First looks: Microsoft Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010 and PowerPoint 2010 review

The major applications get all the new features and improvements outlined in our preview of Microsoft Office 2010 as a whole but some new features apply to just one application at a time. Here, we examine what's different in Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010 and PowerPoint 2010.

Click here to jump to our preview of all the changes in Microsoft Office 2010.

Click here to read about the five new versions of Office 2010 and which programs will be included in each of them.

Microsoft Word 2010

The big change in Word 2010 - besides the Backstage View, combined Print dialog & Print Preview, multi-user editing and Paste Preview - is undoubtedly the new Navigation Pane.

This combines features of the Document Map, Thumbnails, Outline View and Find dialog all in the one pane. Docked left, right or floating, the Navigation pane will show you all the headings in your document and allows you to drag them around, moving the heading and all its associated text, its sub-headings and their associated text; to promote or demote headings or add new headings or sub-headings at any level.

A quick click and you change to see thumbnails of all the pages in your document or type a word or phrase to instantly highlight all occurrences of that phrase in the heading view or thumbnails and in the document itself.

There's also a view which shows you all the matches to your search so you can quickly jump to any one of them.

You can use the new Accessibility Checker to inspect your document to ensure it is easily readable by people with disabilities and new Language tools bring instant translations of words, phrases or documents, as well as separate settings for the applications display, tool-tips and help text.

Microsoft Excel 2010

Excel's improvements, as well as better PivotCharts and Conditional Formatting, include new data visualization through SparkLines and Slicers.

SparkLines are miniature charts which fit into one cell. Showing a line or bar to summarise each run of data they instantly give a feel for how that data is changing in a way that combining all the data onto one chart cannot.

You can highlight the high or low points in each run of data and adjust the axes to be relative or absolute.

Slicers let you visually filter data in lists or PivotTables by any dimension making it obvious what data is being included and excluded. This effectively unlocks PivotTable functionality making it a lot less scary for the masses of ordinary users.

Microsoft Outlook 2010

Of the major applications, Outlook has changed the most. This time it gets the ribbon interface throughout - even the search box gets its own context-sensitive tab on the Ribbon - and the Backstage View for printing, mailbox cleanup, rules and alerts and more.

The "improved" Conversation View will take a bit of getting used to. It groups email by subject even when the messages are in different folders. If you only have a few months of email online this may be OK but we found a lot of false positives when put against our ten years of data, where unrelated messages were grouped together because they had the same simple subject.

Quick Steps are interesting. They are things you often do such as marking a message as read and then moving it to a particular folder. Create a Quick Step to do this and you can do it repeatedly with one click.