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>> Hi, I'm Molly Wood from CNET.com, and today I'm taking a First Look at Microsoft Word 2010 technical preview. Now, this is a very early version of Word, which will be part of the Office 2010 Suite. And overall, there aren't a ton of radical changes to Word, but there are several that are worth noting. Now, the entire Office Suite standardizes the ribbon, which was introduced in Office 2007, and the ribbon is now contextual, so the tabs actually change based on what you're looking at. So if I paste in a script that contains tables in a new document, Word automatically highlights the tables' tab on the ribbon. This is pretty handy, especially since some people kind of had trouble finding various ribbon options when it was first introduced, such as me. The ribbon also gets a lot more powerful in Word in Office. For example, if you put a picture in a document, you'll get this picture tools tab. Now this was present in Word 2007, and it included basic editing options like brightness and contrast and color correction. But now, you can actually apply effects. You can put a frame around the image. You can apply all kinds of color options. And there are a ton of other tweaks that before might have actually called for an image editor. Now, in other ribbon tricks, Office 2010 offers a very cool, new paste preview. When you have documents in your clipboard, you just mouse over the arrow underneath the paste option here. You'll see options to keep source formatting, merge formatting with the default text selections in the new document, or to keep text only. And then each option has a corresponding keyboard command, which I find kind of nice. So you can just hit "K" to keep formatting. This pasting option is available across the Office Suite, and it's pretty slick. Now, the previous ribbon rebranded the file menu as this kind of mystery dot at the top of the page here. But it still contained the file menu options you were used to, like new, open, save, save as, and so on. In Office 2010, Microsoft goes a step further. It replaces the file dot with the backstage view. So you click this dark blue tab here, and you'll open a whole new pane in your document. I know, right? Whoa. It's, like, kind of startling at first. Now here, you still see the regular file options, like save, save as, open, close, and so on. But you'll also see information about the document, like whether it's in compatibility mode, or its file permissions, its versions. You see the word count. You've got author information. And then you even have related documents that appear in the same folder. Now, these options are definitely useful if you're going to be sharing or distributing a file to multiple users who might be on different versions of Word. Otherwise, it's kind of a lot to take in, if you're just looking for "save as." Beyond the ribbon and navigation changes, there don't appear to be a lot of Word-specific changes. Mainly there are just a few more options sprinkled throughout the ribbon, like there's this fancy outline menu in your text options. There's also this interesting option for a screen shot in the insert menu, and I imagine this could be a very cool feature for a blog post or newsletters. Word 2010 and Office, as a whole, seem to be refining the major changes that were introduced in Office 2007, and of course, we'll have a full review of the final Suite once it's released, so check back for that. I'm Molly Wood for CNET.com, and this has been a First Look at Microsoft Word 2010 technical preview. Thanks for watching.
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