Best New Additions in Office 2010

Microsoft's official release date for Office 2010 is June 15, 2010.

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Not all of these features – such as the highly anticipated Office Web Apps - have been incorporated into the Technical Preview yet, but enough are present to get an excellent idea of just how advanced the new office software will be. Here, I'll take a look at some of my favorites.

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The Paste Preview function does exactly what it's name applies – it allows you to hover over a variety of different pasting options and preview how the pasted selection will look in your document before actually applying the action. (Click on the screenshot to the left for a larger view.)

In addition, depending on which Office application you're working in, you'll have several new pasting options that could make your life a lot easier. For example, if you're using Excel, you can choose the option to paste the selection as a transpose and switch your columns into rows, or you can select the option to automatically change the column widths in the new spreadsheet so that they match those in the source file. Even though I'm not the type to usually upgrade to a new version of Office as soon as it's released, this feature alone has made me eager for the full release of Office 2010.

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This feature is particularly useful to people who create the same types of documents, spreadsheets, or presentations over and over again since it allows them to create a custom ribbon tab that contains all of their most used commands. It's also a great tool for those of us who habitually use commands that aren't found on the standard Office ribbon. In Office 2007, you could add these commands to the Quick Access toolbar, but that can get cluttered up pretty quickly. Customizing the ribbon is a much more attractive option.

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With the new screenshot capabilities in Office 2010, no other software is needed. All you have to do is go to the Insert tab, select Screenshot and you'll be presented with a variety of options. Afterwards, you can use the image editing tools in Office to clean up the screenshot without ever leaving your document.

Granted, the screenshot functionality found in Office 2010 is not as robust as that found in standalone utilities, but it's all that most people will need for many projects. It's definitely not going to replace WinSnap on my desktop, but it's still a very handy tool that can be used to quickly grab a screenshot when one is needed for a document, presentation, or even an Excel file.

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Just like I mentioned with the screenshot functionality, this capability is not going to replace the need for some other dedicated video editing application if you find yourself editing a number of movies. However, it does handle basic editing functions pretty decently, and it sure beats having to load up Adobe Premiere Elements or something similar every time you want to make a little tweak to your show.

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There are three basic representations that you can use for sparklines in Excel 2010 – a line that shows the general trend (as pictured in the image to the left), a column chart, and a win-loss structure that allows you to see with a glance when data goes from positive to negative or vice-versa. These single-cell graphs can be formatted using many of the same formatting options as full-size Excel charts so you have some decent control over their appearance and style.

This listing is, by no means, a complete rundown of the new features that will be found in Office 2010. As the Technical Preview progresses, Bright Hub will continue to review some of the other interesting developments in the office suite, including the new mail features in Outlook 2010.