eWeek - June 7, 2010

or free ad-supported forms. What’s more, these applications boast uncharacteristically broad support for non-Microsoft products: The apps support Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome Web browsers nearly as well as Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer.

As they stand now, the Web apps are much thinner in terms of features and extensibility than the better-established Web app offerings from Google and Zoho. But at sites that store documents on a SharePoint 2010 server, I can imagine the Office Web Apps seeing frequent use for previewing documents and carrying out minor edits.

I’m interesting in seeing how Microsoft moves forward, adding new features and improvements to its Web Apps. In particular, I’ll pay attention to how well it handles the challenge of rolling out improvements—not only on the Web Apps instances Microsoft hosts itself, but also on the on-premises installations of Office and SharePoint customers.

Office 2010 will be available at retail in a number of different editions, including Home and Student, Home and Business, and Professional editions, priced at between $150 and $500. Microsoft has done away with upgrade pricing discounts.

For volume license customers,
Office 2010 is available in Standard
and Professional Plus editions. The
Standard edition includes Word,
Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, One-
Note and Publisher, as well as access
to Office Web Apps. The Professional
Plus edition adds SharePoint Work-
space (formerly known as Groove),
InfoPath and Microsoft Commu-
nicator. For more information on
Office 2010 editions and pricing, go
to tinyurl.com/2uuc9t8.

I conducted most of my Office 2010 tests on virtual machines with between 1GB and 2GB of RAM running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 or the 32-bit version of Windows XP SP3. Office 2010 ran happily on every configuration I tested.

Core enhancements

The biggest interface tweak in Office 2010 is probably the addition of a “backstage area” to replace what had been the “File” menu drop-down. In each application, these backstage areas house “meta document” options, such as those for saving, opening, printing or exporting.

In Outlook, the backstage area con-
tains account and folder settings,
alongside import and export options.
In PowerPoint, I visited the backstage
area of a presentation with embedded
video to shrink the size of my video
for different types of distribution.

Word 2010 sports nice enhancements to its sidebar interface, starting with the application’s Navigation Pane, which replaces Word 2007’s Document Map feature. I used the Navigation Pane to traverse Word documents by jumping from heading to heading. I liked the way I could reorganize topics within a document by dragging the headings around within the pane.

Also situated in this side pane is a useful search feature. I typed the words I sought in my document, and the search pane filled in the results and a bit of context. By default, the search pane tool looks for text, but I could also seek out graphics, tables, equations, footnotes and comments by selecting from a drop-down menu.

Another useful set of enhancements revolves around cutting and pasting. In response to research that indicated the most common action that users take after pasting content into an Office document is hitting the undo button, the team added new pre- and post-paste features, housed in context-sensitive Smart Tags, reducing the need to hit undo.

For instance, in Excel, 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.

Also new in Excel 2010 are

OFFICE 2010 FROM PAGE 18

The Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents I tested rendered well in my test browsers, offering the best route I’ve seen for viewing an Office document as intended without having a copy of Office installed.