My OperaSoftware - Microsoft Word 2010
Saturday, May 21, 2011 9:07:29 PM
10 cool features to look forward to in Office 2010.Source: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-cool-features-to-look-forward-to-in-office-2010/900
1: The Ribbon
Why would I list the Ribbon as the number one new feature in Office 2010, when the Ribbon was introduced in Office 2007 — and in fact, was the feature that caused the most controversy? Although some of us loved the new Ribbon interface, many others hated it, so much so that third-party developers soon devised programs to restore the old familiar menus. An example is Classic Menu from Addintools.
Office 2010 not only keeps the Ribbon; it has now been added to all the Office programs, including Outlook and OneNote. But don’t panic: The Office 2010 implementation is Ribbon Done Right. The difference is that now you have control over your Ribbon and what items appear on its tabs, and you can even add tabs of your own and put your favorite commands on there. No more despair because a favorite command that was on an Outlook 2003 menu can’t be found anywhere on the Ribbon.
All you have to do is right-click the Ribbon and select Customize The Ribbon. This opens a dialog box from which you can make new Ribbon tabs and add or remove commands from the tabs, as shown in Figure A.
Figure A
2: Office button options
Office 2007 users are familiar with the Office button, the big round button in the upper-left corner of Office applications, from which you can select a variety of tasks and options. Figure B shows the Word 2007 Office menu.
Figure B
The Office button in Office 2010 has a new look, and it’s been added to Outlook and OneNote, which didn’t have it before. Figure C shows what you see when you click the Office button (now implemented as a Ribbon tab) in Word 2010.
You’ll find many of the same options as before, along with a number of new ones. For example, in the Sharing section, you’ll now see options to save the document to SharePoint or change the file type, as you can see in Figure D. The Back button at the top of the page returns you to the document itself.
Figure D
3: Outlook improvements
Outlook is the Microsoft Office program I use most often. It’s the first application I fire up when I sit down at the computer in the morning and it’s the last application I close when I shut down for the night. And I’m checking my mail and calendar and looking up contacts every 15 minutes (or more often) throughout the day. This makes changes to the Outlook interface very important to me — I want it to work better, but I don’t want to have to relearn everything and I don’t want to lose functionality.
The Ignore button that’s been added to Outlook is just what those of us who belong to lots of email discussion lists have been waiting for. It allows you to get rid of conversation threads that you aren’t interested in. Not only will it delete all messages in your Inbox that belong to the thread, but it will automatically delete any messages pertaining to that thread that come in later.
4: Easier screenshots
If you’re a tech writer, you’ll appreciate a new feature in Word 2010 — the ability to capture screenshots from inside the application and paste them into the document, all in a couple of clicks. The Screenshot button has been added to the Insert tab of the Ribbon, as shown in Figure H.
Figure H
Inserting screenshots into Word is easier than ever.
When you click the Screenshot button, you’ll see the available screenshots, and you can click on the one you want to insert into the document. After you insert a screenshot, the picture tools will automatically appear to allow you to perform photo editing.
5: Photo/video/graphics in Word and PowerPoint
The photo-editing tools have gotten more sophisticated in Office 2010. Now you can apply artistic effects, similar to those available in third-party photo editing programs, such as PhotoShop, from within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You even get a thumbnail preview of what the effect will look like when applied to your picture,
6: Drag-and-drop navigation pane
One of my favorite features in Word 2010 is the new drag-and-drop navigation pane. It’s a little like the Word 2007 document map — on steroids. Whereas the document map only gives you a view of your headers and document sections, graphics, etc., the navigation pane lets you rearrange your document easily by dragging and dropping within the pane. To turn on this feature, click the View tab on the Ribbon and in the Show section, check the box labeled Navigation Pane
7: Open in Protected View
When you open an existing document for the first time in Word 2010, if you try to start editing it, you may be surprised to find that nothing happens. If you look more closely, you’ll see that the Ribbon is hidden. What’s up with that? The document has opened in Protected View
8: Excel sparklines and slicers
The most notable additions to Excel 2010 are two new features called sparklines and slicers. Sparklines are tiny charts that fit into a cell,
9: OneNote improvements
OneNote has been a bit of a forgotten stepchild in previous editions of Office, perhaps because it only came with the “lowest” and “highest” editions of Office 2007 — Home and Student edition and Ultimate edition. Most Office users have the Standard, Small Business, or Professional edition. Microsoft obviously wants to get more exposure for OneNote. According to early reports, Office 2010 features will follow the same pattern as Windows 7; that is, each successively more expensive edition will contain all the applications of those editions “below” it, and more. That means OneNote will be included in all editions of Office 2010.
The most obvious change to OneNote, as with Outlook, is that now it sports the Ribbon interface, as shown in Figure R.
10: Simultaneous editing
Here is another favorite of mine. I often leave a document that I’m working on open on one computer, and then need to open and work on it from a different computer. I get the familiar “file in use” dialog box that gives me the option to open a read-only copy, create a local copy to merge later, or receive notification when the original is available. Office 2010 does away with that annoyance.
Now I can pick up where I left off, or two people can edit a document simultaneously. A notification in the status bar tells you who else is currently editing the document, and where they’re making changes. Very cool!
Word can also cache shared documents so you can edit them when you’re offline, and any changes you make will automatically be synchronized with the original on the server when you come back online. Now you don’t have to remember to merge your document when you get back.
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