First look: Microsoft Office 2010 review

Common New Features

The biggest of the new features common to all applications is the "Backstage View". This is the replacement for the File menu and is accessed from the now smaller, oblong "Office Button" which lives at the top left of the Ribbon in all applications.

The big round Office Button was roundly criticised in Office 2007 because new users didn't even realise it was there and couldn't work out how to open, save or print their documents.

Backstage View lets you do things with the document, such as save, print, send or share. When you click the Office Button, Backstage View completely takes over the application's window, presenting instead a big menu of major options on the left with the centre and right showing sub-options and more depending on which major option you have chosen.

If you choose the Info section, for instance, you can protect your document (encrypt it, add a digital signature or mark it as final), check it for issues (such as accessibility or compatibility problems or hidden metadata), manage different versions of the document and view and add document properties such as author names, comments, keywords, etc.

The print section of the Backstage View combines the features of the old Print dialog with the Print Preview display so you can do a final visual check of your document and alter settings such as duplex printing, collation orders and which pages to print before committing the document to paper.

This is a big change but it does work intuitively and it can be easier to scan the simple list of option settings than it was to check the old Print Options dialog to make sure you'd set it right.

Another common new feature is called Paste Preview, accessible from right-click menus and the Paste button on the Ribbon. This lets you check the effect of pasting text or an object before you do it and choose whether to accept the source formatting, destination formatting, to merge formatting or paste as plain text only.

Pasting objects such as images, drawings or charts get the options appropriate to that object. If you habitually use the Ctrl+V keyboard shortcut to paste, you can still get at the Paste Preview options by pressing Ctrl (sic) again after Ctrl+V.

Common Improvements

You no longer need a separate photo-editing programme to make common corrections and changes to images you want to include in your documents.

The Picture Tools in Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint now include colour and contrast correction, background removal and artistic effects.

A couple of clicks is all it takes to take a photograph of your dog on the beach, remove the beach and render the dog as a pencil sketch or watercolour.

The thumbnails for each effect are derived from the picture you are working on so you get even more feedback on the effect you??ll see before you chose it, saving even more time.

SmartArt has been improved with new types of diagrams including timelines, organisation charts and several new types of process diagrams. The SmartArt tools on the Ribbon include new buttons to add shapes, promote demote and reorder shapes so you can work directly with the shapes as well as with the bullet point text from which they are derived.

In Office 2007, WordArt was in a state of flux. Excel actually had a better, more modern WordArt experience than Word. In Office 2010, Word, PowerPoint and Excel all have the same WordArt experience with only Publisher being left behind with the old model.