It's a new year, a new decade, and time to consider a new version of Microsoft's omnipresent Office suite. Currently in beta and available for public download, Office 2010 comes with a number of enhancements to its core applications, a suitewide expansion of its new menu architecture, and the first ever web-based versions of its most popular apps.
Before I took the beta for a test drive, I was skeptical about the value of an Office 2010 upgrade to law offices currently invested in Office 2007, or frankly, the adequate-for-most-of-us Office 2005. But the new version delivers new features and capabilities that could actually make your office more efficient and effective, so it's well worth considering, especially if you are planning an upgrade to Windows 7 or SharePoint 2010 (the latter is due around the same time as Office 2010).
RIBBON WRAPS ALL THE APPS
Perhaps the most striking change in Office 2010 is the appearance of the Ribbon in all the suite's applications, including Outlook. First introduced in Office 2007, the Ribbon is a wide context-menu strip that replaces the Menu bar and provides tabbed access to clusters of related functions and commands. This is the third-generation of the Ribbon, and Microsoft has refined it, reorganized its tabs, and integrated it across the entire Office landscape.
The Ribbon has gotten mixed reviews since it first appeared, but Microsoft's own surveys have found that it makes Office users much more productive, the company says. To date, more than 12,000 third-party developers have signed up to build versions of the Ribbon for their own applications, so it's almost certainly here to stay. Even SharePoint 2010 is getting a Ribbon. I've been working with it since the release of Office 2007, and I find it to be more useful and intuitive than a menu bar, so I'm glad to see it becoming a standard.
I'm also impressed with the latest Ribbon tweak: Microsoft has replaced the Office Button, which opened a drop-down menu of document management commands (Open, Print, Save, Close, etc.) with what it calls Backstage View, a full page from which users access groups of options related to the current application and document. Click the Backstage View in Excel, for example, and you'll find a list that includes the Share group, which offers e-mail and faxing options, tools for changing the file type, and the ability to send the file to "Special Locations," such as the company's SharePoint Server or Excel Services. See Figure 1.
Figure 1.
OUTLOOK MANAGES THE CONVERSATION
All of the applications in the Office suite get an update in the 2010 release, but Outlook gets something closer to an overhaul. The Ribbon interface has been adopted throughout (Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, etc.), and that's a big change. But the standout enhancement of this release, and one that is likely to transform your inbox, is Outlook 2010's ability to recognize and manage e-mail conversational threads. See Figure 2
Figure 2.
The new Conversation View, which is now Outlook's default e-mail view, assembles related e-mails under the most recent message and presents them together, turning dozens of messages into a handful of conversations, automatically. And entire conversations can be sent to the Recycle Bin in a click. As someone who receives close to 300 e-mails a day, I fell in love with this feature.
Although not complete in the beta, Outlook 2010 will come with a new "social connector" that will link the program to such social media networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. As social media evolve into commonplace, and even essential, communications platforms for business, marketing, and professional networking, this capability will likely prove itself in a law office setting. The social connector in Outlook 2010 integrates "social networking awareness" into the application, but it currently works only with Microsoft's own SharePoint.
OFFICE IN THE CLOUD
One of the most talked about enhancements in Office 2010 is its planned integration with a set of web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, known collectively as Office Web Apps. It is still under construction -- Microsoft just released a Community Technology Preview to testers in September 2009 -- but it's worth adding to the conversation, because it's likely to be the basis for some useful, browser-based, mobile-access capabilities down the road. In its promotional materials, Microsoft talks about Office Web Apps allowing users to work with Office files from remote computers and smartphones.
Microsoft plans to make its Office Web Apps accessible from Windows, Macs, and Linux systems running Internet Explorer 7.0 or higher, Firefox 3.5 or higher, or Safari 4 for the Mac. But as of this writing, Microsoft is not providing access to its online apps from Google's Chrome browser, Opera, or Safari for Windows. Accessing the Office Web Apps will also require SharePoint 2010 or a Windows Live account, the company says.
TWEAKS AND TUNEUPS
Outlook got the makeover in this release, but other Office apps received a few noteworthy nips and tucks. PowerPoint 2010, for example, adds "rich media" editing tools -- that means video, audio, and fairly sophisticated graphics effects. Previous versions of PowerPoint supported embedding video into presentations, but this is the first version to allow video editing. And a new live co-authoring capability allows teams to work together on a PowerPoint 2010 presentation from different locations.
Attorneys aren't artists, but these capabilities are going to make it possible to create more dynamic electronic presentations at trial, mediation, and arbitration and more sophisticated pitches to prospective clients.
A live co-authoring capability is also present in Word and Publisher. Both provide tools for editing a document or presentation in real time with one or more team members via a Microsoft-oriented instant messaging application. Both programs also support OpenType fonts, a cross-platform font format developed by Adobe and Microsoft.
All Office 2010 apps get a new feature called Paste Preview, which gives users a look at how text or images will appear in a document before they've been added to them. A context menu called Paste Options appears that lets you choose to paste with formatting or without before committing it to the document.
It's also worth noting that the release of Office 2010 marks the end of the venerable Microsoft Works, the basic productivity suite that has for many years come pre-loaded on new Windows PCs. MS Works will be replaced by Office Starter 2010, another basic home productivity suite aimed at users who don't want or need the advanced features of a full version of Office. It will include reduced-functionality editions of Word and Excel, and provide a direct upgrade path to the full Office suite. If you're feeling tentative, this might be a place to start.
Office 2010 will be the first version of the venerable productivity suite to come with both 32-bit and 64-bit installers. The 64-bit systems are more common in professional settings. Their ability to take advantage of large amounts of RAM will be especially welcome among heavy Excel users; Excel 2010 is designed to handle data sets greater than the 2 gigabytes of previous versions. If you've got massive amounts of data to analyze, this capability will be a godsend.
NEW EDITIONS AND PRICING PLANS
Microsoft has just announced two pricing plans for Office 2010: one for the boxed version and another for a "key card" version, which will come preloaded on some PCs and provide single-license activation (it works on that PC only) for a lower price. Here's the lineup as of this writing:
Home and Business edition (includes Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote): boxed $279; key card $199;
Professional edition (includes Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Publisher, Access): boxed $499; key card $349;
Professional Plus edition (includes Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Publisher, Access, SharePoint Workspace, Infopath, Communicator): Volume pricing.
This is a good time to check out the Office 2010 beta. It's a nearly feature-complete version of the product, so a test drive should give you a good idea of what it has to offer. And you won't be alone: Microsoft says that more 2 million people have downloaded the beta so far.
The company expects to release the final version in the first half of this year.
