receive proper training and that is why they end up not being aware that features they could\would use are already present.
The Ribbon and context sensitive menu systems provided by Office 2007 are a very slight improvement but managed to alienate the die-hard office users.
Regardless of what surveys of users state I know from personal experience with some very large corporate companies that they simply won't move to Office 2007 and potentially 2010 unless they really have to because of the re-training and support required to use them.
That is directly down to the menus having been screwed with.
(The corporates of which I speak would not have been included in any surveys related to product useage and so their negative take on the features won't have been reflected in the product's reviews hence my reasoning for ignoring what the surveys positive spin)
At the end of the day if you loose productivity because of the ribbon and other new features, have to potentially re-train your staff, spend extra money on the overall cost of ownership of the product and yet can't improve productivity as a result what is the point in using the new version besides 'keeping up with the Jones'es'.
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|Retraining....for the ribbon....really.
The only training that would be required, in my mind, is for functionality exposed to the user via the ribbon that was previously unknown to the user. Learning this functionality would require training regardless of the interface. Accessing old functionality that has been simply re-organized shouldn't. A few moments here and there to hunt it down is all that should be required.
I could provide some similar anecdotal evidence to yours, but really, it's anecdotal...what's the point? I just don't see how this would require any retraining...at all.
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|yeah, its nothing more than simply repackaging, just like W7 is from Vista.
the question is how long can microsoft expect to milk it?
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|"its nothing more than simply repackaging"
...here we go again... I guess I can't be too harsh, Carmi played the same old, tired cliche.
Seriously... In an article *detailing* the new functionality.... you're going the "Nothing new to see here, folks" route? Really?
Note to trolls: I have not offered any opinions as to the quality or usefulness of any product, feature or function.
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|Oh, so Vista has the superbar built in now? Or comes with WDDM 1.1?
Really? If so would you kindly point out where?
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|Good Points, all that people do when they look at windows is thinking.
If it looks the same it is the same, that's just shallow.
The engine and underlying system matters way more.
The driver architecture has improved, not changed, in windows 7.
It's kinda strange that MS doesn't point to those improvements.
Guess that it's not flashy enough for most people to say that the engine of something has been heavily improved.
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|...
Microsoft is not pushing *anything* related to Windows 7 yet. Though I doubt we'll see many comparatives with Vista since it's still in retail.
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|@ bopb99
not really all that improved,
just tweaked / fine tuned.
all w7 is, is a vista that has been tweaked and finely tuned like an o.s. should be.
vista is no more than a bloated buggy mistake from microsoft and they can hardly wait to dig its grave.
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