LABS GALLERY: Office 2010 Beta Provides New Ways to Slice and Dice Data, Build Apps

by Jason Brooks

The Office team has put its splash screens to good use in the 2010 edition of Office, adding a Cancel button for bailing out of unintentionally opened Office applications before they finish loading—nice for when you’ve opened the wrong (large) document.

Access 2010 offers up some common components for building database-backed applications under the feature called Application Parts.

I was met with a security warning message after creating a new database from an Access template.

The Backstage Area of Office’s applications is a good place to put security warning information.

Office packs quite a range of built-in security management settings.

Next Halloween, Word 2010 will be ready to help you keep straight which witch you’re talking about with context-aware spell-checking.

The Web-based version of Office lacks context-aware spell-checking. See where it catches my misspelled “conditions” but misses the “meat” misuse.

I used Word 2010’s Navigation Pane to move around in my document and to re-order its sections by dragging and dropping headings.

I channeled the NBA stats I’d imported into Access into an Excel PivotChart.

The application templates provided by Access included tables fronted by rich forms.

With most beta products, I’m accustomed to seeing “under construction” notices where help files should be, so I was pleasantly surprised at the state of the help system in this Office beta.

After importing a CSV file into Access, the application offered to store the steps involved and set up a recurring reminder in Outlook to prompt me to run future imports.

With a few hundred players included, my chart was rather unwieldy.

I used the new PivotChart Navigation buttons to filter my field of players down to the top performers.

I used Excel’s new Slicer feature to swap between viewing my top performers in win or losses only.