Hands on: Office 2010 Technical Preview

Microsoft is finally letting people try some of the Office 2010 applications. The Technical Preview code includes the main desktop applications, but not the web apps or the SharePoint server that you need to run those web apps and enable live collaboration; we haven't seen the improved Windows Mobile Office apps, either.

Without those key features, how much is actually new in the new Office? We got our hands on the code to find out. Read on for our early Office 2010 review.

Office 2010 puts the ribbon interface in all the Office applications, including OneNote, Publisher and all of Outlook. More importantly, it adds the option to customise the ribbon completely, adding and removing commands from tabs or creating a new tab with all the features you use the most.

There are other subtle changes to the interface, most of them for the better. In general, it's plainer and cleaner with pale backgrounds rather than baby blue; interface elements like drop-down lists and dividers between panes inside a window take up less space but still convey as much information.

FEEDBACK: The technical preview uses the same 'Send a Smile' feedback tool as the Office 2007 betas, grabbing a screenshot and letting you add comments

The Office button is easier to spot, which is important because it now launches the Backstage menu, an improved - if oversized - version of the Office menu that adds useful options from the Print setup and New Document dialogues, as well as specific features for each app.

BACKSTAGE: Backstage works a little like the in-place jump lists on the Windows 7 Start menu and the live print preview is particularly useful, but the other options don't need to take up the whole window

Given that the Backstage menu is rather more useful now, it's odd that Microsoft has moved it out of what Office interface designer Jensen Harris used to call the 'Magic Corner' where the standard window control menu has returned. The very top left corner is the single easiest place to get to (assuming you have the window maximised), because you can just shove the mouse pointer into the corner without positioning it carefully, and it's wasted on the window control.

Another irritating point: you have to right-click on an area of the ribbon that has commands in to get the options to customise it - but it's more logical to right-click on the empty space at the side that you want to put a new button.

IN VIEW: Having the tools you want on the ribbon makes it useful; buttons here are bigger and easier to find than on the Quick Access Toolbar, and the dialogue box for customising the ribbon is clear and easy to work with. Note the Office button: it's much smaller and instead of taking up the whole top-left corner of the window it moves down to be the same size and shape as the ribbon tabs, with the colour and icon for the current application rather than the Office logo

From paste to pictures

The Paste Options smart tag has been in Office for several years, to help you change the format you paste with if the clip doesn't look right; it's now larger, with more obvious options. And if you right-click instead of pasting you can preview the different formats before you put the clip in at all.

PASTE PREVIEW: The Paste Preview makes the options for pasting in different formats more obvious and more useful

Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook get new photo editing tools with live thumbnail previews for sharpening and blurring, changing brightness and contrast, tweaking the saturation and colour temperature (or adding a whacky colour filter) and applying Photoshop-style artistic effects (ranging from film grain to glowing edges.

If you already use an image editing program you're unlikely to abandon it but for simple tweaks Office does a good job.

Potentially more useful is the Background Removal tool (which you may recognise from the Microsoft Expression Technology Preview). This does what it says on the tin, automatically, and it works extremely well; if the areas of the photo it removes aren't what you want you can mark areas to include and exclude by pointing and clicking. For a document, you often want a picture of a specific feature rather than a snapshot and this is a simple way to get it, although there are some rough edges (the preview doesn't always update and cropping the preview doesn't crop the picture box in your document).

CLEAN UP: The intelligent background removal tool detects and removes backgrounds, but you can tweak it too

There are also dozens of new SmartArt diagram layouts, and they also show up on the new Picture Layout option (which replaces the pointless Picture Shape command on the Format tab). Further proof that Microsoft really designs Office for its own internal needs: you can insert a screen grab of any open window into your document with the Screenshot button. Oddly, none of these image tools are in Publisher, where they would be ideal.

WORD ART: The new image editing tools range from practical to funky; Artistic Effects turns photos into illustrations