Microsoft Word: I can’t think of another application I’d like to have re-written to meet my needs. I’ll kvetch some more another time. Today, I have five tricks to fire up the way you use Word.

Tabs for Word. Cool!

You know how quickly you got used to opening multiple tabs in browsers? It’s a smart way to quickly move among Web pages; without it, browsing is lots like running applications in DOS.

Office Tab is a freebie that works in 2003 and older versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Double-click on the tab bar to open a new a document in a new tab; double-click a tab to close it. A right-click brings up a useful menu where you can save or close all your documents; the Options menu lets you change the look and color of the tabs.

You can save or close all your docs with one click, or right-click the tab to close

Have multiple tabs any way you’d like in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access

The program is from a Chinese developer (his name might be wangminbai) and the Baidu.com site is confusing even using Google’s translation. The program, however, is entirely in English. Read the product description, browse through the FAQ, and download the Zipped Word tool.

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Last October, Microsoft casually dropped a bombshell at its PDC event: It was working on a new version of Microsoft Office that would include browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. The Web version of Office is part of the suite later officially dubbed Office 2010, which won’t arrive until next year.  But it tiptoed a little closer to reality today: Microsoft has released a “technical preview” of the Office Web Apps, a pre-beta, invite-only test version which it’s using to get early feedback from a limited number of users.

If you’re not one of the lucky few, don’t feel too deprived: Microsoft provided me with access to the technical preview this morning, and judging from my first couple of hours with it, it’s a very incomplete rough draft of the Web-based suite to come. Word only lets you view documents, not edit them; Excel and PowerPoint are missing wide swaths of basic functionality; OneNote is missing altogether. Two of the most useful-sounding features–the ability to open documents stored on the Web from within a local copy of Office as if they were stored on your hard drive, and to view documents in phone browsers–aren’t ready yet. And I encountered multiple technical glitches as I tried to use the features which are available.

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The business unit within Microsoft responsible for Mac apps (which Microsoft likes to call the MacBU) is as old as the Mac itself, and it’s never behaved like it had been fully assimilated into the Redmondian Borg. Office for the Mac has long been a distinctly different product from its Windows counterpart–sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. One of the most striking differences has been that Office for the Mac has never offered Outlook; instead, it includes Entourage, a sort-of-like-Outlook, sort-of-different application that got great reviews when it debuted but which has also suffered from iffy compatibility with Outlook and Exchange. It’s also faced increasing competition from within OS X itself, as Apple has beefed up its Mail and iCal apps (and moved to build compatibility with Microsoft’s Exchange server directly into Snow Leopard, the imminent OS X upgrade).

Today, Microsoft announced that it’s working on a new version of Office for the Mac for release by the holiday season of 2010–and that it will dump Entourage for the first version of Outlook for the Mac OS X [there was a previous version of Outlook I'd forgotten which never made it to OS X; this is the first modern one--thanks for correction in comments, Jeff] There was a time when the fact that Mac Office users got Entourage rather than Outlook was widely considered a pro, not a con, and I’m sure some Mac users won’t be happy with this development. But despite any remaining Entourage virtues, e-mail and calendaring are by definition functions which involve working with other people, and with so many Office for Mac users being small fish in large ponds inhabited mostly by Outlook users, consistency probably makes sense. (Although Microsoft said during today’s announcement that Outlook for the Mac will be distinctly different from the Windows edition; if it follows the pattern of other Mac Office apps, it’ll likely be a somewhat simpler program with fewer hardcore business tools.)

The news about the next version of Office for the Mac confirms that Microsoft isn’t planning to discontinue the suite out of lack of interest or desire to make trouble for Apple and Mac users–which isn’t really news, but which seems to be a persistent fear in the back of some Mac fans’ heads. (I’ve heard some worry that Microsoft intended to ditch Office for the Mac once it releases browser-based editions of the major Office apps next year.)

I’m still curious whether Office 2010 for Mac will include integration with the Office Web Apps, and whether it’ll adopt a full-blown version of Office for Windows’ Ribbon interface. (Office 2008 for Mac has a sort of halfway-there version of the Ribbon.) Microsoft didn’t say anything about these questions today. Me, I’d vote for a Mac Office that bore at least somewhat more resemblance to the Windows one, not just for consistency but because Office 2007′s interface is superior to that of Office 2008.

The company did announce some tweaks to the lineup of Office 2008 versions: On September 15th, it’s replacing the current standard edition of Office Mac with a new one called Office Mac 2008 Business Edition, which includes a version of Entourage with better Exchange connectivity; features to let Mac users work with SharePoint and Office Live Workspace services; and new business-oriented document templates. The Home and Student Edition is sticking around, but the Special Media Edition one that bundles its Expression Media graphics package is going away.

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Special all-Office-2010 section:

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Paul Thurrott: lots to say.

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“Seamless XP” in Windows 7.

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Why America doesn’t love Nokia.

Apple tablet rumor. Yes, again.

Today at its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Microsoft is announcing that it’s distributing a Technical Preview version of its upcoming Office 2010 suite to tens of thousands of testers. It won’t be a public beta that’s open to everyone who wants a sneak peek; that will come later this year, and the final version of Office 2010 isn’t due until some time during the first half of next year. But for the first time since it demoed some features last October, Microsoft is showing off the new Office and providing more information about its plans. And it’s briefed reporters and provided them with early access to the Technical Preview (including me).

Office 2010 will be the first version of the suite to reflect the era in which upstarts such as Google Docs and Zoho are delivering Office-like features in the browser, and charging little or no money for them. Microsoft’s response to the new challengers is multifaceted. On one hand, it’s introducing the first Web-based versions of the major Office apps. But it’s also stuffing scads of ambitious new features into the traditional versions of the applications, as if to prove its oft-stated (and accurate) contention that local software can still do lots of things that Web services can’t. And it intends to make the traditional and Web versions of the apps into a powerful team that’s more useful and versatile than either standalone software or a purely browser-based suite can be.

Unfortunately, using the current version of the Technical Preview doesn’t tell us enough to come to even a preliminary verdict about whether the final version of Office 2010 will be a no-brainer upgrade. That’s because Microsoft isn’t providing access to the Web applications or an array of new collaboration tools yet–and it’s the online and collaborative stuff that’s the biggest, boldest change planned for Office 2010. Moreover, the Technical Preview, unlike an almost-finished piece of software such as the Windows 7 Release Candidate, is still subject to meaningful revision before it goes out the door. It’s rough around the edges in spots, and Microsoft says it’s still looking for input from testers. So all I can say is that I’m cautiously optimistic about Office 2010 based on what I’ve seen so far.

Okay, that’s not all I can say–read on for my hands-on impressions of the Technical Preview, plus some information on the features that Microsoft isn’t ready to let outsiders try just yet. There’s a lot to chew on, so I’ll focus on the features thagt impress and/or intrigue me most.

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Service Packs are usually limited to fixing bugs, but Microsoft has added some major pep to Office 2007 with Service Pack 2 (SP2). Microsoft says that SP2 is a “major performance enhancement,” and anecdotally, that is what I’m hearing from Office users.

Office 2007 SP2 became available yesterday, and will be available via Microsoft Update in August. It may be downloaded from Microsoft’s Web site.

Jane Liles, group program manager, Office Sustained Engineering at Microsoft detailed the performance tweaks in a prepared statement. “Outlook 2007 SP2 is 26 percent faster than its predecessor on a set of common e-mail tasks and is even faster, 35 percent, with larger mailboxes,” she said.

Further, she added that users now greater control over visual representation of data in Excel, and that Microsoft Office SharePoint Server was given security and performance updates in addition to support for the Firefox browser.

For what it’s worth, a friend that works for a financial company IM’d me today saying that Excel 2007 is now noticeably faster. I’m also seeing similar comments being made in forums across the Web. If you’ve already made the upgrade, feel free to leave a comment here.

Even more importantly, SP2 adds significant support for open document formats. The average user may not notice it, but SP2 makes great strides toward interoperability with support for non-Microsoft document formats such as OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.1, PDF 1.5, and PDF/A.

Now, I just wonder what the incentive will be to upgrade to Office 14. The only thing that I can thing of offhand are the forthcoming Office Web services. That, and Microsoft is holding off support for ISO International standardized Open XML until that release.

Up until now, we haven’t known much about Microsoft’s plans for the next version of Microsoft Office except that they involve Web-based versions of the major Office apps, and that the suite wouldn’t show up in 2009. Today, the company announced more news about the upgrade, including its name (Office 2010) and general timing (technical preview version in third quarter of 2009, final version out the door in the first half of next year). It also released a public beta of Exchange 2010, the server side of its e-mail system, which will enable new Outlook features such as a “mute” button that lets you ignore a message thread.

With apps as venerable as most of the ones in Office, it’s always a challenge for a software developer to come up with significant new stuff that makes for a compelling upgrade. The main thing we know about new Office 2010 functionality remains the browser-based versions (and features in the traditional ones that let them work in tandem with the Web ones). But with Microsoft planning to release a preview version of Office 2010 in a few months, it may not be too long until it’s ready to reveal more. I’m particularly curious whether the radically new “Ribbon” user interface from Office 2007 will receive a major makeover–although the glimpses we’ve seen of Office 2010 so far suggest that any tweaks may be minor.

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AT&T wants more iPhone exclusivity.

Microsoft patches up Office holes.

Philips: Two dimensions are enough.

I’m afraid to use ATMs.

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Lemme touch the Palm Pre!

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SlideShare’s prank: funny, cruel, both?

Sorry, unauthorized iPhone app stores.

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XM/Sirius merger’s loose ends.

Stolen iPhone? It calls cops!

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Microsoft Business Division president Stephen Elop raised hopes for a version of Office for iPhones during a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo. He says the company has took notice of the rise in demand among smartphone users to edit MS Office documents. When asked however directly if it meant the company was indeed developing a Office suite for iPhone, Elop deferred. “Not yet—keep watching,” he said.

Elop stressed that the company remains committed to Office on the web and mobile devices, and said that it continues work on a Web version of the suite. He did disclose that any beta of that product would not be this year.

[NOTE: I wrote this piece for my pals at PC World, who kindly agreed to let me publish it here, too.]

If Microsoft had invented the iPod, it would have been called the Microsoft I-pod Pro 2005 Human Ear Professional Edition. The cult-hit video that makes that assertion may have been a joke, but it rings true. And when word emerged that the video was a self-parody produced within Microsoft, the point was even clearer: The world’s largest software developer just isn’t very good at naming stuff.

Some Microsoft names sound clunky; some are confusing; some are undignified or overambitious. More than any other company in technology, the behemoth of Redmond loves to change product names–often replacing one lackluster label with an equally uninspired one. Microsoft has also been known to mess up some names that are actually perfectly good, such as Windows and Word, by needlessly tampering with them.

Herewith, in chronological order, are ten Microsoft names that could have been a lot better, together with some semiconstructive advice on monikers that would have more euphonious and/or more accurate. I also selected six not-quite-as-bad runners-up.

1993: Word 6.0 for Windows: When Microsoft upgraded 1991′s popular Word 2.0 for Windows, it replaced it with…no, not something logical like Word 3.0. Rather, it blithely hopscotched over three version numbers and landed at Word 6.0. The official explanation for the skippage was that it brought the Windows edition’s version number into line with that of the older DOS incarnation of Word. But conspiracy theorists noted that it also allowed Word to catch up with archrival WordPerfect, which also released a version 6.0 in 1993.

Whatever the rationale, the move rendered the practical purpose of version numbers meaningless, thereby setting a bad example for other companies such as Netscape, which later went straight from Netscape Navigator 4.0 to version 6.0.

What it should have been called: Word 3.0 for Windows. Simple and accurate.

1995: Microsoft Bob. When I asked my Twitter and Facebook pals to nominate bad Microsoft names, this legendarily lousy Windows front-end hosted by animated characters came up far more often than any other product. It’s possible that the badness of the product has tarnished its title. But as several people pointed out, “Microsoft Bob” is both cutesy-cute and uninformative–it doesn’t give you an inkling as to what the product is all about. (The box featured a smiley face wearing Bill Gates-like nerdy glasses, but the main character in the interface was a dog named Rover, who was later revived for Windows XP’s misbegotten search feature.)

What it should have been called: Well, Microsoft Rover would have been at least slightly more descriptive–especially since the product itself was such a dog.

1996-present: Every name ever associated with handheld devices running Microsoft software. At first, they were called Handheld PCs, and ran an OS known as Windows CE. Then they morphed into Palm PCs–until the PalmPilot people complained, whereupon they became Palm-Size PCs. But only briefly: Soon, Microsoft wanted us to call them Pocket PCs, and the software they ran was renamed Windows Mobile.

That name stuck around when the OS migrated from PDAs to phones, although it bifurcated into two editions: Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Windows Mobile Smartphone. Then Microsoft declared that there were three Windows Mobile variants–Windows Mobile Classic, Windows Mobile Professional, and Windows Mobile Standard. As for the devices themselves, Steve Ballmer declared in February of this year that they’d be known henceforth as Windows Phones–scratch the “Mobile.” Except for the fact that the OS is still Windows Mobile. Got that?What they should have been called: Melvin. Or just about anything else, really, as long as it didn’t keep changing.

2000: .NET. In the mid-1990s, critics accused Microsoft was accused by many of being slow to jump on the Internet bandwagon. By the dawn of the new millennium, however, it was firmly on board–and in June 2000, it unveiled a vision for online services it called .NET. As originally articulated, .NET addressed consumers, businesses, and developers, and it involved everything from programming languages to an online version of Microsoft Office to calendaring and communications services to a small-business portal to stuff for PDAs, cell phones, and gaming consoles. It was so wildly ambitious, so all-encompassing, and so buzzword-laden that it pretty much defied comprehension, at least if you weren’t a professional geek. Which the company seemed to realize–it quickly stopped pushing the concept to consumers, instead restricting it to programming tools.

What it should have been called: How about “Virtually Everything Microsoft Does Involving the Internet From This Day Forward,” or VEMDIFTDF for short? Or what if Microsoft had simply declared that it was now Web-centric, period–no new branding required?

2000: Windows Millennium Edition. Microsoft couldn’t call this successor to Windows 98 “Windows 2000″ because it had already assigned that name to Windows NT’s replacement. So the company saddled the OS with a name that was both pretentious and goofy, and gave it the overly adorable (and badly capitalized) nickname “Windows Me.” It was probably bad juju: The product itself went on to be widely reviled as slow, glitchy, and insubstantial; and to this day its name rivals that of Microsoft Bob as shorthand for “crummy software.”

What it should have been called: Windows 2001, especially if Microsoft marketing had assembled an ad campaign involving HAL 9000 and/or apes hurling things at an obelisk. Bonus virtue: That name would have given Microsoft an excuse to delay the OS for six months to fix bugs.

San Francisco’s too rainy today:

Apple layoffs? Supposedly not true.

Will Washington prohibit iPhone exclusivity?

Windows 7 for Netbooks: dicey?

Disney might take on iTunes.

Nvidia reaps Mac desktop windfall.

IE: Nukable from Windows 7.

Hackers mock Apple’s Safari browser.

Office 14 beta? Fairly soon.

Obscure, good Microsoft Web services.

Sprint’s Treo Pro: March 15th.

Julius Genachowski tapped for FCC.

California legislator: blur Google Earth!

After countless attempts at suffocating software piracy, Microsoft has accepted it as an inevitability–one that it can profit from. The company intends to deliver an ad-supported edition of Office 14 in an attempt to draw illicit users into its revenue steams, Silicon Alley Insider is reporting.

That is not to say that Microsoft has abandoned the fight–it’s just thinking outside of the box. Today, at the Morgan Stanley Technology conference, Microsoft Business Division president Stephen Elop told attendees that an ad-supported version of Office could provide Microsoft with an eventual upsell opportunity with pirate “customers.” It would also diversify its revenue streams, he said.

Over the past two years, Microsoft has pushed ahead with its Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) program. OGA requires customers to validate their licenses in order to receive updates and add-ons. The program met with resistance from some customers when their paid software was flagged.

Those measures, while helpful, have apparently fallen short. Last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Wall Street analysts that piracy drained Office sales more so than competition from Google Apps, OpenOffice.org, or any of its other competitors.

“We offer services through Office Live today that take advantage of both ad-funded and subscription offerings. As we announced last year at PDC, we will deliver Office Web applications, which will be available with the next version of Office, to consumers through this service. We have nothing more to share at this time,” a spokesperson said.

Microsoft has pushed the dial enough toward enforcement direction that a new direction is warranted–paying customers won’t accept more inconvenience and intrusion. I’m not certain that splattering a Web-based version of Office with ads is going to eliminate piracy altogether, but it will provide an alternative to unauthorized copying that could reduce its occurrence without markedly affecting Office license revenue.

Steve Ballmer has finally put the kibosh on any hopes of seeing the next version of Office this year, essentially telling Wall Street analysts any rumors or leaks indicating such are not true, according to Mary Jo Foley.

Executives have let slip apparently that there was some possiblity of a late 2009 release, and enterprise sales representatives were echoing that to their customers. However, for whatever reason it now appears that date has slipped.

Could it be a casualty of the poor economy? Possibly. Pushing it into 2010 could mean a better adoption rate as many economists expect some type of recovery to begin at that time. A lot of companies right now are slowing down their product releases as a result of the poor retail environment, which does make good business sense.

Office 14′s delay doesn’t seem to be affecting Windows 7, however. MJ’s sources still place the release of that operating system later this year. I think it isn’t a problem: an operating system release is more important that a productivity suite in my eyes.

After all, I know a few folks who have still yet to upgrade from Office XP yet.

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Gmail: Down. Then back up.

David Pogue likes Kindle 2.

Want Office 14? Try 2010.

Happy birthday to Steve Jobs.

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