If you have Word 2007, I recommend moving to Word 2010.
Why upgrade to Word 2010? Here are my main reasons. In Word 2007, there is no way for the user to customize the Ribbon. A developer can customize the Ribbon by writing XML code. But there is no way for an ordinary user to make any changes to the Ribbon. That represented an enormous step backwards from the functionality we'd had since, oh, Word 95 or maybe even earlier. What you cannot do is make any changes to a built-in group.You can show or hide built-in tabs or built-in groups.You can add a new tab, add groups to the tab, and add controls to each group.In Word 2010, the user can customize the ribbon. However: beware of the Big Bug that will delete all your customization efforts. Echo Swinford has a good description of the bug. She writes about PowerPoint, not Word, but the principles are the same. One of the cool things about the Ribbon is that it expands and contracts to reflect the window size. In Word 2007, if a developer customized the Ribbon and created a custom group, it did not expand and contract. In Word 2010, custom groups expand and contract just like built-in groups. you are working on a laptop or a netbook with a tiny screen.Įven customizations made from within Word by users expand and contract.you re-size the Word window so you can look at, say, a web page or emails at the same time.įigure 1: When I right-click an image in Word 2010, I see a minibar and a shortcut bar.In Word 2010, when I right-click an image, I see a little minibar above the right-click shortcut menu. The mini toolbar gives access to the most-frequently used picture-editing commands: size, crop, flip etc (Figure 1). Little changes like this are not earth-shattering. They're not included in Microsoft's media release announcing a new product. You couldn't even include it in your business case to justify moving thousands of your users to Word 2010.īut little things like this do make a real difference to users. There are many other subtle differences like this in Office 2010 that make life better for us. (By the way, one of the commands on the right-click menu is Change Picture.
It lets me choose a picture to replace the existing one. Word swaps the new image for the old-but retains all the formatting I applied to the old image. It's not new (it was in Word 2007), but if you haven't noticed it, give it a go.
The new Navigation Pane has much to recommend it. The new Find mechanism highlights all instances of the text you're searching for. The new Document Map lets us rearrange large slabs of content with nothing more than drag and drop. Even the old Alt-V-D keyboard shortcut is back. Word applies Protected View to documents opened from potentially unsafe locations. If you open a Word document from a website or an Outlook email attachment, or a document that contains potentially unsafe contents, Word displays it in a "sandbox" environment. But you may not edit the document until you consciously allow editing, by clicking the button that appears to tell you about Protected View. WordArt in Word 2007 was an embarrassment. PowerPoint 2007, even Excel 2007, had "new" WordArt that relies on a new graphics engine.