Top 10 Office 2010 features for business

From powerful productivity enhancers to important security safeguards, the new Microsoft Office has a number of features that businesses will love

By Frank Ohlhorst, San Francisco | Thursday, 27 May 2010
Although much of the hype around Office 2010 has focused on how the product integrates with other Microsoft technologies such as SharePoint 2010 and Windows 7, most users won't care about those capabilities until after making the leap to Office 2010 itself. Their main concern comes down to what Office 2010 can do for a user right out of the box.

And it will take more than a new paint job and a tune-up to get budget-conscious buyers to take the bait. Only real improvements that enhance productivity and simplify support will prompt users and their IT administrators to take notice and give Office 2010 a home in their enterprises. Lucky for Microsoft, those enticing enhancements are present throughout the Office 2010 suite. Let's take a closer look at the features and improvements that will matter most to business users and perhaps set the upgrade wheels in motion.

The features are listed in no particular order of importance. I would count PowerPoint Broadcast and the new video and image editing features among the most impressive, while Sparklines and PowerPivot for Excel are also big productivity boosters. Most users will notice the new Ribbon and Backstage Views, and Outlook's Conversation Views get my vote as most improved. The security enhancements may be the most welcome new features of all.

Customisable Ribbon
The Ribbon menu met with much derision when it debuted in Microsoft Office 2007. Many users complained that the Ribbon was hard to work with, made it difficult to find common operations, and could not be customized to meet their needs. With Office 2010, all of that has changed. Both users and administrators now have the ability to modify the Ribbon to their liking. Each element of the Ribbon can be tweaked, features and tools can be regrouped, and new tabs can be customized or created.

Customizable Ribbons should be a productivity boon to most users, who will now be able to bring the most highly trafficked and desired features to the foreground for easy access. What's more, customized Ribbons can be saved to a file and incorporated into other copies of Office 2010. Administrators also now have the ability to create and distribute custom Ribbons to users across the network, giving companies the means of either tailoring Ribbons for specific departments or "normalizing" the Office 2010 interface across the enterprise. Administrators can use group policy tools to prevent end-users from changing custom-deployed Ribbons as well, which should help reduce the number of help desk calls and simplify user training.

Ribbons now support contextual tabs, which adapt to the process being performed. For example, if you select an image in Word, a contextual tab will appear, allowing you to edit or format the image.

No one should upgrade to Office 2010 for the customizable Ribbon alone, but the enhancements will go a long way toward easing the transition from Office 2003 (which had no Ribbons) to Office 2010, while offering a tangible improvement over previous versions of Office.

Backstage View
Previous versions of Office suffered from a cumbersome and labyrinthine menu system, especially when it came to modifying basic properties of a document. For example, if you wanted to remove the meta data from a document, you'd need to traverse several menus just to get to a point where you could examine the document for any embedded meta data. Embedded meta data can include information related to the editing of the document, from comments to tracked changes to time spent editing, as well as who was involved with the document creation and edits. For many, that is proprietary information that should not be shared with external users. Making it easy to remove meta data is a step toward preventing data leakage and other potential problems.

Sharing documents could be equally cumbersome, where trying to set permissions on a document, secure a document, or create multiple versions of a document was often difficult. Office 2010 eliminates those hassles with the Backstage View, which offers a concise look at the basic properties of a document and simplifies changes within any of those elements. Users will now find it much easier to properly secure documents and remove proprietary information hidden in meta data.

Built-in graphics toolset
Office 2010 includes enhanced graphics tools throughout its various applications. Microsoft's goal was to make it easier to insert images, videos, and other graphical elements into a document, presentation, or spreadsheet. In the past, if visual elements required editing to prepare them for inclusion into a Microsoft Office file (Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation), you'd have to resort to third-party tools.

Microsoft now embeds most of the image- and video-editing tools you need directly into the Office applications, allowing users to work with graphical elements without leaving the Office environment. Office 2010 includes tools for cropping, resizing, color correction, and layer and background removal (edge detection), as well as brightness controls, contrast controls, artistic effects, visual styles, and many other image control capabilities. The new image- and video-editing features eliminates the need for most third-party graphics editing tools and can save a great deal of time when sprucing up documents with images or integrating videos into presentations.

Enhanced security
In the past, Microsoft Office has been susceptible to a variety of security threats, ranging from macro viruses to exploits of embedded vulnerabilities. Users (and administrators) often relied on frequent updates, patches, and third-party security products to keep their systems safe from threats embedded in documents, presentations, or spreadsheets.

Office 2010 includes several technologies that help to enhance security and protect the system from threats. First and foremost is Protected View, which works by opening new documents from unknown sources in a "digital sandbox" that prevents a user from editing the document or executing macros or other embedded features. That way, a user can view the document without any risk to the system and then decide whether they want to trust the document.

Protected View is only one layer of protection offered by Office 2010. Other important security enhancements include Data Execution Prevention (DEP), which should block whole classes of attacks by preventing the execution of embedded programs or untrusted macros, and Office File Validation, a component that checks files for proper format structure before allowing them to open. The Microsoft Trust Center application can also control which types of files are allowed to be opened, saved, and blocked. Trust Center can work hand in hand with group policy controls, allowing administrators to better enforce security policies across the enterprise.