In-depth look at new features: navigation pane, text effects, customized ribbon
It’s early on a Sunday morning and what should appear in the Office Watch Inbox but some sneak peek looks at Word 2010! Lucky us. Here they are with some very preliminary comments.
Please keep in mind that with this and any other talk about Office 2010 – this is early stages. While most of what we see now will make it to the public release, things can and do change.
Our spies promise more images in the days ahead, and Office Watch will publish when they appear in our Inbox.
Office 2010 on Office Watch
We’ve reached the stage where Office 2010 news will appear on a regular basis, either officially from Microsoft or, as in this case, very unofficially.
Office Watch has created a special page for Office 2010 news as well as a matching Office 2010 RSS feed.
The easiest and cheapest way to keep up with Microsoft Office news (for any version of Office, not just the new one) is to subscribe to Office Watch. Office Watch is the free and fearless source of MS Office news since 1996 – email subscriptions are free and you can leave at any time – click here.
New Look? – not really
Word 2010 doesn’t appear to be much different to Word 2007. The changes in Word 2010 are more evolutionary after the revolutionary jump of interface and document formats in Word 2007.
Click on any of the large images to see a full size version.
The ribbon is still there, with some changes (see below). The Quick Access Toolbar is further to the left because the Office button is now smaller than the big round animal in Word 2007.
Navigation Pane
At first look, the document map and thumbnails views have been removed. But no, they have been merged with a new look Find option to make the Navigation Pane.
This is the new document map view showing a document with Heading 1, Heading 2 and Heading 3 styles.
We’re not sure that we like the fancy new ‘block’ view because it takes up more vertical space per heading than the Word 2003/2007 equivalent. This mean fewer headlines appear per screen and more scrolling in a large document. At first look it seems more like a stylish decision rather than a practical one.
Here’s the thumbnail view
And here’s the Find pane with the pull-down list of options. This should make it easier to find non-text objects in documents, which you can do in current versions of Word though it’s not obvious.
We’re told that the standard Find, Replace and Go To dialogs remain and will appear using the usual shortcuts and from the menu items shown above.
When you do a search the results appear in the pane, so you can jump around the document, as well as being highlighted as you can in Word 2007.
Text Effects
Maybe you’ll like this feature or maybe you’ll fear it’s a way for documents to be made uglier.
Text Effects is new on the Font group. Select some text and click on the button to see a gallery of preset options:
As well as the presets there are customizations to make your own with Outline, Shadow, Reflection, Glow and Bevel effects.
You might not be surprised to learn that the WordArt feature has been dropped in favor of this more flexible approach. In fact ‘WordArt’ remains on the Insert ribbon but clicking on it shows the new Text Effect presets and then inserts a drawing box with the matching ribbon.
Text Effects can be set as a part of any style.
Better copying
When you paste some text, you get a mini-toolbar with live preview.
The choices are to use
- Source Formatting
- Merge Formatting
- Keep text only
The Live Preview means you can see the effect of the paste options as you hover over each one – this should help reduce some confusion about the paste options.
And yes, there are keyboard shortcuts to access all of this.
Customized Ribbon
Hooray – people will be able to re-arrange their ribbon without taking time off to learn intermediate XML.
You can add your own tabs, groups, tools and icons to the ribbon.
A group of tools on a ribbon can be moved left/right or removed entirely
New custom groups can be added anywhere on the ribbon to make your own groups.
In this example, we’re shown a new group (from a fan of the TV show Dollhouse we assume) and the Clipboard group has been moved to the right-side of the ribbon.
Click on any of the large images to see a full size version.
All this is done from the Word options | Customize dialog box. There is a way to reset a ribbon if it gets too messed up and there are also (praise be!) options to export and import custom ribbon settings to a separate file. You’ll be able to share your setup to other computers you have as well as other people.
See Also
- Office 2010 ‘enters’ Technical Preview
- Access 2010 – first look
- PowerPoint 2010 – first look
- Excel 2010 – first look
- Other Office 2010 news and bundle changes
- Office 2010 Technical Preview – why bother?
- Office 2010: new relations
- Under the Office 2010 ‘Office’ button
- OneNote 2010 – a first look
- Outlook 2010 gets the ribbon interface
- Office 2010 new images and more questions
- Leaked! Images for Office 14 – the next Microsoft Office
