The next Office has new ways to link dates, people and documents
Under the Office 2010 ‘Office’ menu for Word 2010, Excel 2010 and PowerPoint 2010 are some interesting new features to link or relate the current document.
Documents can be related in ways that we’ve not seen before. On the right side there are pull-down menus:
Dates
A Related Date can be entered with label for example: ‘Sent to Client’, ‘Submitted to Court’ etc. However you choose to use this option, at last there’s some control beyond the basic open & modified dates.
People
Related People is linked to the Outlook or corporate address list or Global Address List (GAL).
Documents
Despite the word ‘Document’, any file can be related to an Office 2010 document. The idea seems to be that you can quickly open associated files from within an Office document.
We’ll hear more on this I’m sure but we’ve already heard one complaint. “Relating documents doesn’t work both ways. If I relate document A to document B then opening Doc B should show a relation back to A“. Good point, for this would not work for non-Office documents but it could be done for Office Open XML (.docx etc) documents.
Finding relations
What’s not clear is how these new relations will be available to users.
Can you search for all documents with the same or a range of related dates?
Will an Outlook contact display a list of documents related to that contact?
Can / will Windows Search support these new relations as seperate parameters? Hopefully there is already some talk between the Office and Search teams about this.
Other documents in current folder
Buried underneath the Related Documents heading is a truly useful new feature – ‘Other documents in current folder’ simply opens a Windows Explorer pane for the folder that the current document is saved to.
Since related documents are often saved together this is a useful, if somewhat ‘tucked away’ option.
So useful is this feature that one of our spies complains “ … wanted to put that command on the QAT now but it’s not on the list of commands.“
Hey – it’s a Technical Preview, chill out. There’s months of development work to go before Office 2010 is ready for the big time – a comprehensive update of the options on the long Customize buttons list is just one task among thousands.
