What is Backstage in Office 2010 ?

Today morning another mail popped in asking me what is Office Backstage and I smiled. Looks like people are seriously looking into aspects of technical preview before buying Office 2010.

Backstage in literal meaning is an out of view of the public or a stage area out of sight of the audience. In Office 2010, this backstage concept was added to let people understand there are always 3 parts of a document.

• One which the end reader sees.
• Second where the author  can work on it, make it ready for the outer world
• The third second is that section where you decide what your documents can do, what settings can be made and common things the end user can do with that document.

Now if you are getting confused with background work it’s not and it’s not just settings but a super set of it.

Back Stage is a collection of controls and most common actions that can be taken on the document and its properties can defined which affects it globally.

This can be used both by the document creator to define settings etc. and also by the end user who can find all the most commonly used tasks in one place i.e. printing, sharing etc. You can access the back stage by clicking on the Office button which is on top left and is rectangle in shape rather than a round one.

Here are few snapshots of how backstage looks like in Office 2010. Remember backstage is not specific to any of the Office Applications, some of things are specific and some can be common to all.