Office 2010 Technical Preview: A SuperSite Special Report
Part 2: Expanding and Improving Office

When you think about Microsoft Office, you most likely think of Word, Excel, Outlook and the other core Office applications. This is understandable, since the traditional Microsoft Office suite is now 20 years old. (Fun fact: The first version of Office shipped for the Mac; the first Windows version followed a year later, in 1990.) Today, the desktop Office suite is still the core Office experience for most customers, though of course Microsoft has extended Office to mobile devices and servers and will further extend it in the Office 2010 product wave to the web as well. So where are we at with Office 2010?

"Our mission with Office 2010 is very simple," Microsoft Office group product manager Chris Bryant told me in a briefing last month. "We provide the best productivity experience today and are leading new expectations for tomorrow. We spend a ton of energy on each release making sure that the fundamentals work consistently, with great performance, no sacrifices, and no compromises, from device to device, and environment to environment. We must deliver the basics in a trustworthy and reliable way, and the expectation is that we preserve document fidelity with older versions of the software, all the way back to Word 5.1 in fact. And we believe that is very important."

Back to basics

Looking at Bryant's comments about the basics--what I think of as traditional Office capabilities--and future expectations, some Office 2010 trends emerge. On the basics front, Office 2010 will further refine basic productivity tasks, such as copy and paste and application-to-application integration. It will offer the highest quality document fidelity, something that's proven to be a huge issue with "competing" Office suites and services (though, again, Office has no real competition).

And now, in Office 2010, for the first time, email, the central purpose of Microsoft Outlook, becomes a fundamental capability. This is an interesting shift. "Email is a basic need now," Bryant told me. "This was not the case originally when Office debuted 20 years ago. But this is how Office has evolved. Email is now something that people depend on. So we've improved support for email in Outlook. Looking back, you can see other examples like this from history. In 1991, Word was the first with drag and drop, which was novel at the time. But now it's basic."

Bryant also sees the ribbon user interface as another example of an Office capability that will grow from being a novel, different thing, as it is now, to being a familiar and expected way of doing this. "Ten years from now, we will look back on the menus and toolbars of the past like we look at the command prompt today," he said. "The growth in usage that people are getting out of the product now [because of the ribbon] is phenomenal. It's a huge success. Customers strongly prefer it over the old interface, and they're learning about features and functionality that have been in there for a while but were previously hidden from them."

To the future

As for leading edge capabilities that will apparently one day be thoughts of as commonplace, Office 2010 offers a few interesting if general new features. The product will support "high definition" content, which I take to simply mean "higher quality" content, such as with better-looking special effects, transitions, and imagery in applications like Excel and PowerPoint. It will support advanced visualizations, similar to what Apple has done in its Keynote application. It will allow users to connect and collaborate in real time, both on the PC desktop and on the web. And it will support Microsoft's "work anywhere" notion via high-fidelity pass-through of documents between the PC desktop, the web, and mobile devices.

I don't want to get too specific here because we'll be diving into the improvements in each application. But the general gist, from what I can tell, is that the core Office applications are evolving, as are the Office servers and mobile applications. The Office Web Applications, which are of course, brand new, will open up Office tremendously, allowing customers to access their documents from anywhere, even if the PC they're using is not their own and does not have Office installed. This is an interesting approach for taking a near-ubiquitous software suite and positioning it to be equally ubiquitous in the cloud computing generation.

"The ability to use Office anywhere is the single biggest [focus] in Office 2010," Bryant told me. "We're doing a ton of engineering work and focus work with the web applications, from new users from different information worker segments all the way through financial people, CEOs, whatever. And what came back, resoundingly, was, 'you're not going to change our documents, right?' Right. That was our fundamental mission statement."

Microsoft is also ensuring that the Office Web Applications work identically in any browser, and they're specifically targeting Internet Explorer, Firefox, and, Safari. "We will definitely support non-Microsoft browsers fully," Bryant said. "We have a high bar for how well it has to work, and we will prove it out and take care of any issues before releasing it to customers."

On the phone, a lot of the work is focusing around improving the editing capabilities and ensuring that documents that pass through the device don't lose any of their formatting. "People are doing more with the phone these days," he told me. "It's not just email and telephony. Customers expect to create, edit, and view documents on their phones."

Of course, the best experience will always be in Windows. On the PC, Microsoft is finally starting to specifically target the more advanced hardware capabilities that are found in virtually all PCs these days as well. "There's more power on the PC now, so we've done tons of work to deliver native 64-bit versions of the Office 2010 applications," Bryant said. "This is particularly relevant to Excel, which now has the ability to open multi-gigabyte spreadsheets. We're also taking advantage of latest in graphics processing chips, harnessing the GPU to deliver great visualizations."

Changes that apply across Office applications

As noted previously, Office 2010 adopts the ribbon user interface across all applications, and it's an improved version compared to the one that debuted with many Office 2007 apps. Gone is the round Office Orb, replaced instead by a more traditional looking application button that is very similar to the application button that appears in Windows 7's ribbon-based apps, Paint and WordPad. The Office 2010 ribbon also picks up a handy Minimize button--it's the caret-looking thing over on the right next to the Help button--that minimizes the ribbon with one click. You could do this in Office 2007 by double-clicking any ribbon tab, but that isn't particularly obvious.

The ribbon has been enhanced in Office 2010.

Office 2010 also replaces the old File menu with a new interface called Backstage. This view, which is triggered by clicking the application button, takes up the entire application window and represents the "behind the scenes operations that you can perform on the currently loaded document." It's also the place where you can access application options and other items that were previously found in the File menu, including Print, another essential, or core, Office capability. (In Backstage parlance, the document content is considered "on stage.")

The new Backstage interface provides access to operations you can perform on the current document.

Many Office applications support presence icon (green when available) that provides status information about the people you're collaborating with. This is handy because live, multi-person collaboration is a big feature in Office 2010, though it's handled a little differently by each application. (For example, while Word provides true multi-person live document editing, PowerPoint still relies on a less refined "only the last saved version is saved" model.) You can use the presence icon to open a communications menu that provides options for getting in touch with the person in question. (Note that Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 are required for real-time communications.)

Finally, all Office applications will be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions in Office 2010. You'll pick the version to install at Setup.

Continue with Part 3, Microsoft Outlook 2010...

--Paul Thurrott
June 30 - July 13, 2009

Special Report: Office 2010 Technical Preview

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Improving Office
Part 3: Outlook 2010
Part 4: Word 2010
Part 5: Excel 2010
Part 6: PowerPoint 2010
Part 7: But Wait, There's More

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Office 2010 Beta: User Experiences
Office 2010 Beta Preview
Outlook PST: Open for Business
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OWA: Is It Enough?
Office Web Applications TP
Office 2010 Technical Preview
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Office 2010 FAQ
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