Usability Analysis – office 2010

Just when Windows users started to become accustomed to seeing. docx extensions and to finding their way around on the infamous Office 2007 Ribbon, Microsoft is shaking things up again with a brand new version of its omnipresent productivity suite, office 2010. eWEEK Labs has been trying out the Technical Preview version of the new suite, and we've encountered a raft of really useful new features, particularly around data visualization in Excel. What's more, Office 2010 is mercifully devoid of major file format or interface metaphor shifts. This Technical Preview will be accessible to a limited group of testers, but you can try to get added to the list by signing up at [ http://www.buyoffice2010keyshop.com/ ]. Expect to see a broad public beta later this year. Until then, check out the screen gallery below for our take on Office 2010 so far.



I haven’t used OneNote or any other software that comes with Office. Again, feature wise, Microsoft has added a lot new things to office 2010 professional plus (so they say…) If you want to know more about those features, head on to Before I wrap up, I will also touch up some minor UI glitches in Windows 7, lack of uniformity in the UI, and what I find interesting. eah, From the screen shot it should be evident that I’m using a mac now. I testing Office 2010 by installing it on my Windows 7 Virtual Box image. Being a usability guy myself, In this article, I will primarily focus on usability aspects of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

That little splash screen was animated!!! and it lasted only for a second or so. Word 2010 opened up near instantaneously. I was running within a VirtualBox. So i expected it to be slow. Yet to my surprise, the startup was fast. On a real PC, i think one wouldn’t even notice the splash screen. It’s really super fast.

The first thing one would notice is the new “Office Button” The already awesome office 2010 activation key (Codenamed ribbon) has gotten some tweaks especially the Omnipotent Office Button. Clicking that button takes you through a great looking “task centered” page dubbed as Outspace. The tasks are grouped (highlighted in orange in the screen shot above) elegantly. Clicking a group brings up a separate pane where actions related to that group can be performed. In the above screen shot, what you see is the actions related to the “Info” group. But I’ve a little gripe here. There is no visual cue that a group can be clicked. It appears as if only the buttons are clickable. Moreover, going by classical Windows (or Mac) philosophy, a menu option is usually suffixed with a ellipsis (…) when clicking an item brings up a new dialog or something. However, this guideline was not followed in designing this UI. As such, it’s quite confusing to know what’s going to happen if i click something, before actually clicking it. Small things, but one should really put some effort on the usability aspect of things rather than focusing just on aesthetics.