Office 2010 Tech Preview – All Round Improvements

PowerPoint and Word both have an option embedded in their Ribbons for inserting screenshots of active windows into documents or presentations. Choosing this option spawned a dialog with thumbnails of all the open windows on my test machine.

I could choose to insert these thumbnails into my document or presentation. I could also grab new screen clippings to insert, but I had to make sure that the window from which I wished to clip was the one I was viewing just before focusing on the Word or PowerPoint window. I found it easier to select a whole window and do my cropping as a second step.

PowerPoint 2010 has picked up some new, slick-looking Smart Art elements, along with some fancy new Apple Keynote-style slide transition effects.
In addition, PowerPoint has gained the ability to trim embedded videos down to size with fairly easy-to-use controls. The application offered the option of embedding Web-hosted videos, but I had trouble getting this feature to work with the YouTube video that I tried out during my test.

I was happy to see that PowerPoint now includes Windows Media Video as an output format–previously, exporting presentations to video required a separate plug-in. I’d like to see PowerPoint join OpenOffice.org Impress in adopting Adobe’s SWF as an export format, as well.

During my tests, I had a bit of fun with Word 2010’s new image manipulation capabilities, which include a nifty new Background Removal tool. I was able to click on a person in the foreground area of an image and direct Word to swap out my picture’s background for a transparent one. Then, I managed to add a drop shadow to my image with another click.

Excel Charts

Some of my favorite new sets of features in Office 2010 are those that involve data visualisation in Excel. Microsoft has enhanced the conditional formatting capabilities of Excel with easy-to-apply visuals such as in-cell data bars.

I imported a set of NBA [I guess that’s baseball – UK Editor] statistics into an Excel spreadsheet, highlighted the rebounds column, and then applied a data bar conditional formatting element to the column. A bar appeared in each cell representing the size of the cell’s value relative to the rest of the values in my selection.

Elsewhere, I imported the statistics for a single player across a 10-year span, and illustrated the rise and fall of that player’s stats in a compact, single-cell chart called a sparkline. I could add detail to my sparkline charts, highlighting, for instance, the high and low points on the curve.

Given that the OpenDocument Format support that Microsoft added to Office 2007 in SP2 carries over to Office 2010, I was interested to see if any of these handsome visualisations would survive if I saved my spreadsheet in ODF. Not surprisingly, they disappeared when I saved my spreadsheet to ODF.

I also found that the classic XLS format lacked support for sparklines and other in-cell chart goodies. However, unlike saving in ODF, which spawned a generic warning message, Excel 2010 told me explicitly what wouldn’t work when I tried to save in XLS format. I would love to see Excel 2010 provide this same level of information to ODF users.

Conclusion

Microsoft’s Office 2010, which eWEEK Labs has tested in a Technical Preview release, offers welcome enhancements to core Office capabilities, but also breaks significant new ground by pushing Office apps beyond the bounds of the Windows desktop into rich, Web-based versions that perform on Firefox and Safari browsers – as well as on Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer.

Jason Brooks is executive editor of eWEEK.com