Top 5 obvious feature enhancements to Microsoft Office 2010

Perhaps it was an accident that Microsoft released a series of Office 2010 preview videos this morning, instead of another chapter in its non-revealing "Office 2010: The Movie" theatrical trailer. The videos themselves were pulled down from Microsoft's servers, along with the micro-site that accompanied them, but not before search engine caches everywhere captured them, and not before blogger Long Zheng gathered them in one place.

This morning, these Microsoft-produced videos show extensive screen shots and demos of each primary Office 2010 component at work, although the appearance of the early code-name "Office 14" in a few of those shots indicates that videos may not necessarily be depicting the most recent build, being distributed to Technical Preview participants as soon as today.

None of the changes we see from these videos depict dramatically new features, especially when compared to the startling differences for many users between Office 2007 -- the first to include Microsoft's "Ribbon" front-end model -- and Office 2003. There are multiple noticeable tweaks, and there's an obvious effort by designers to make these applications cleaner looking, a little more like the 2003 edition.

Of the changes that Microsoft is willing to take credit for and claim this morning, here are the five we noticed that could impress customers gauging whether the upgrade is worth the money:

5. 3D rendering model in PowerPoint. Many companies' marketing divisions in recent years have taken to editing videos using an application specifically for that purpose, just to get 3D effects and transitions into a presentation that may then be imported into PowerPoint. The 2010 edition shows that more of the features of Windows Presentation Foundation (including some that were previewed for Office 2007, but which didn't make it in time) are now opened up for availability directly through PowerPoint.

The Application Painter feature, demonstrated here, is derived from the Format Painter feature first created for Word before the turn of the century, and then carried over into Excel. The idea is that the paintbrush tool is "loaded" with the last animation effect used on an object, so that same effect may then be applied to new objects entering a scene without having to create some explicit style for them, or to repeat all the steps used in formatting the first one.

4. Search integration with Document Map in Word 2010. Document Map was a feature that was actually created for Office XP over a decade ago (in this excerpt, my wife was one of the first to document it). The original idea was to create some means for the author of a long document to build a meaningful, useful table of contents. Up to now, one of the key reasons this feature has gained so little use in business environments is because, once a document already becomes long, it's too late to spend time sectioning it into a map -- all the convenience and time you gain from having the map is wasted in actually creating it.

Finally with Word 2010, there appears to be some genuine effort to make Document Map useful in a real-world setting. Yes, only now can you use a search line (instead of Find-and-Replace) to locate an area in a document that may be worth mapping. Here, the search process is instantaneous, even more so than the 2007 version's old fashioned Home > Editing > Find feature, and hopefully it's also now indicative of the way search and replace will also work in Word.

(The second reason Document Map isn't as well utilized as it could be is because many businesses, including attorneys and publishers, prefer to maintain long documents in multiple files, especially if they're already divided into sections and chapters. Imagine how difficult it would be for many collaborating parties to edit a book, if the entire book were on a single document. Now, Microsoft would say the answer to that is SharePoint, but my experience tells me that the way you would motivate a business to use SharePoint is to take the time to demonstrate it to its employees directly.)

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