infoTECH Feature

July 22, 2010

Word 2010 Impressions

Word and Outlook are the two applications I use most frequently from Microsoft’s (News - Alert) popular office suite. After upgrading to the new 2010 edition, I recently shared my thoughts on the new version of Outlook. Now I thought I’d offer my impressions on the new flavor of Word.

Word 2010 boasts a few changes in its basic editing with the cut, copy, and paste feature notably now more user-friendly. Pasting text from one file or section to another used to be a chore as you had little control over how the text appeared after it was pasted. Word 2010 offers a Paste Preview popup box that shows you what your text will look like if you paste it using the source formatting, the destination formatting, or as just plain text. You can also set a default paste to determine the normal format for pasted text. I often copy and paste text from Web pages and other external files into my Word documents, so this feature has proven quite useful.

The Find feature has also received a makeover. Using Word’s Navigation pane, you can now see every instance of a specific word or phrase throughout your entire document and jump to any single instance. My only gripe with the new Find feature is that it doesn’t visually incorporate the Replace option in the same way. So if you want to replace any or all of your found items, you still need to use the traditional Replace dialog box.

Word documents have long been a potential source of malware, with viruses sometimes hiding in macro code. Word 2010’s new Protected View automatically opens a Word document in a sandboxed mode. This opens your document in a read-only mode that prevents any macros and other code from executing. Word typically reserves Protected View for documents that you download from the Internet or open as file attachments from an email message. If you know the document is safe, you can easily disable Protected Mode in order to edit it. Sometimes these forms of protection can be intrusive, but Protected Mode is nicely and intelligently implemented.

Like the other Office 2010 applications, Word sports some helpful and much-needed changes to its Ribbon. First introduced in Office 2007, the Ribbon offered a new way of working by replacing the traditional pull-down menus with a single row of icons that changed depending on what you were doing. Whether you loved or hated the Ribbon, it did pose one limitation--you couldn’t modify it. Now with Office 2010, you can edit and customize the Ribbon to turn the display of certain commands and icons on or off, and add new commands.

Word 2010 also benefits from the new Backstage view, a quick, handy way to run frequently-used commands, tap into help, and access different options. From Backstage, you can save, open, close, print, and share your documents. You can view a list of recently-opened documents. And you can modify all of the various settings and options in Word. Backstage goes a long way toward organizing and displaying a variety of Word’s most common settings and features in one place.

Though most of the changes in Word are more evolutionary than revolutionary, as they say, I find that every little improvement helps. You’ll find a list of all the new features in Word 2010 and the ones that have been removed at Microsoft’s Changes in Word 2010 page.


Lance Whitney is a journalist, IT consultant, and Web Developer with almost 20 years of experience in the IT world. To read more of Lance's articles, please visit his columnist page

Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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