By Yardena Arar, PC World US
July 1, 2010

Everyone is still reeling from the recession, and cash is tight— not, perhaps, the best time for Microsoft to launch a new version of its ubiquitous Office productivity suite.

Nevertheless, with Office 2010, Microsoft continues to refine the dramatic overhaul that it began with the 2007 editions, while adding a few nifty new features with marquee appeal—all at prices much lower than we saw for similar Office 2007 packages.

The most immediately visible innovation in the new suite is a set of Web-based applications—online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote—slated to appear on Windows Live when the desktop editions ship in June. For businesses that wish to host their own Office Web Apps privately, Microsoft will also offer SharePoint versions of the online suite.

In general, the shipping version of the suite isn’t much different from the Office 2010 beta. Some of the new features should impress even jaded Office users; PowerPoint’s Broadcast Slide Show function, which lets you show a presentation remotely to anyone with a Silverlight-enabled browser, heads the list.

Improved customization features for the ribbon interface, which premiered in the key Office 2007 programs and is now present suitewide, could mollify some of the ribbon’s many critics: you can now assemble the commands you use most frequently—regardless of where they normally reside—in tabs and groups of your own creation.

Overall, the suite’s look is more consistent from one app to another—and more subdued than its predecessor, primarily because Microsoft opted for a palette of mostly grey and white, versus the sky blue of Office 2007.

Office 2010 introduces a nice little refinement to the most basic of all content-creation tasks, pasting material you’ve cut or copied. The new Live Preview for paste not only lets you opt to retain the source formatting, merge with destination formatting, or transfer text, but also allows you to see what your choice will look like before you commit to it—much the way the ribbon lets you try out formats by hovering your pointer over them.

The suite also now boasts some fairly sophisticated image- and video-editing tools that could, for many users, eliminate the need to process media with third-party applications before using them in Office documents.

Responding to the increasing problem of malware that arrives in files downloaded from the Web, the programs now by default open downloaded Office documents in a protected view, with editing disabled until you explicitly authorize it by clicking a button in a highly visible warning that appears at the top of the window.

Some other new features work only with other Microsoft applications, such as a presence indicator that allows you to see which of your Windows Live Messenger contacts are online and to initiate conversations from within various suite applications.

64-BIT OPTIONS

Office 2010 is the first iteration of the Microsoft suite to arrive in both 32- and 64-bit versions. The 64-bit edition, however, does not have the full functionality of the 32-bit suite: Among other things, third-party Outlook Social Connectors (for displaying updates from popular social networks within Outlook) are not immediately available for x64 (Microsoft says they will arrive eventually), and Outlook x64 does not support synchronization with Windows Mobile devices because 64-bit versions of Windows lack the Windows Mobile Device Center.

The 64-bit editions of Excel and Microsoft Project can use x64’s ability to address more memory to run huge spreadsheets or project models, respectively (though strangely the same does not hold true for large Access databases). Unless you bump into limits with the 32-bit version of these applications, however, Microsoft recommends that you stick with the 32-bit edition of Office, even if your computer runs a 64-bit operating system.

A USEFUL UPDATE

Overall, Office 2010 shapes up as a pleasing and, in many ways, useful successor to Office 2007. Microsoft isn’t offering upgrade pricing, but the Product Key Card versions aren’t outrageously expensive, and many people will be fine with either the four-app (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) Home and Student edition for as little as $119, or, if Outlook is a must, the $199 Home and Business suite. Especially if you skipped Office 2007, a switch to Office 2010 is worth considering— even in a recession.

WORD 2010

Apart from the suitewide alterations, Word 2010’s key changes focus on design tools. First among them are new OpenType typography features that let you apply artistic effects ranging from ligatures to glows to bevelled edges, all easily accessible from the Fonts pop-up window.

In longer documents with subheads, the navigation pane (easily accessible from the View tab) makes skipping between sections simple. The new Insert Screenshot feature (found under the Insert tab) permits you to add, instantly, an image of any open, nonminimized window on your desktop; without exiting the document, you can even opt to add just a region of an open window, which you can define on the fly.

Unfortunately, Word has become such a powerful document-creation tool that its online counterpart is all the more of a letdown. Using the Web app isn’t difficult: the Save & Send screen has a convenient ‘Save to SkyDrive’ option, and I didn’t mind not having all of the rich media tools. But the Web app’s lack of support for Word’s own revision-and-review toolset seems unpardonable, since one of the best reasons for a Web version is to simplify collaboration. While the Web app does support simultaneous editing, the feature is still underwhelming.

EXCEL 2010

The eye-popping chart graphics introduced in Office 2007 are certainly a hard act to follow, and aside from the suitewide image-editing, OneNote integration, and paste-preview features, the new Excel doesn’t offer a lot to brag about. As in the beta release, the most eye-catching innovation is the addition of Sparklines, a feature that can create tiny charts in a single cell to illustrate trends in a row of figures.

Excel power users who own the 64-bit edition stand to benefit from the ability to manipulate massively larger amounts of data thanks to that version’s increased addressing of memory. Excel jockeys also will want to download the free PowerPivot for Excel 2010 addon, which lets you gather and analyze huge amounts of data from multiple sources.

The ability to save such complex spreadsheets to the Web, open and edit them in the Web version of Excel, and return them to the desktop without encountering formatting issues is probably one of the strongest achievements of Office Web Apps. Anyone who has attempted to do this kind of thing with third-party Web services knows just how difficult it can be. But as with Word, functionality in the Web edition of Excel is severely limited, offering no charting tools whatsoever.

POWERPOINT 2010

PowerPoint improvements include fairly robust built-in video-editing features that not only let you trim your embedded video but also bundle it up so that it travels with your presentation. You can import video from the Web on the fly, too, and all the neat image-acquisition and editing features available in Word apply here as well.

As all previous new versions did, PowerPoint 2010 enlarges the already handsome arsenal of transitions and themes with new eye candy, including a selection of 3D effects. A new animation painter allows you to apply animation you’ve created for objects in one slide to objects in other slides. And a new autosave capability will surely rescue more than one work in progress from oblivion after an unexpected crash.

OUTLOOK 2010

The latest edition of Outlook delivers new layout options and features designed to put more information than ever at your fingertips. Change is always tricky with popular software, however. A feature introduced in the beta—conversation view, in which all messages in an email thread are gathered together regardless of when they were sent (à la Gmail)—is turned off by default in the shipping version, following complaints from some beta testers.

To the existing panes (folders, messages, reading, and calendar), the default mail view adds a people pane that shows your recent interactions with the sender of whatever message appears in the reading pane. The people pane also is home to the most interesting new feature in the beta, Outlook Social Connector, which lets you view updates from popular social networks for contacts who are members. This function, however, works only with networks that support it with a downloadable add-on (at this writing, only LinkedIn and MySpace provide add-ons; Microsoft says that Facebook and, oddly, Windows Live add-ons are due soon). Another concern is that Microsoft does not support Social Connector for the x64 edition of Office.

ONENOTE 2010

If Office users don’t all start using OneNote to take notes (typed or, where digital ink is supported, handwritten), to gather and organize thoughts and information from various sources, and to share everything with colleagues, it won’t be for lack of trying on Microsoft’s part. The 2010 version of OneNote, now a component of all Office editions, adds some powerful tools, including an improved search function, the ability to turn handwritten math equations into text, and—for shared notebooks—visual cues to show what new content has been added since you last opened the document.

MICROSOFT’S WEB APPS: EASY ACCESS AND LIMITED FUNCTIONALITY

What Microsoft is doing with Office Web Apps appears to be little more than an effort to fend off Google Docs and other online-apps competitors by giving users who collaborate on documents—or individuals who need access to their files from several Office-equipped computers—a basic alternative.

Microsoft is also integrating Web-app support into the new version of Hotmail: users who receive attachments in Office XML formats will be able to open and edit them in the browser (saving the download step previously required to open the documents in a desktop program). Of course, you’ll still have the desktop option if you want more functionality.

Aside from online access, the other principal benefit of Microsoft’s Web apps is that they don’t break Office formatting. Whatever changes you make to a file on the Web, you are unlikely to be surprised with the results when you bring the file back to your desktop. Given the formatting issues that frequently arise with Office docs in competing Web apps, this is no small achievement.

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