Microsoft Outlook 2010 screenshots: Backstage view

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

We’ve already given a more general introduction to Microsoft Office 2010’s Backstage view, but Outlook 2010 deserves a special mention.

Above is the first screen to meet you when you click File, the Info screen. This makes it much, much easier to change settings than the horrible meandering mess that was Outlook 2007 and predecessors.

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Microsoft Office 2010 screenshots: Backstage view

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

If there’s one thing you’re bound to notice when using Office 2010, it’s the Backstage view. This is a unified set of commands and information that relates to the particular file you’re working on.

For example, forget pressing <Ctrl+P> and getting that boring old print dialog (shown right for comparison).

Instead, you’ll get something that looks an awful like the below, complete with an automatic print preview and an overview of all the settings. That not only looks nicer, it also makes it far easier to pick up mistakes (printing in portrait when you meant to print in landscape, for instance, or choosing A4 when you wanted A3).

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Microsoft Office 2010 screenshots: Accessibility Checker

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Part of the Backstage view, Microsoft has built in a handy little checker that will reveal which parts of your Excel, Word and PowerPoint files will cause problems for people with disabilities such as impaired vision. For example, it will tell you if pictures lack Alt text, highlight headings that are too long, and point out if the document doesn’t use heading levels in a logical way.

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Microsoft Word 2010: inserting screenshots

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

This is one of those features I just happen to like: the ability to insert a screenshot quickly and easily into a document. So, you’re writing a report or some technical documentation. All you need to do is head to the Insert tab and click on the Screenshot button sitting in the Illustrations area. If you have a multitude of other applications open, you’ll see a screen rather like this:

You then just select your chosen screenshot and it’s inserted painlessly into the open document.

Microsoft Word 2010 screenshots: Text Effects

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Microsoft Word has long offered artistic effects to add to your headings, but we welcome the new Text Effects as they make them easier to apply and also don’t convert them into some fancy graphical format – which means you can search on the words, just as with any text within your document.

The effects themselves won’t have Adobe Illustrator users fainting in awe, but they’re strong enough to add a bit of impact to newsletters or even the funkier company report. As ever, use sparingly.

Microsoft Office 2010 screenshots: Recover unsaved items

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

This is the screen you’ll see in the Microsoft Word 2010’s Backstage view if you click on the Info tab. Think of it as a glorified version of the File Info dialog you currently access if you click Properties, but with a much nicer layout and more power – including the ability to recover unsaved items.

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Microsoft Office 2010 screenshots

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

There were many good reasons why Microsoft Office 2007 earned a place on the PC Pro A List, but if we were to boil it down to one then it would be the Ribbon. While not everyone welcomed the new interface, it made it much easier for the vast majority of users to create professional-looking documents. And quickly. Microsoft Office 2010 would always struggle to have the same impact, but there are a number of nice new features that make this the best version of Office 2010 yet.

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PowerPoint and Silverlight: a perfect match?

Monday, November 9th, 2009

With its place at the heart of the Microsoft Office suite, PowerPoint is the overwhelmingly dominant presentation software for business. However it has a fundamental flaw – it still doesn’t offer an in-built route for efficient, cross-platform, screen-based web delivery. For a program whose whole purpose is to help users get their message over, this is quite astonishing and unforgivable as we approach 2010.

Microsoft might not provide its own solution but there are plenty of third-party applications which fill the gap such as Adobe’s Captivate and Presenter, the bargain Flair from WildFX and my personal favourite Articulate Presenter. The major embarrassment for Microsoft is that these all rely on the Adobe Flash format.

It’s an embarrassment that is made considerably worse by the fact that Microsoft is currently busily touting its own cross-platform web format, Silverlight, as a direct alternative to Flash. It’s clear that PowerPoint and Silverlight should make a perfect match and native Silverlight export would certainly go a long way to explaining (if not excusing) PowerPoint’s lack of support for Flash.

So where is the ability to convert PowerPoint to Silverlight?

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Microsoft Office Web Apps review: first look

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

We’ve been looking forward to getting to grips with the Office Web Apps ever since the first, highly impressive demos at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) almost a year ago.

But do the limited apps on offer in the technical preview live up to the promise of those well-polished demos? We find out.

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Why Outlook 2010’s conversation view doesn’t work

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Let’s be clear: Outlook 2010 is good. Very good, actually. And, certainly, if you instructed me to write an email client I’d come back to you with a white box with “INBOX” written on the front in biro.

But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been driving me up the wall.

Outlook 2010 tries to be all clever by bundling messages into “Conversations”. This is useful for when someone in the office CC’s everyone in on which pub to go to and you spend Friday afternoon battling a deluge of witty put-downs. In Outlook 2010 everything with the subject line “Let’s go to the pub!” is rolled into one conversation and you have to scroll through your inbox less. (more…)