Microsoft Office 2010 Beta

Word’s massively improved Navigation pane lets you reorganize a document by dragging elements up and down a list, and lets you print a section of a document with a single mouse-click.

The new Background view in all applications provides easy access to all file-management options, including a variety of ways to send and share a document

Want to insert a screen shot of a window or any section of a screen into a file? Just click Insert, then Screenshot, and either select an open window or use the Screen Clipping tool to select a rectangle.

Word finally gets the typographic refinements available in high-end desktop publishing. Note the two different kinds of numerals and the combined "Qu" and other ligatures.

A suitewide improvement is the Paste Live Preview feature. Click on Paste on the Home tab, then the down arrow, and you can choose between retaining the source format of the pasted text (as shown here in a live preview), or select only the text. When you move among the options, the text in the page changes to show what your choice will look like.

Go easy with Word’s new visual effects for text. They have the advantage that you can edit the text after applying an effect, but the disadvantage that you can go wild with reflections and other distracting features, as I did here.

Excel’s new Slicer feature lets me choose an item from a list – as I did with "Dairy Products" in the Slicer in the middle of the screen, and then only the matching items appear in the Pivot Table at the upper left.

Those little column graphs in the second column are Excel’s new Sparklines, showing miniature graphs of the data in the cells to the right of the Sparkline itself.

Throughout the suite, the new Print page is rich in options, including a generous-sized preview and options that used to be crowded into the Windows Print dialog.

Outlook’s new clean look survives even the clutter on display here. I’ve turned on multiple features to show how easily you can find tasks, contacts, and other data from a single screen.

Outlook’s new Quick Steps are user-definable sets of operations that can be performed on a message or task. Here I’m about to edit the task that moves a message to a specified folder.

Outlook’s integration with OneNote makes it easy to link an e-mail message with a page in a OneNote file.

PowerPoint, like the rest of the suite, gets a pallette of visual effects that can be applied to any graphic.

PowerPoint’s Animation menu is clearer and more powerful than in earlier versions.

PowerPoint’s ability to display video on a 3-D slant is another feature that almost asks to be used more often than it should be.

You can trim a video in PowerPoint with a few mouse clicks.

OneNote now attaches itself to the taskbar tray so that you can add a quick note while working in another application. In this screen, the ribbon interface—finally added to OneNote—is visible in all its glory.

Publisher gets the ribbon interface and new "Dynamic Guide" feature that lets you know when you’ve moved an object to align with another object. Here, the pink horizontal line appeared when I moved the box near the upper left to a place where it aligned with the box near the upper right.