At its Worldwide Partner Conference in mid-July, Microsoft finally released Office 2010 Technical Preview to a restricted, invitation-only, group of testers.
Apart from some bootleg copies that circulated for a couple of months, this was the first time we could take Office 2010 for a test drive, kick its tyres and look under its bonnet, and while there's only room for a whistle-stop tour here, I'm happy to give you my first impressions.
Office has never been so unified as it is now: all its applications have virtually identical user interfaces, based on the Ribbon, the new Backstage View (which replaces the File menu) and common features that work exactly the same way in every application.
Usability is improved by making the essentials work as you'd expect, and it's future-proofed by anticipating future needs such as video-editing tools in PowerPoint. Combined with SharePoint 2010, Office 2010 enables even better group collaboration, with multiple users able to easily edit the same document at the same time.
Look and feel
Forrester Research surveys suggest that 80% of people liked the Ribbon interface in Office 2007, while only 2.4% found it "significantly more difficult". Unfortunately, given 500 million Office users, that means around 12 million people won't be happy that the Ribbon is now ubiquitous throughout Office 2010.
On the other hand, Microsoft's Customer Experience Improvement Programme has somewhat reshaped the Office 2010 Ribbon, although most of the visible changes are small and cosmetic (there's still time for this to change).
All the applications look very grey, as they did in Office 2007 Beta 1 before the stylists slapped on the baby-blue, green and black colour schemes (other colour schemes promised in the Options dialogs aren't yet here).
Many icons are just red, orange or yellow placeholder dots, but the icon designers have been busy designing replacements for all those old menu items in Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, InfoPath, Groove, Visio and Project that have become buttons on a brand-new Ribbon.
Ribbon tabs look a little less cluttered, as all the small buttons have lost their borders, leaving just the icon, and separator bars now replace borders and gaps between button groups. Group captions are less prominent than they were in Office 2007, but this helps to make their dialog launcher icons stand out better.
Most of the application splash screens have swirling green and orange patterns at the bottom that excitedly tell you which add-ins are loading, or boost confidence by assuring you that they're "Still working..." - which is just as well since they can take quite some time to start.
However, sluggishness is to be expected at this stage since the debug code is still running extra checks and logging, and has yet to be optimised.
Common features
The biggest new feature common to all applications is the Backstage View, which replaces the File menu for basic tasks such as saving, printing, sending or sharing documents, and is accessed from a small Office Button at the top left-hand corner of the Ribbon in all apps.
Office 2007's big round Office Button was roundly criticised because new users couldn't work out how to open, save or print their documents.
When you click the Office Button, Backstage View fills the application's window with a menu, with major options on the left, while the centre and right of the window show sub-options that depend on which major option you chose.
Selecting the Info section, for instance, lets you protect your document by encryption, adding a digital signature or marking it final; check for accessibility, compatibility and metadata problems; manage different versions; and view or add document properties such as author names, comments, keywords and so on.
The Print section of Backstage View combines the old Print dialog with the Print Preview display so you can visually check your document and alter settings such as duplex printing, collation order and which pages to print before committing it to paper.
This is a big change that works intuitively, making it easier to scan the simple new list of option settings than it was to check that you'd set the old Print Options dialog correctly.
Another new common feature is called Paste Preview - accessible from right-click menus and the Paste button on the Ribbon - which previews the effect of pasting text or an object before you do it, letting you choose whether to accept the source or destination formatting, merge these formats or just paste plain text. When
pasting images, drawings or charts you see options appropriate to those objects, and if you prefer the <Ctrl-V> keyboard shortcut for pasting, you can still get Paste Preview by pressing the Control key once more; that is, by typing <Ctrl-V-Ctrl>.
You no longer need a separate photo-editing program to make simple changes to images you want to include in your documents, because the Picture Tools in Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint now include colour and contrast correction, background removal and artistic effects. A couple of clicks is all it takes to process a photo of your dog on the beach by removing the sand and rendering the dog as a pencil sketch or watercolour.
The thumbnail for each effect is a preview applied to the picture you're working on, offering more feedback and saving more time. SmartArt has been enhanced with new diagram types, including timelines, organisation charts and new kinds of process diagrams.
The SmartArt tools on the Ribbon include new buttons to add, promote, demote and re-order shapes, so you can work directly with the shapes as well as the bullet-point text from which they derive.
In Office 2007, WordArt was in a state of flux, with Excel displaying a better, more modern version than Word. In Office 2010, Word, PowerPoint and Excel now all have the same WordArt abilities, with only Publisher stuck in the old model.
Word also gains Text Effects that enable outline, shadow, reflection, glow and bevel effects to be applied to normal document text without embedding a WordArt object. Used sparingly, such effects can make headings and important words really stand out.
Customising the Ribbon
One of the bugbears for many power users in Office 2007 was the inability to customise the Ribbon. Unless they resorted to third-party add-ins or complex scripting, users were restricted to adding often-used buttons to the small Quick Access toolbar that lives on the left of the application window's title bar.
Microsoft always maintained that this was by design, as only a tiny minority of users intentionally customised the old menus and toolbars, while many people did it by accident, and it also wanted to ensure that Office looked the same after two years as it did at installation.
It's now relented somewhat so that anyone can customise the Ribbon in any application, but only through the Backstage View Options dialog, and then only within certain limits. You can move and remove tabs and groups and add your own tabs, groups and commands, but you can't rearrange, add to or delete commands from the built-in groups on existing tabs.
You don't get control over the size of buttons, although that may come later. The only way to delete a command from an existing group is to create a custom group and add all the commands you want to it, missing out the ones you don't, then remove the original group. You can also export and import your customisations or reset one or all tabs back to their defaults.
File formats
Office 2010's file formats are pretty compatible with Office 2007, with only a few of the new features not surviving a round trip to the old version and back again. The new SmartArt diagram types are even editable in Office 2007, but Text Effects in Word and Publisher are stripped out if you edit Office 2010 documents in a previous version of the application.
Behind the scenes, Excel 2010 adds two new namespaces to its XLSX files for mark-up compatibility and (I think) application compatibility, which ensures that Excel 2007 will ignore anything marked with the "x14ac" namespace, so that such features will survive editing in Excel 2007 and still be there when the file is edited again in Excel 2010 (see code below).
<worksheet xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/spreadsheetml/2006/main" xmlns:r="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships"
xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/ 2006" mc:Ignorable="x14ac"
xmlns:x14ac="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/spreadsheetml/2008/2/ac">
We still don't know the details of how these file formats have been changed to implement ISO 29500 - the amendments to the OOXML file formats required by the International Standards Organisation - or how Office 2007, 2003, XP (2002) and 2000 will cope with those changes, but digging around in Excel's Options dialog turned up something.
In the options for saving was a setting to "Save date and time values using ISO 8601 date format (may reduce precision)", which demands further investigation.
Major applications
All the major applications get the new features and improvements outlined above, but there are certain new features that apply to just one application.
The biggest change in Word - besides the Backstage View, combined Print and Print Preview dialog, multi-user editing and Paste Preview - is the new Navigation pane, which combines features of the Document Map, Thumbnails, Outline View and Find dialog all in the same place.
Whether docked left, right or floating, the Navigation pane shows you all the headings in your document and allows you to drag them around, moving each heading and subheading and all their associated text. You can promote or demote headings or add new headings or subheadings at any level.
A quick click takes you to thumbnail views of the pages in your document, while typing a word or phrase instantly highlights all occurrences of that term in the headings, thumbnails or the document itself. There's also a view that shows you all the matches to your search term so you can quickly jump to any of them.
You can use the new Accessibility Checker to ensure that your document is easily readable by people with disabilities, and new Language tools permit instant translation of words, phrases or documents, with separate settings for the applications display, tool-tips and help text.
Excel's major improvements, besides better PivotCharts and Conditional Formatting, include new data visualisation through "SparkLines" and "Slicers".
SparkLines are miniature charts that fit into one cell, showing a line or bar that summarises each run of data and gives an instant feel for how that data is changing in a way that combining all the data into one chart doesn't.
You can have the high or low points in each run of data highlighted, and adjust the axes to be relative or absolute. Slicers let you visually filter data in lists or PivotTables along any dimension, making it obvious which data is being included and excluded. This has the potential to make PivotTable functionality a lot less scary for most users.
Of all the major Office applications, Outlook seems to have changed the most. It gets the Ribbon interface throughout - even the search box gets its own context-sensitive tab - and the Backstage View for printing, mailbox cleanup, rules and alerts and more.
Its improved Conversation View will take a bit of getting used to: this groups emails by subject even when the messages are in different folders.
If you keep only a few months of emails online this might be okay, but we found a lot of false-positives when it ran against our ten years of data, with wholly unrelated messages being grouped together just because they had the same simple subject.
"Quick Steps" are interesting: these are tasks you need often, such as marking a message as read and then moving it to a particular folder. Create a Quick Step to do this and you can invoke it repeatedly with a single click. There are new Scheduling Views and Calendar Groups in the calendar module, and you can better control who sees what inside your calendar.
Unified Communications through Exchange Server 2007 or 2010 and Office Communications Server integrate well with Outlook 2010, with features such as your Communicator "buddies list" showing up in the To-Do pane. The integration is sure to improve further as we get closer to release.
In PowerPoint, a new animation painter that copies the animation from one object to another, and some new 3D transitions, make livening up a presentation easier.
Adding and editing video content is also easier. You can trim video clips in PowerPoint and add effects such as reflection or colour washes.
Slides can be divided into logical sections and moved around in the slide sorter. Incorporating screenshots or equations is also much easier. Presentation options now include the ability to broadcast a presentation to your audience via their web browsers, or compress a presentation to send it via email.
Other applications
OneNote is promoted from being a personal tool with some multi-user features to becoming a fully multi-user collaboration tool. If you store your notebooks in a SharePoint folder then anyone to whom you give permission can edit them at the same time.
Changes are tracked and tagged by the author's name, and you can see previous versions of each page and search by author tag. You can also link notes on different pages together. OneNote gets a new file format to support these new features, but you can upgrade or downgrade notebooks to maintain compatibility with other users.
The Ribbon interface arranges all the tools from multiple toolbars and menus into one place, but I wonder whether the Pens and Tags galleries shouldn't also be available to "tear off" and dock on the left or right of its window.
Publisher gets a big overhaul to make it work with a Ribbon interface and Backstage View, increasing usability. It also inherits new object-layout technology from Visual Studio, which makes it even easier to align objects on a page. Typography improvements such as ligatures, swashes and alternative numeral forms can be used with cursive or calligraphic fonts.
InfoPath's biggest changes are the introduction of the Ribbon and the splitting off of its forms Designer into a separate application from the form Editor. End users no longer need to have the full Designer tool, just a lightweight editor application.
Working with SharePoint 2010 data will be InfoPath's biggest strength; point it at any SharePoint 2010 list and it will design a rich form for that list, while SharePoint 2010 will render InfoPath forms natively inside users' browsers.
Access gets conditional formatting similar to that in Excel, plus the ability to design forms and reports for use on the web. Macros can now be tied to data tables rather than forms, and there will be even greater integration with SharePoint 2010.
As for SharePoint Workspace, Groove has been given a new name and a new purpose: its old functionality is retained alongside a new ability to carry whole SharePoint websites offline while you're travelling. Unfortunately, we can't test this feature until we get SharePoint 2010 later this year. The same applies to Microsoft Project and Web Apps.
Verdict
Office 2010 is far more than just a cosmetic overhaul of those applications that were left out of the Ribbon revolution of 2007.
There's still some way to go in terms of fit and finish before the scheduled release in the first half of next year, and I do have some niggles about the way certain features work, but there's time to fix or explain these better.
My overall impression is that Microsoft has made serious strides in increasing the usability, cohesiveness and collaboration of this most popular of office suites.