First look: Microsoft Office 2010

UPDATE: We now have the Office 2010 public beta! Check out our Hands on: Office 2010 review

The technical preview of Office 2010 won't be available until July, but when Microsoft used it to show improved integration with Windows 7 at its TechEd conference this week we were able to find out more about some of the new features in the desktop apps as well.

The ribbon introduced in Office 2007 is here to stay, but now it has the Windows 7 styling.

Instead of the same round Office icon marking the Office menu (which replaces the File menu and isn't obviously a menu), there's a button in each app that looks like the buttons for the different tabs on the ribbon, in the signature colour of that application (green for Excel, blue for Word, red for PowerPoint, yellow for Outlook and so on).

That's much more like the menus in the RC versions of Paint and WordPad, and rather easier to spot.

The app windows also get their window menus back (they were removed in Office 2007); these use the icon for each app and let you restore, move, size, minimise, maximise or close the window. They're very minor changes, but they take Office some way back towards the standard Windows user interface.

RE-STYLE: The Office applications in the Technical Preview get Windows 7 styling, and the Office menu is easier to find

Outlook gets its own custom jumplist with common tasks instead of recent and pinned files. Right-click on the Outlook icon on the taskbar and instead of just another way to open the app you can create a new email message, appointment, contact or task, or open the inbox, calendar, contact or tasks window.

You won't need to keep the Outlook icon in the notification area any more just to find out when you have unread messages; the taskbar icon uses the same Windows 7 feature that lets Internet Explorer show a progress bar to add a 'new mail' overlay.

And you can drag a file from the jumplist of any application onto the navigation pane in Outlook to create a new mail message with the file as an attachment.

Office 2010 ribbon

The Office 2010 ribbon gets the flatter Windows 7 look (like the Windows 7 taskbar); there are no major changes visible in most apps, although you can spot new icons for the indent settings on Word's Home tab (they look more like moving a text box) and text orientation in Excel.

SMALL CHANGE: There are few visible differences in the new version of Word so far; just a couple of icon changes on the ribbon

Outlook 2010 has the ribbon interface throughout the program, not just in message, contact and calendar windows. For the Inbox that gives you four tabs (Home, Send/Receive, Folder and View – which means that, as with Office 2007, features that have been buried in dialogue boxes are brought up onto the ribbon).

Instead of the tiny dropdown New menu in Outlook 2007, there's a full-size New E-mail button and a dropdown the same size next to it for creating other items like appointments and contacts.

Other icons are grouped into sections for responding to and deleting messages, applying actions (Move, Rules and similar), setting flags (including mark as read or unread) or categories and searching in various ways.

COMPUTER SAYS NO: There's a reason why the Technical Preview of Office 2010 won't be available until July; it's still alpha code that doesn't always run smoothly

EASY IGNORE: Copied onto a message you're not interested in but that you think is going to get a lot of replies? Outlook 2010 will let you ignore all of them automatically