We are thrilled to announce the release of the public Beta of Microsoft Word 2010! Betas for Office 2010, as well as SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 are available for you to download at www.microsoft.com/2010 . We've talked in a bit of detail about the goodness of Word 2010 in these posts , and our friends in marketing put together a handy top 10 list here . In addition to these new features and experiences you'll find a lot of fit and finish, performance, and stability improvements...

The document review scenario has been significantly improved in Word 2007. It's pretty straightforward and powerful technology once you have the basic idea. So let's start with getting a grasp around the difference between Word's two document review options: compare and combine. While they both tell you what changed in a document, there is a fundamental difference in the end goal they were each designed for. Compare tells you what changed where as combine tells you who changed what. This enables...

So in the last post , we went over what I mean by the concept of structured editing in Word. I deliberately skipped over the awesome work we did in this same space in Word 2003, and I'm going to keep saving that for the future. In this post, I want to finish my first thought and go through the types of controls, and what they're capable of/useful for. Content Controls in Word 2007 In the first post , we talked about how within the Developer tab, the Controls group exposes all seven control types...

Word "thinks" in terms of lists of nine levels. Even when you only have a simple, one-level list, Word has eight other levels stored off-stage. It's these additional levels that come into play when you indent a numbered entry and the number format changes (whether by using tab or the Increase Indent button). Several changes that we made in Word 2007 make it easier to work with complex, multilevel lists. One thing that we changed was the way in which the Enter key works when you're working with a...

In my first two posts in the series on Word Automation Services, I talked about what it is and what it does – in this post, I wanted to drill in on how the service works from an architectural standpoint, and what that means for solutions built on top of it. Word Power on the Server The most important component of Word Automation Services is getting a core engine with 100% fidelity to desktop Word running on the server – accordingly, much of our effort was focused on this task. If you've ever tried...

I'm a big fan of Excel's ability to freeze rows and columns. If I'm looking at a large set of data, I can keep some of the rows and columns fixed and scroll though the rest. After all, this is pretty much useless: …while this gives me the context I need to make sense of the data: Now what if I have a similar situation in Word? Say that I have a figure on page one and need to write about it on page three. Do I need to scroll up and down over and over? No. Do I need to copy and paste the figure into...

Yikes! What happens if you close a document before you've had a chance to save it and give it a name?

Word 2010 saves a draft of your document. See how you can get it back:

-- Joannie Stangeland

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Following up on my first post about Word Automation Services, I wanted to continue by talking about the functionality offered (and not offered) by the service, how it's exposed, and the types of solutions you will be able to build on top of it. What the Service Does Functionally, the service is very simple – this is intentional, as we wanted to address the pain points that we've heard loud and clear from you over the past few years, while keeping performance and scale at the top of our priorities...

Word has gridlines in tables, gridlines on a page, and a page boundary.

We'll cover all three.

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How do you add text to a table of contents? Not a heading, but just plain text?

I was going to write about different commands on the References tab, but then that Add Text button was staring right at me--glaring, in fact.

At the risk of opening up the proverbial can of worms...

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