Top 5 non-obvious feature enhancements to Office 2010

3. Document properties at a glance. In the old days of Word, the Document Properties dialog box was what editors used to maintain control over versioning -- which version of a document was being edited based on how many editing cycles it had passed through, and when it was last modified and saved. Versioning control in Word has improved dramatically since then, but many publishers' control and validation processes have not.
For editors who have to work with these publishers, it was a pain to discover that the designers of Office 2007 had buried Document Properties in an odd location: in the Office menu (the big round button, which has been replaced in Office 2010), under Prepare, followed by Properties and then Advanced Properties. (Nothing advanced about them, really, it should be "Basic Properties.")

With the BackStage feature in all Office 2010 components, a document's basic properties shows up on the front page -- no excavation necessary, no "advanced" dialogs. You'll also find there the most basic and necessary features that Office 2007 buried under its little-used Prepare menu; in fact, I'm fairly certain that many folks will think the "Check for Issues" feature is new, when it actually premiered in the 2007 version.

2. The Share menu takes center stage 'BackStage.' Office 2007 introduced something Microsoft was fairly excited about at the time, called the Publish menu (under the big Office button). Its projected purpose was to enable any number of possible options for preparing a document to be received by multiple people, whether through SharePoint or Microsoft's Document Management Server, or to a blog post someplace. But Microsoft's "Johnny Appleseed" approach to the notion of publishing (a blog post and DMS are pretty different things) meant this menu became another of the 2007 version's buried treasures.

In Office 2010, BackStage's new Share menu replaces Publish with a full and richly self-documented selection of functions you can perform to enable the active document to be consumed by someone else, typically without using Office. This is Microsoft's acknowledgment, at long last, that Office is not the universe which binds together all intellectual property.

The Change File Type menu is particularly interesting and useful here, as it presents well-explained options for doing the kind of thing we used to call "exporting." Here is where you'll find one of the multiple places where Office now supports OpenDocument format, both as an alternate default file save format and as a vehicle for sharing files with others. The concept of "share" makes more immediate sense to new users than "export," and it has a more open and positive connotation: It doesn't mean to move data out of one universe to warp it into another.

While I'm on the subject of BackStage: When Office's designers first premiered the ribbon for the 2007 version, they claimed one of its principal benefits was to get options and commands out of the way of the document being edited. Nothing in the ribbon drops down, and the document is obstructed by dialog boxes only when vitally necessary. But BackStage runs completely contrary to that design ethic. When you're about to save a document or print it or see what it will look like on your printer or in SharePoint, the BackStage screen totally occludes the document you're working on, although in some cases it leaves a thumbnail open in the upper right corner as a reminder.

And yet it works surprisingly well. Because it uses all that space, there's all that space for it to use, and it gets used for explaining the user's options in clear and concise language. Here is where Microsoft finally learns a lesson from Web page design. Notice also the construction of the menus, in a three-tier fashion with the categories running top to bottom, and subcategories expanding to the right. Little left-pointing arrows align the commands to their respective categories like notations in an open book. It's very legible, very attractive, and yet in runs in stark contrast to the very design decisions that gave rise to it.

1. Fully customizable ribbons. The ability to customize Office completely, to make it into the application you need it to be, is something I've not only treasured but cashed in on. Two of the 17 books I've published under one of my two names, including this one, were exclusively about the subject of Office customization.

So when I learned that you needed Visual Studio to customize Office 2007's ribbons, I was a taken aback. I heard a number of various excuses, one of which being that the everyday end user was not familiar enough with the principles of ribbon design to be making a ribbon for himself (it's too dangerous, boys and girls!). And the bone that Microsoft threw for us customizers in the meantime, the "Quick Access toolbar," is not only too trifling to be fully functional or adaptable, but also (as its name clearly suggests) contrary to the ribbon design ethic -- it's a toolbar!

This glaring omission in Office's long-established functionality -- perhaps the most prominent regular Office feature ever to be omitted from a successor version for lack of readiness -- will be fixed in Office 2010. I would like to say it's fixed now, but in early Betanews tests, adjustments I've made to the ribbons in Word and Excel did not stick -- for some reason, components revert to their default layouts. (We're legitimately testing Office 2010, so when I discover the reasons, Microsoft will most certainly hear from me.) Nonetheless, you can see where in the new Options panel, there are separate tiers for the Quick Access toolbar and the complete ribbon.

Everything here can be changed, including the order and names of the menus themselves, and you can create completely new menu categories on your own -- you don't need Visual Studio or a lesson in "line-of-business applications." The background programming language for Office remains Visual Basic for Applications, which isn't altogether bad -- it means older macros remain compatible -- but it does forsake the enormously powerful possibilities of opening up access to the .NET CLI, and letting the user choose her language (VB, C#, F#, IronPython, IronRuby). While VBA is, on the whole, slower and based on an older Windows component model, it still has access to the complete Office type library, and that's the most important feature for developers. Now it's possible once again to re-engineer Office into a sophisticated information management system exclusively for global publishers. And yes, you're sensing a huge smile on my face.

We can debate the monolithic nature of Office applications until Steve Ballmer stops repeating the word "tenacity." It's almost a moot argument until anything the Web can deliver enables the degree of productivity, and the level of flexibility, as Microsoft Office. There remains no equal in the applications field, and that's actually a shame because there appears to be ample opportunity and talent out there quite capable of engineering a better and more efficient way of working. Until then, we Office users may have even less reason to complain for at least the next three years.