7 reasons to upgrade from Microsoft Word 2007 to Word 2010If you have Word 2007, and you can't move to Word 2010, at least make sure that Word 2007 isfully-patched with updates and service packs.Versions of Microsoft Office, including Word, come inpairs. Word 2007 represented a huge change to the user interface and file structure, and minor changes to functionality. Word 2010 consolidated those changes, tamed down the worst of the graphic excesses of Word 2007, fixed lots of bugs and introduced a few new features.If you have Word 2007, I recommend moving to Word 2010. Why upgrade to Word 2010? Here are my main reasons.Customizing the RibbonIn Word 2007, there is no way for the user to customize the Ribbon. A developer can customize the Ribbon by writing XML code. But there is no way for an ordinary user to make any changes to the Ribbon. That represented an enormous step backwards from the functionality we'd had since, oh, Word 95 or maybe even earlier.In Word 2010, the user can customize the ribbon. There are constraints, though. You can add a new tab, add groups to the tab, and add controls to each group. You can show or hide built-in tabs or built-in groups. What you cannot do is make any changes to a built-in group.However: beware of the Big Bug that will delete all your customization efforts. Echo Swinford hasa good description of the bug. She writes about PowerPoint, not Word, but the principles are the same.

Expanding and contracting custom groupsOne of the cool things about the Ribbon is that itexpands and contractsto reflect the window size.In Word 2007, if a developer customized the Ribbon and created a custom group, it did not expand and contract.In Word 2010, custom groups expand and contract just like built-in groups. Even customizations made from within Word by users expand and contract.This is really useful if: you are working on a laptop or a netbook with a tiny screen you re-size the Word window so you can look at, say, a web page or emails at the same time.Editing images

Figure 1: When I right-click an image in Word 2010, I see a minibar and a shortcut bar.In Word 2010, when I right-click an image, I see a little minibar above the right-click shortcut menu.The mini toolbar gives access to the most-frequently used picture-editing commands: size, crop, flip etc (Figure 1). It's new in Word 2010.Little changes like this are not earth-shattering. They're not included in Microsoft's media release announcing a new product. You couldn't even include it in your business case to justify moving thousands of your users to Word 2010.But little things like thisdomake a real difference to users.There are many other subtle differences like this in Office 2010 that make life better for us.(By the way, one of the commands on the right-click menu is Change Picture. It lets me choose a picture to replace the existing one. Word swaps the new image for the oldbut retains all the formatting I applied to the old image. It's not new (it was in Word 2007), but if you haven't noticed it, give it a go. It's very useful.)NavigationPaneThe new Navigation Pane has much to recommend it.The new Find mechanism highlights all instances of the text you're searching for. The newDocument Maplets us rearrange large slabs of content with nothing more than drag and drop. Even the old Alt-V-D keyboard shortcut is back.

Protected ViewWord applies Protected View to documents opened from potentially unsafe locations. If you open a Word document from a website or an Outlook email attachment, or a document that contains potentially unsafe contents, Word displays it in a "sandbox" environment. You can view the document. But you may not edit the document until you consciously allow editing, by clicking the button that appears to tell you about Protected View.WordArtWordArt in Word 2007 was an embarrassment.PowerPoint 2007, even Excel 2007, had "new" WordArt that relies on a new graphics engine.Word was struggling by with "old" WordArt that was very 1990s (Figure 2).In Word 2010, Microsoft added the same WordArt functionality availalble in PowerPoint and Excel (Figure 3).And, unlike previous WordArt, spell checking works in the WordArt in Word 2010.Figure 2: WordArt in Word 2007

Figure 3: WordArt in Word 2010Undo

Figure 4: The Undo list in Word 2007 after running some code. The user has no way to know how many steps to choose to undo the effect of the last button he or she pressed. And the list is not accurate, either. I wasn't running code from VBA for this example!This might not seem like a big deal. But it's a big deal to me.As a developer,I cannot give your users a good user experience in Word 2007.We know thatUndo is the fourth-most used command in Word(after Paste, Save and Copy, and before Bold). So we know that users care, really really care, about their Undo lists.If I write some code to manipulate the document in Word 2007, the user has no way to undo that code. The Undo list will look something like Figure 4to use an old-fashioned expression of my mother's: it looks like a pakapoo ticket.In Word 2003, I could bundle up all the steps the code executed and give the users a one-button undo (Figure 5). It's not ideal, because the text always says "Undo Bookmark". But it is a thousand times better than dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of entries with inscrutable names like VBA-Shape.LockAspectRatio.In Word 2010, I can do the same 'Undo Bookmark' trick, or, even better, use Word 2010's new functionality to specify the text that appears and to give users a much better experience (Figure 6).In Word 2003 and before, we achieved this by trapping the EditUndo and EditRedo commands. I can't do that in Word 2007. Basically, Microsoft forgot to plug in the Undo command in Word 2007.

Figure 5: The Undo list in Word 2003. Developers could trick up their code so that the Undo list said 'Undo Bookmark'. Developers have been doing this for eons.

Figure 6: The Undo list in Word 2010. Developers can now specify the text that appears in the undo listOpening Creating ad saving Word DOC.Starting a New Document

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Launch Word following one of the methods explained in tutorial on "Launching & Exiting Word 2010".The Word window will open with a blank document.2. You already have a new document on the screen, but since it has been opened by Word itself, you will open another new document for the sake of learning.3. Click the 'File' tab to open the Backstage menu and click the New menu option(see Figure 1.This brings up a list of available templates on the basis of which you can start a new document. For this lesson you will use the blank document template which is already selected.4. Click the Create button.A new Word window will open with a blank document.Congratulations! You have just created your first Word document.

Pacific ring of fire The Pacific Ring of Fire, or Ring of Fire for short, is an area where a large number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur in the basin of the Pacific Ocean. In a 25,000 mile horseshoe shape, its associated with an almost continuous series of oceanic trenches, volcanic belts, volcanic arcs and/or plate movement. The Ring of Fire contains 452 volcanoes and is home to over 75 percent of the worlds active and dormant volcanoes. Its sometimes called the circum-Pacific belt or the circum-Pacific seismic belt.Approximately 90 percent of the worlds earthquakes and 81 percent of the worlds largest earthquakes happen along the Ring of Fire.This region is a direct result of plate tectonics and the movement and collisions oflithosphericplates. The eastern part of the ring is the result of theNazca Plateand theCocos Platebeing subducted underneath the westward movingSouth American Plate. The Cocos Plate is being subducted underneath the Caribbean Plate, located in Central America. A part of the Pacific Plate in addition to the smallJuan de Fuca Plateare being subducted beneath theNorth American Plate. Along the northern part, the northwestward-moving Pacific plate is being subducted underneath the Aleutian Islands arc. Farther westwards, the Pacific plate is being subducted along the Kamchatka Peninsula arcs on south past Japan. The southern part is more complicated, with numerous smaller tectonic plates in collision with the Pacific plate from the Mariana Islands, the Philippines, Tonga, Bougainville, and New Zealand; this piece excludes Australia, due to the position of which being in the center of its tectonic plate. Indonesia lies between the Ring of Fire along the northeastern islands that are adjacent to and including New Guinea and the Alpide belt along the south and west from Sumatra, Bali, Java, Flores, and Timor. The famous, and very active, San Andreas Fault zone of California is a transform fault which offsets a piece of the East Pacific Rise under southwestern United States and Mexico. The movement of the fault creates a number of small earthquakes, at multiple times a day, the majority of which are too small to be felt. The activeQueen Charlotte Faulton the western coast of the Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, and Canada, has created three large earthquakes during the 20th century