Old faithful Word got a bit of a polish in Office 2010, not a major facelift. And that's not a bad thing. Word is a mature application so most of the rough edges have already been smoothed over. Messing with it unnecessarily would only cause confusion.
That said, there are a few new goodies to look at other than the suite-wide features discussed elsewhere.
The Navigation Pane (formerly known as the Document Map), activated by checking a box on the View tab, now has three components, two of which are new. The first, as before, shows the document's organization based on headings. Click on any one of these, and you'll jump straight to that location in the document. But now you can also drag a heading to another position on the Navigation Pane and it and its associated text will shift to that spot in the document.
The second tab in the Navigation Pane displays thumbnail views of the document pages. Again, you can re-order them simply by dragging and dropping, just as you have been able to do when re-ordering slides in PowerPoint.
The third tab in the Navigation Pane is the Search tab - you can search for text, graphics, tables, or equations in the document body, in footnotes and endnotes and even in comments. If several people reviewed the document and entered comments, you can choose whose comments to search. Results are highlighted in the document body and are also displayed in the Navigation Pane, along with surrounding text for context.
The other area that's received some TLC is graphics.
As in Office 2007, insert an image, and you'll get the Picture Tools options, but they've been kicked up a notch. With them you can colour-correct the image (and get a preview of the correction before you apply it), adjust brightness, sharpness and contrast, and add artistic effects, also with handy previews - Microsoft, remember, is trying to cut down on Undo usage.
The new Screenshot option lets you insert a picture of any part of the screen that is not minimized to the taskbar. When you select it, you are shown the available windows, and can insert the whole thing or choose to clip a portion of the window of your choice. Interestingly, the Word document you're working in is not available for clipping, so If you want to insert an image of a menu, for example, you need to turn to an external screenshot capture program such as the Snipping Tool found in Windows Vista and Windows 7, or open another instance of Word.
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Read the rest of the Office 2010 Review package
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You can also fiddle with borders, remove the picture's background, and crop the image. A lot of this isn't entirely new, but has been enhanced since Office 2007.
Text effects have received some attention, too. WordArt now does not turn your text into a graphic so you can still spellcheck any text you operate upon without losing the funky effects. You can apply effects such as Glow, Reflection or Outline to selected text, and the Clear Formatting button still lets you easily recover from over-enthusiastic application of artistic licence.
Overall, though, there's not a lot that's earth-shattering in Word 2010. What's more important is that the tweaks that were made didn't break anything.