What’s new in Office 2010?

I have been testing Microsoft Office 2010 ( Technical Preview) for a couple of months now for which I was authenticated to use it by generating a serial key through www.connectmicrosoft.com. The sneak peek that I had was awesome and build which I'm still using is 14.0.4006.1110. Comparison was the best option I thought to decide upon how Office 2010 is going to be of different taste from Office 2007 and other earlier Office packages. Certainly, there are some promising upgrades and improvements over Office 2007. One of the biggest additions to Office 2010 is it’s online collaboration capabilities. Here are some noticeable improvements in the technical Preview build:

1. Built-In Screen Capture Tool:

A really handy addition & at the same time a beautiful implementation of the same. Word & Powerpoint both have the ‘Screenshot’ feature under ‘Insert’ & the useful part is that it catches screen shots of the currently open windows for one-click insert. Screen shot of the ‘Screenshot’ feature:

2. Background Removal Tool (for images):

This is a feature that I’m sure quite a lot of us will be using. A neat addition to picture properties is ‘Background Removal’. Suppose, I have an image that I inserted into a Word 2010 document as shown below:

Now, after using the tool this is what II can get:

NOTE: No use of Photoshop AT ALL!

Here is the Background Removal tool options tab:

3. Protected Mode:

This is also a very good addition as a feature. Every time you download a document from the internet & open it, Word 2010 will open it in a ‘Protected mode’ that won’t allow you to edit the document unless you enable editing of the document. Screen shot:

4. New Smart Art Templates:

It’s right up there amongst the best features in Office & in Office 2010 there are new templates added. Existing categories have new templates & there’s a new category as well as shown below:

5. Author Permissions:

As I already said, co-authoring a document & collaborating over the Internet will be one of Office 2010’s pluspoints, the ‘Protect Document’ option under ‘Review’ in Office 2007 has now been renamed to ‘Restrict Editing’ & a new tab titled ‘Block Authors’ has been added. Screen shot of the option in Word 2007 & Word 2010 is side-by-side below:

6. Completely Revamped Options Under the Office Button:

Office 2010 has introduced a huge a change in the document options that are presented to you under the Office button. One of biggest pains was the meta-data that can be added in a document. Quick access to permissions, document meta-data under document info. With Office 2010 you now have the option of saving your document to a SharePoint location as well. Screen shot:

7. An improved Control Panel Under the Office Button:

This is a fantastic addition, clicking ‘Print’ under the Office 2010 button opens a plethora of printing options. No need to go through a ‘Print Wizard’; we can directly select all our print options from here & hit print. Screen shot is below:

8. New Splash Screen

You don’t really figure out the awesomeness till you see the close & minimise options & the sleek animation

9. Powerpoint Gets Word 2007’s Equation Editor & New ‘Action’ Tab

Powerpoint 2010 now has the Equation Editor. Along with it, there is another tab – ‘Action’ which allows you to configure mouse-click or mouse-hover action of objects. Screen shot:

10. Broadcast Presentations To Your Clients:

Another sweet feature! Now we can broadcast our presentations by sending the intended viewer a URL and this works well along with Office Live Workspaces & we need an account of the same. Screenshot below:

11. Record Slideshows As Videos!

12. Compress Media While Saving Presentations

An option to compress the media files inserted in the presentation to reduce file size and also, it even gives an esitmate of the presentation size. Screenshot:

13. Save File Notification

When closing an unsaved file Office 2010 now lets you know that it has auto-saved a draft. Screenshot:

14. New Icons:

I should be missing out many other new features though, I expect most of my blog viewers will definitely have a pretty good idea on how Office 2010 looks like and what's new with it as well.