Continuing the Office 2010 Pictorial Review
What about that other tricky feature of Office 2007, the Office Button? The main problem with this was that new users simply did not realise it was a button, and puzzled over where to find Open and Save. Clearly Microsoft has paid attention to the problem.
It now has a down arrow on it to encourage you to click. Is that enough? I’m not sure. Still, when you do click you get a lot more than before: a full-screen Backstage view:
This combines several features in one: File menu, options, preview. There’s an interesting usability issue here though. How do you close the dialog? Maybe Exit at bottom left? Nope, that closes Word. It’s the File menu, see, although it looks like a dialog. You are meant to click Back at top left.
Excel has some new smarts, such as Sparklines, a one-cell chart:
I really like these, which give a great at-a-glance summary of trends in Excel data.
Oh, and by the way old-style Visual Basic is still alive and kicking:
Notice that it remains at version 6.5, so Microsoft is not doing much with it, though no doubt the available document objects are suitably extended in this version.