Office 2010 Tech Preview – All Round Improvements

Cut and Paste – the Next Generation

It may not sound particularly exciting, but many of the new features in Office 2010 revolve around cutting and pasting.

The Office team told me that research has shown that the most common action that users take after pasting a chunk of content into an Office document is hitting the undo button. Office 2010 sports new pre- and post-paste features, housed in context-sensitive Smart Tags, for reducing the need to hit undo.

For instance, in Word, I copied to my clipboard a chunk of text, bullets and images from one document, and shifted to a new document. Right-clicking in the part of my new document in which I meant to paste the content pulled up the familiar menu of options, with a few additional Paste Preview choices.

I could retain the formatting from my source document, shift to the formatting style from my new document or retain only text. For each option, I could preview the outcome by hovering my mouse over each paste option. I was also able to switch among these paste formatting options after I’d pasted the content, again via a Smart Tag.

Excel 2010 boasts its own version of undo avoidance with cut and paste. I copied a multicolumn file list from a PowerShell command line and pasted it into Excel 2010, only to find that all my chosen content had been stuffed into a single column.

Rather than undo the operation and figure out how to turn Excel’s text import engine on my data, I was able to click on a Smart Tag that appeared near the text I’d pasted. The tag offered to re-run my paste operation through Excel’s text import wizard.

Similarly, I entered the number 1 in the first cell of a spreadsheet column, grabbed the corner of the cell with my mouse, and dragged down 30 or so rows. Excel filled each cell in the set with a 1, and spawned a Smart Tag to ask if I’d intended to fill the cells with a series of numbers – 1, 2, 3 and so on.

Office’s handy free-form note-taking application, OneNote, also receives a helping of cut-and-paste goodness in Office 2010. I could, for instance, paste a chunk of text into a OneNote notebook as an image file, and later ask OneNote to recognise and copy the text out of my pasted picture. I found that, as with any OCR operation I’ve tested, OneNote’s text extraction accuracy was less than perfect.

I was also able to paste passages from other Office documents into OneNote, and the application preserved a link back to the source document for future reference. Similarly, through integration with Internet Explorer 8, I could add text and images to my notebooks from the Web, and retain a link back to the source page.

Pictures & Video

Many document- and presentation-building tasks for which Office users tap Word and PowerPoint involve pictures and video. Office 2010 stands to make these tasks a bit easier with an assortment of new multimedia features.