Taking a look at Microsoft Word 2010 beta

I am typing this article using Microsoft Word 2010 beta, which is handy as this article is about Microsoft Word 2010 beta. Usually I would use Microsoft Live Writer for articles as it generally fits my purpose better, and Word sometimes, with the best of intentions, just gets in the way – especially with the amount of mark-up it likes to put in saved html files and its super cleverness at looking over my shoulder telling me all the grammatical errors I have made.

Having used Office 2010 beta for a few weeks I am feeling pleasantly surprised by it – it's even got me looking around and trying things I might never have tried before. For the everyday user, who uses say less than 25% of the full feature set, one version of a product like Word is really much like another but lift the lid and that's where the fun or administrative nightmare, as we sometimes call it, starts.

One of the coolest features has got to be the screenshot feature, available from the Ribbon bar, which lets you take a snapshot image of just about any window under Windows control and paste it into the document you are writing (each available window is shown as a small thumbnail). Not only that but the Screen clipping option allows you to pick out just part of the screen you are after – admittedly it's a small thing but one that makes a big difference in productivity. Incidentally, if you have images with a contrasting
background you want to remove you could head into Format then select Background Remover – it's not perfect but it gives it a shot. You can also right-click the image in Word and save it directly in a variety of different formats.

However, I can comfortably work on my file in Web Layout mode, which also shows the word count (not that I've ever let that stop me!), and I can then save the edited page as a html web page, using the filtered

option, which strips out all the Office-specific mark up and leaves a very lean html file – with just the formatting style sheet in place in the header section.

Mind you, it would be useful to be able to strip this out too – but a simple cut does the job just as easily. This facility has been around since Word 2003 but it's only with version 2010 that I have managed to muster enough gusto to explore it.

My feeling so far about Office 2010 is that it seems to have stopped getting in the way and started helping you be a little more productive.