Kobi Pinhasov

A couple of days ago I’ve received an invitation to download and install the technical preview of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2010. I was so surprised and pleased to see that there’s a 64 bit version of the product (and I’m running 64 bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate RC).

Installation

When I tried to install it a message appeared informing me that I had to remove other versions of Office. Since I was too excited to try the new release I’ve uninstalled the current Office installation (Office 2007). After that the installation process was pretty quick and smooth.

Word 2010

After a quick reboot I went directly to Word 2010 and opened some existing documents to experience new features. The splash screen was absolutely beautiful and the program load was very fast. I wasn’t looking for new stuff – I just wanted to work as I usually do and to see if my experience would change/improve.

I loved the new ribbon design – very clean, nice colors – simple and yet powerful.

Insert – Screenshot 

I wanted to insert a picture to my current document and that’s when I’ve stumbled upon it at Insert tab – menu item named Screenshot.  When I’ve clicked on it I was presented with a list of images each of which represented a screenshot of currently opened programs (Task manager for some reason was not in that list). That was very cool ! In addition there was a button named Screen Clipping and when you click on it – it allows you to select any area of the screen and the result is automatically inserted as an image object to the document.

The following screen is presented when you click on the Screenshot button above.

Picture Tools

A very impressive and features rich tab named Picture Tools appears when you click on any image. It’s not a new tab but I can see that it includes a lot of small features that enrich the image editing experience.

Technical Preview

Since this is still an early release of the product I truly hope that this nice feature will be available in final release as well.