The Picture Shape command in previous versions of Office has been replaced with a new Crop to Shape command that allows users to resize and move the selected shape itself when cropping. Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word include a variety of artistic effects such as glass, paint stroke, pastel, and pencil sketch effects that users can apply to inserted images. Photos inserted into SmartArt diagrams can also be cropped, resized, or repositioned. The Convert to Shapes feature, introduced in Office 2007 SP2 as a context menu option that turned SmartArt into a group of customizable shapes is now on the ribbon in both programs. The former option presents open windows as thumbnails in a gallery on the ribbon that insert a screenshot of the selected window into the active app, while the latter option minimizes the currently active app, dims the screen, and presents a selection rectangle for users to create a screenshot by holding the main mouse button, dragging the selection rectangle to a desired area of the screen, and then releasing the button to automatically insert the selection as an image into the document. Users can download various text-to-speech engines from Microsoft. Office 2010, like previous versions, automatically resizes photos that are inserted into shapes by default, which can negatively affect their aspect ratio.

A bump cutter looks a little bit like a giant squeegee, and in some ways, that’s essentially what it is. The giant space viewer has now spotted “superhot blobs of gas” emerging from a distant star system. It is a completely passive system. After the background has been removed, users can apply various visual effects to the result image or wrap text in a document around it; users can also crop the image since removing the background does not reduce its original size. An image of active regions on the Sun from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Additionally, the background removal feature and image adjustments such as brightness and contrast are all accelerated when used on capable hardware. A new background removal feature based on Microsoft Research technology is included in Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word to remove the backgrounds of images inserted into documents. It is exposed as a Remove Background command that appears on the Picture Tools contextual tab on the ribbon when an image is selected, which displays a separate Background Removal contextual tab and places a selection rectangle and magenta color over portions of the selected image; the selection rectangle algorithmically determines which area of the selected image will be retained once the background removal process is complete, whereas the magenta color indicates the areas that will be removed.

A new Aspect Ratio option under the Crop command of the ribbon presents a drop-drop down menu with options for both landscape and portrait page orientations to customize the aspect ratio of the selection rectangle before cropping, which automatically resizes the selection rectangle when users start the crop process; users can manually resize the selection rectangle and simultaneously preserve its aspect ratio by resizing it from its corners while pressing the ⇧ Shift key. The SmartArt text pane now allows users to insert, modify, and reorder images and their associated text within a diagram, and new Move Up and Move Down commands on the ribbon facilitate the reordering of content. Audio pronunciations are made available through a Speak command, which can be accessed separately from the Mini Translator (e.g., added to the ribbon), but the command can only be used if a text-to-speech engine matching the language of the selected text is installed. A Mini Translator allows users to translate selected text in OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. Presentation sections allow users to visually customize the organization of slides in a presentation. Sections can be copied or merged.

Only windows that have not been minimized to the taskbar can be captured. Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word allow users to immediately insert a screenshot of open app windows or a selection of content on the screen into documents without saving the image as a file. A Quick Filing feature allows users to choose which location in a notebook to quickly send information to from within other programs. Excel supports hardware accelerated chart drawing, and PowerPoint supports hardware accelerated animations, transitions, and video playback and effects; slideshow elements are now rendered as sprites, which are then composited with additional effects such as fades and wipes implemented using Pixel Shader 2.0. All Office 2010 programs support Direct3D hardware accelerated SmartArt and WordArt object and text rendering. Images are automatically cropped when inserted into shapes within SmartArt diagrams to preserve their aspect ratio; users can also manually reposition images. Word Starter 2010 cannot insert captions, citations, footnotes, endnotes, equations, indexes, or SmartArt graphics or text, and it does not support change trackage, customization, digital rights management, full screen view, or macro functionality.