continued for part 1
Word 2010
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Word 2010 sports a handful of nice enhancements to its sidebar interface element, starting with the application’s Navigation Pane, which replaces Word 2007’s Document Map feature. I used the Navigation Pane to traverse Word documents by jumping from heading to heading. I liked the way I could reorganise topics within a document by dragging the headings around within the pane.
Also situated in this side pane is a useful search feature. I typed the words I sought in my document, and the search pane would fill in with results and a bit of context from around the found term—more or less like search engine results do. By default, the search pane tool looks for text, but I could also seek out graphics, tables, equations, footnotes and comments by selecting one of these options from a drop-down menu in the search box.
For example, if I were converting a large Word document from a previous Word format, I could select “graphics” from the drop-down menu and cycle through each graphic in the document, looking for needed placement tweaks. This is especially useful, since slight graphics misplacement is one of the most common format-conversion casualties.
Word 2010 also sports contextual spell-checking. I typed the sentence, “I can’t wait to meat you,” and Word duly corrected me with a blue squiggly line instead of the red one with which it would mark a misspelling.
I also took note of Word’s cut-and-paste enhancements—for instance, in Word, I copied to my clipboard a chunk of text, bullets and images from one document, and shifted to a new document. Right-clicking in the part of my new document in which I meant to paste the content pulled up the familiar menu of options, with a few additional Paste Preview choices. I could retain the formatting from my source document, shift to the formatting style from my new document or retain only text. For each option, I could preview the outcome by hovering my mouse over each paste option. I was also able to switch among these paste formatting options after I’d pasted the content, again via a Smart Tag.
Excel
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Excel 2010 packs a handful of interesting tweaks to its PivotTable and PivotChart features. I checked out these changes by linking a fresh Excel spreadsheet to a set of NBA statistics from last season. I then created a quick PivotChart to display players’ average offensive rebounds per game. With a few hundred players in my data set, I was faced with a rather unwieldy chart—and a great opportunity to try out Excel’s new search filter capabilities.
Clicking a “Player” button on my PivotChart brought up a menu with a bunch of sort and filter options. I used these options to trim my set of Players to the top five performers in terms of average offensive rebounds per game. From the same menu, I could remove certain players from consideration by unchecking boxes next to the players’ names in the dialog.
As with the filter button, I could modify other aspects of my PivotChart (and the PivotTable underlying it) using buttons situated on the chart. All in all, I expect that the new options for manipulating charts will help flatten out the learning curve for users who haven’t quite gotten comfortable with these Excel features.
Another addition to Excel’s PivotTable and PivotChart toolbox is the Slicer—a graphical element that allows users to modify data under analysis by slicing it up by particular categories.
I inserted a Slicer into my offensive rebounds chart that let me consider only wins or losses in determining my top five performers. For example, when taking into account only losses, Golden State Warriors’ Andris Biedrins was second in the league in offensive rebounds per game. Considering only wins, Biedrins didn’t crack the top five.
Some of my favorite new sets of features in Office 2010 are those that involve data visualisation in Excel. Microsoft has enhanced the conditional formatting capabilities of Excel with easy-to-apply visuals such as in-cell data bars. I imported a set of NBA statistics into an Excel spreadsheet, highlighted the rebounds column, and then applied a data bar conditional formatting element to the column. A bar appeared in each cell representing the size of the cell’s value relative to the rest of the values in my selection.
Elsewhere, I imported the statistics for a single player across a 10-year span, and illustrated the rise and fall of that player’s stats in a compact, single-cell chart called a sparkline. I could add detail to my sparkline charts, highlighting, for instance, the high and low points on the curve.
For a look at Excel’s new PowerPivot add-on, which enables the application to take much larger data sets, see my review here.
Many document- and presentation-building tasks for which Office users tap Word and PowerPoint involve pictures and video. Office 2010 stands to make these tasks a bit easier with an assortment of new multimedia features.
PowerPoint and Word both have an option embedded in their Ribbons for inserting screenshots of active windows into documents or presentations. Choosing this option spawned a dialog with thumbnails of all the open windows on my test machine. I could choose to insert these thumbnails into my document or presentation. I could also grab new screen clippings to insert, but I had to make sure that the window from which I wished to clip was the one I was viewing just before focusing on the Word or PowerPoint window. I found it easier to select a whole window and do my cropping as a second step.
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PowerPoint 2010 has picked up some new, slick-looking Smart Art elements, along with some fancy new Apple Keynote-style slide transition effects.
In addition, PowerPoint has gained the ability to trim embedded videos down to size with fairly easy-to-use controls. The application offered the option of embedding web-hosted videos, but I had trouble getting this feature to work with the YouTube video that I tried out during my test.
I was happy to see that PowerPoint now includes Windows Media Video as an output format–previously, exporting presentations to video required a separate plug-in. I’d like to see PowerPoint join OpenOffice.org Impress in adopting Adobe’s SWF as an export format, as well.
During my tests, I had a bit of fun with PowerPoint 2010’s new image manipulation capabilities, which include a nifty new Background Removal tool. I was able to click on a person in the foreground area of an image and direct Word to swap out my picture’s background for a transparent one. Then, I managed to add a drop shadow to my image with another click.
Access
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Users who prize Access as a tool for roughing out database-backed applications will find a handful of welcome improvements in the 2010 version of Office.
I began putting Access through its paces by selecting one of the template applications offered up from the tool’s start page. The first thing I noticed about the new database app I created was an information bar across the top of its interface, alerting me of blocked active content.
By now, macro-blocking has become a very familiar part of Office applications, and the experience that the Office team has accrued while dodging malware writers really shows in the interfaces around trust management. For example, I was pleased to find that clicking for more information on the blocked-content notice did not call forth a dialog box with tough-to-relocate information. Rather, I was sent to the Backstage area for Access—the landing page for meta-document operations and information—where I could read what Access had to say about the active content and then decide whether to enable the content, knowing exactly where to find that information when I was ready to act on it.
I opted to mark the database as a trusted document, which cleared the way for the active content. I noticed, however, that when I emailed the database to myself for testing on a different machine, the trusted status did not carry over to the second machine. I had to mark the document as trusted again. I also could have configured a trusted location and ferried the database from one machine to the other through that trusted channel. This document trust scheme appears in other components across Office.
The application template I’d selected was for a project management application, with tables and interface forms for users and tasks, among other things. I was interested to see that both the user and task components of the template were available for easy use in other applications in the form of Application Parts, available under the Create tab of the Access ribbon.
Access 2010 now supports triggers—database operations that can be scripted to occur, for instance, when records are inserted into a database. In Access, this feature is called Data Macros. Along similar lines, I was pleased to see that Access now supports calculated fields, derived from other fields in a record.
Outlook
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When Microsoft rolled out its new Ribbon UI in Office 2007, Outlook was left Ribbon-free. In Office 2010, Outlook has joined its officemates in taking on the new UI. Outlook, along with all of Office’s other components, offers the option Ribbon customisation—I could add any of the application’s functions to the Outlook Ribbon. In some parts of Office, the Ribbon customisation option served as a window into long-ignored but not quite dead Office features. For instance, in Outlook, I tricked out my Ribbon with a new custom group (I called it Graveyard”) and populated it with the command, “Windows CE Inbox Transfer.”
Along similar lines, Outlook 2010 picks up its own version of the backstage view, and, through its integration with Word as an editor, partakes in all the same paste preview and image editing features that Office’s word processor and presentation applications now offer.
Elsewhere, Outlook picks up a nifty new calendar preview feature, which I used to survey potential appointment conflicts while reading meeting request messages. Also on the theme of teasing out additional information from inbox messages is Outlook’s social connector feature, which, for a given message, offers additional information about the message sender and recipients. By default, I could see a list of recent messages passed between me and a particular contact, along with information from the company directory. I could extend the available information by connecting to SharePoint or to outside social networks. At the time I tested, MySpace and LinkedIn were the only social network options, but support for additional networks is on the way.
Another notable new Outlook feature is a sort of quick rule-making interface called Quick Steps, which offers up some common multistep processes, such as forwarding to one’s manager or responding and deleting the original message, as well as a means of creating new Quick Steps. In the case of the forward to manager option, I was presented with a first run dialog that asked me for my manager’s address for future use.
Microsoft Office 2010 Icon Pack. Each of the icons are 256×256 pixels, and come in both ICO and PNG formats.
In all there are over 60 different icons included in the download.
To download the Icon pack ▼ point your mouse here
http://hotfile.com/dl/45092722/8260361/Microsoft_Office_2010_IconPack_by_NhatPG.rar.html
deviantART
http://nhatpg.deviantart.com/art/Microsoft-Office-2010-IconPack-136037080
source:eweekeurope end