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Exploring Microsoft Office 2010 beta

Posted on 17 Feb 2010 at 17:37

Simon Jones explores the changes between the technical preview and beta of Office 2010

For the rich-client apps, co-authoring will be available

in Word, PowerPoint and OneNote (but not in Excel at the moment), and it appears you’ll need SharePoint 2010 to enable it. You won’t be able to co-author documents shared via Windows Live SkyDrive using the full applications, despite the fact that you can do so using Excel and OneNote web apps – this may change later on in the beta cycle, but Microsoft is remaining tight-lipped about it for now.

Visio 2010 & Project 2010

Visio 2010 and Project 2010 are also both available in beta and both show that an enormous amount of work has gone into updating them to employ the Ribbon interface.

Both apps benefit greatly from their makeover and include new features that make working with them much easier. Visio has inherited snaplines from Visual Studio, which make aligning shapes by dragging much easier. There’s also a live preview of alignment options in the Ribbon – you can hover over the alignment choices to watch the selected shapes slide into place, then click to select that option if you’re happy with it.

Project has always been a difficult application to use, with a myriad of different options, functions, forms, displays and so on. The Ribbon interface puts virtually all these controls in one place, so there’s less hunting around for them, and there are also new features, such as a Timeline pane that shows an overview of the entire project as a single line and which enables you to choose which part is visible in the Gantt chart just by dragging markers to the left and right.

This is a far easier way of controlling what is shown in the Gantt chart than the previous method of specifying a number of days, weeks or months for major and minor timescales.

All the Office 2010 Beta applications appear remarkably stable and show great promise, but the fortcoming months will be crucial. Microsoft needs to concentrate on finding and fixing the last few bugs, writing the Help text and developing the training courses for them.

Some people are bound to continue moaning about the Ribbon interface, but the majority of users do find it easier to use and it’s now more customisable, which should satisfy all but a very few.

Office 2010 is shaping up to be the most coherent and cohesive release of Office Microsoft has ever made, with features to commend it to everyone.