Office 2010 Core Improvements

Office 2010 has two categories of new features and improvements: global changes that benefit all the suite components, and generally attempt to streamline tasks and make important features more visible, and product-specific features that are relevant to only one or two components.

Global Changes to Core Applications

Among changes to the core applications is a new Backstage feature, as well as improvements to a variety of features, including the Ribbon, paste, and 64-bit support. (To see the evolution of these features, and which products include them, see the chart “Office Improvements by Product and Version“.)

Backstage. The File menu, which was replaced by a round button depicting the Office logo on a tab in Office 2007, returns in Office 2010 as the File tab on the Ribbon. Although the Ribbon tab’s label reads “File,” the Office team promotes this tab as a new user interface feature called Backstage. The File menu, or Backstage, provides access to the usual File menu commands, such as creating, printing, saving, and sharing Office documents; documents’ properties; and reversion to saved copies of the document or worksheet being edited. It streamlines several formerly separate commands: selecting a printer and print preview appear together, for example. (For an illustration, see “Backstage“.)