Office 2010 Beta: A Visual Tour of What’s New

Microsoft took the wraps off of Office 2010 beta, announcing the availability of a public beta of the software and revealing more about its flagship productivity suite. Microsoft has not announced an official launch date or price for Office 2010 except to say the final version of Office 2010 will be available sometime early 2010.

You can read our full review of Office 2010 beta here. You can download a beta version of Office 2010 from Microsoft here.

Office 2010 beta comes packed with meaningful improvements such as beefed up cut-and-paste functions for text and multimedia content. Also added is tighter integration to the Internet such as Outlook Social Connector, which brings communications history, collaboration, and social network feeds directly into Outlook.

One of the most striking addition to Office 2010 is the introduction of Office Web Apps. These are lightweight versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote that are all accessible via desktop, mobile devices, and Web browsers.

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

The ribbon interface introduced in the key Office 2007 apps goes suitewide in Office 2010, with more contextual changes.

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

Suitewide, the most immediately apparent change is the departure of the round Office button that brought up commands for saving and printing documents as well as for changing application-specific settings. Instead, Microsoft returns to a familiar menu convention: a File tab that brings up a full screen of commands and information. Microsoft calls this screen the Backstage View.

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

The left navigation bar in Backstage View holds many of the commands, but most of the real estate is devoted to big panes filled with document-specific items such as editing permissions, links to autosaved versions, file size, and even a thumbnail. (Businesses can customize Backstage View to integrate their workflow processes.)

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

Microsoft engineers have added a paste-preview feature that lets you see the results before you commit (similar to the mouse-over previews of font changes and other edits available in the ribbon).

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

Improved picture-editing tools allow you to preview and apply cropping (and many new adjustments and effects) on the fly as you insert images into Office documents.

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

Here is another look at the improved picture-editing tools.

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

A new Text Effects pane lets you apply artistic effects (fills, outlines, and the like) to any text–and still edit the text afterward,

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

The biggest innovation is a feature called Sparklines that lets you create miniature charts within a single cell, a way to instantly show multiple trends across several contiguous data sets.

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

Embedding video in a presentation requires only a click or two, whether you’re drawing from your own library or a site such as YouTube.

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

PowerPoint Broadcast Service, one of the more impressive PowerPoint innovations, lets you accomplish this with a minimum of fuss and nothing to install.

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

Support within Outlook has been added for tracking feeds from social networks

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

Application icons are chunkier and restricted to one letter, which invites confusion in the case of PowerPoint and Publisher, and bemusement in the case of Outlook and OneNote (the latter’s icon is the letter N, one leg of which looks like a 1).

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

Judging from the preview versions we tried through a SharePoint site that Microsoft set up for reviewers (and through the technical beta program on SkyDrive) Web Apps are no match for the competition. For example with the Excel Web App you can’t create charts,

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

In the beta Office 2010 Word Web App we tested it had no support for revision mode making collaboration harder.

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

The PowerPoint we looked at paled in comparison to the desktop version and also the wealth of Web-based choices such as Zoho Show.

This slideshow is meant as a compliment the review of Office 2010 beta Microsoft Office 2010: An Intriguing Beta.

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