Core Dump

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

The system uses an XSLT transform that is driven by a style-to-tag mapping file to map DOCX XML files into arbitrary DITA maps and topics. We are using it for both the simple case of 1 word doc = 1 topic and one word doc = a sophisticated tree of maps and topics.

At the moment this is a one-way process, in that we have not implemented the reverse DITA-to-DOCX transform. However, that wouldn't be too hard to do using a similar style-driven approach. (There is a general DITA-to-InCopy/InDesign transform in the DITA2InDesign project that could be adapted to do DITA-to-DOCX since the business logic is similar although the data details are of course very different--but we haven't yet had a client requirement to round trip from DOCX-to-DITA-to-DOCX.)

The main limitation is the fact that it does require careful design of the Word styles to enable mapping to the appropriate DITA structures. It also doesn't handle in any sophisticated way the problem of mapping a flat sequence of character styles into a nested set of inline elements.

Labels: DITA, Microsoft Word

* Using the BibWord styles, you can add more styles to the default list in Word 2007.
* Using the BibWord XSL and XML files, you can create your own or modify existing style formats. But you DO need to know something about XML before you go fiddling around in them. PLEASE make a back-up of the original files before you fiddle with them! And follow the advice on the BibWord website, its documentati0n, and check the user Discussion area for help and guidance.
* BibWord is free!

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2010

One of the most common complaints about Microsoft Word is its insistence on taking control of the wheel. Many users get completely blindsided by some of Word’s automatic changes, and even the more experienced among them often just live with Word’s shenanigans because because they don’t know how to disable them.

If you’ve gotten more than your share of support calls from users trying to wrestle Word into submission (or pulled out your own hair on a few occasions), the list below will help you quickly cut Word down to size.

Labels: Microsoft Word, technical communication

Labels: Microsoft Word

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Labels: Microsoft Word, software, technical communication

You can make a copy of the themes under your Office Install -> Document Themes directory, and then open them up in the Theme Builder application to customize just about any aspect of the theme. Once you've finished, you can save them out to your documents folder and use them from any Office application by choosing the Browse option under the themes panel's drop-down menu. If you want them globally available, you can save them out to the Office installation directory where the rest of the theme files are.

The application is a bit of a pain to get going, but could be a huge timesaver for making sure all your Office documents have a consistent look. Theme Builder is a free download for Windows only.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007, software

Labels: Microsoft Word, technical communication

Some experts worry that a settlement this large could rekindle debate over the legitimacy of lawsuits like this one. Lobbyists in the U.S. tech sector have been pressuring Congress to crack down on small companies suing bigger companies over patent issues.

A penalty such as the one levied against Microsoft could become a rallying cry to push even harder for those reforms, says Eugene Quinn, a U.S. patent attorney and founder of intellectual-property blog IPWatchdog.com.

“Many [small] companies are suing them just to try and get a settlement,” Mr. Quinn says. “But a lot of times it is this exact dynamic, where a small company has good technology that is being infringed. There are a lot of these types of suits out there.”

Mr. Vulpe defends their decision to protect their patent rights, while dismissing the notion that ideas should be free for use by everyone.

“Innovation without patents is like fishing without nets,” he says. “It's great for the seals upstream, but not so great for the fishermen.”

Translation? “We want to get paid,” Mr. Owen says. “They're not going to use it unless we give consent. It's the right thing.”

Labels: intellectual property, Microsoft, Microsoft Word

So that's basically the end of Word at work. Well, at my workplace at least. I have a friend who spends hours and hours taking Word XML documents and untangling them programmatically to extract their data into other formats, and I'm glad I don't have his job. Other friends use Word at work as a matter of course, simply because nobody wants to change. Change is a funny thing, though. One day you wake up and everything is on a wiki somewhere. How did that happen? It happens in much the same way as typewriters suddenly disappeared—because a better alternative arrived. Word—and I know I'll be attacked for saying this—is the new typewriter.

Maybe I'm wrong. Software is, after all, infinitely adjustable, something that typewriters aren't. Microsoft has put some effort into making Word part of the new Web-based world, such as adding support to post an article directly to a blog, including uploading pictures. It's worth noting, however, that this feature was added as a last-minute afterthought. Word, at its advanced age, is unlikely to change what it fundamentally is at the core. For me, the program no longer serves any purpose in my life. Maybe Word 2010 could win me back, but I doubt it. The love is gone, and all the new features in the world won't bring it back.

I've even abandoned Word for my own personal writing. These days, all my writing is destined for the Web, but I still need a place to compose my initial drafts. I can basically use anything for this—I've used NotePad, TextEdit, even FinalWriter on my Amiga. In the end, however, I settled on a very slick software program called Scrivener, available for OS X. It simplifies and enhances the writing process by using a model based around user-defined document sections, not pages of virtual paper. Scrivener has a decent "Save as HTML" feature, which, unlike Word's, produces sane and readable HTML, but even that needs to be cleaned up somewhat before it can be sent to the Web. A much simpler solution is to just copy and paste the text. Where do I paste into? The now-ubiquitous Web text entry box, available on every blog, content management system, and wiki on the planet. It's fast and simple, the perfect combination for our accelerated world.

Labels: Microsoft Word, software

• Introducing Word 2010

• Word 2010 - Framing the Release

• Some Other Office Blogs Involving Office 2010

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2010

Microsoft has also updated the desktop version to have collaborative features so that multiple users can be editing a document at once. This collaboration is not available in the web version, unfortunately. Microsoft says that users don’t want this feature but this might be a move to protect the Office revenue model.

When two people are editing the same document (in the desktop version) at the same time, Word will notify each user when there are changes that need to be synced with their document. The copy/paste function of the desktop version has also received an upgrade, where you can see see a live preview for the paste function. The paste function also has an advanced option to create and insert screenshots. To make moving around a long document easier, Word now has a visual navigation pane and section header breakdown which makes it easy to jump around different sections of a document.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2010

Labels: Microsoft Word

# You cannot resize the dialog box any which way, which means that you have to continually scroll the list nine items at a time (Home and End work within it as do the page up/down keys, so that helps a little). This is fixed in Word 2007 and the dialog is resizable for both height and width.
# The heading levels cannot be collapsed — they always open fully expanded, which makes it painful to get to Section 12 of 24 sections, for example. Again, you have to scroll to get there. This is the same in Word 2007. Surely it would be a simple thing to add expand/collapse icons for the Headings list??

Labels: Microsoft Word

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2010

Labels: Microsoft, Microsoft Word

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Developers have taken advantage of the tools and programming structures in earlier versions of Office to extend the Fluent UI in creative ways. For example, the command bars object model enabled developers to build rich solutions in their custom Office applications. Continuing in that tradition, UI extensibility introduces an innovative model that you can use to enhance the user experience. You use extensible markup language (XML) and one of several conventional programming languages to manipulate the components that make up the Fluent UI. Because XML is plain text, you can create customization files in any text editor, which simplifies work with the Fluent UI. You can also reuse custom Fluent UI files with a minimum of adjustments because each application uses the same programming model.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Labels: Microsoft Word, software

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Page numbering isn’t the only thing which is controlled on a section-by-section basis. You can adjust a variety of page formatting options for each section in your document, including:

* the number of columns;
* text alignment;
* headers and footers;
* settings for margins and borders;
* line numbering;
* footnotes and endnotes;
* paper size and orientation.

If you have a printer with multiple paper trays you can even nominate a different tray for each section in a document – handy if you want to put your first and last pages on heavy card or colored paper, for instance, while the rest of the document prints on plain paper.

Labels: Microsoft Word

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Turns out, even after reading through all of your complaints (and I do sympathize, I've been there myself), I still do feel that I have a mission, and I choose to accept it: to forcibly tug the great lot of you into the next phase of productivity software. Consequently, this week's column will help you deal with your problems: how to gain space, how to find things, how to concoct a little toolbar of your own with all your favorite features, how to move that little toolbar around, and how you, too, can learn to stop worrying and love the Ribbon.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

• Building Blocks

• Keyboard Driven Building Block Insertion

• Managing and Adminsitrating Building Blocks

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

The Web 2.0 revolution has also affected publishing. I found my publisher was not promoting my books into the global marketplace as they had promised, so I have self-published using Web 2.0 resources. Others have been unable to get published at all, and so have self-published, to find themselves with best sellers on their hands and conventional publishers offering them million-dollar contacts. Print-on-demand technology is revolutionising publishing as we speak. I can supply my book as a PDF file to a printer who can cost effectively print and despatch a single copy; no more huge print runs resulting in volumes of remaindered stock.

What else is being radically changed as Web 2.0 developers get better and better at what they do, and are enabling ordinary users to do more and more of what they once had to pay professionals to do?

I am writing this using the Blog template in Word 2007 and will hit a button in Word to save it to my Google blog. From there it will distribute itself across a range of other sites with no human intervention. Now how sweet is that?

Labels: Internet, Microsoft Word, Office 2007

This book is the first attempt ever to catalog and describe all of Word's features. The whole of the user interface is displayed graphically and explained, together with cross-references to the commands, which are found alphabetically later in the book.

This book is targeted at experts and power users who need to understand how Word functions at a low level. It will be useful to teachers and trainers, helpdesk staff, technical authors writing books about Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Office programmers.

Labels: books, Microsoft Word, Office 2007, technical communication

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007, technical communication

Labels: Microsoft Word, technical communication

Cupertino, the city in California, is best known for hosting the headquarters of Apple Computers. But the term doesn’t come from the firm. The real source is spelling checkers that helpfully include the names of places as well as lists of words. In a notorious case documented by Ms Muller, European writers who omitted the hyphen from co-operation (the standard form in British English) found that their automated checkers were turning it into Cupertino. Being way behind the computing curve, I’m writing this text using Microsoft Word 97, which seems to be the offending software (more recent editions have corrected the error); in that, if you set the language to British English, cooperation does get automatically changed to Cupertino, the first spelling suggestion in the list. For reasons known only to God and to Word’s programmers, the obvious co-operation comes second.

Hence Cupertino effect for the phenomenon and Cupertino for a word or phrase that has been involuntarily transmogrified through ill-programmed computer software unmediated by common sense or timely proofreading.http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/olwy.htm#N5

Labels: language, Microsoft Word

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

In all previous versions of Word the Document Defaults were hardcoded into Word. That is, you couldn't change them. This means that the way you would change the default properties applied to your documents would either be to change the Styles within the Template used to create the document, or to write a macro that went through all documents and updated the properties defined by the Normal Style (the paragraph Style applied to text by default).

In Word 2007, you can certainly still do the former, but should know the following before you do the later:

By default, the Normal Style is empty

Put differently, all of your Normal properties arejavascript:void(0) being specified by Styles further up the hierarchy; specifically, the Document Default and Table Styles.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Labels: Microsoft Word

The Open XML SDK provides a set of .Net APIs that allows developers to create and manipulate documents in the Open XML Formats in both client and server environments without the need of the Office clients. The SDK should make it easier for you to build solutions on top of the Open XML Format by allowing you to perform complex operations, such as creating Open XML packages or adding/deleting tables, with just a few lines of code.

Labels: Microsoft Word, XML

Here you’ll find an eclectic (and occasionally slightly repetitive) collection of disjointed techniques to make Microsoft Word do things its designers never intended and to fix things they didn’t know were broken. Also, being of a somewhat philosophical turn of mind (like the old
mechanic relaxing behind the counter), I’ll occasionally throw in some thoughts about the publishing process and how some of these odd techniques can improve it. I hope you’ll find it all very, very useful. There’s lots of good stuff in here—if you don’t mind rummaging around to find what you need. You brought a wrench and a screwdriver, right?

Labels: books, Microsoft Word

Labels: Microsoft Word

Labels: Microsoft Word

Labels: books, Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is prone to a remote memory-corruption vulnerability.

An attacker could exploit this issue by enticing a victim to open and interact with malicious Word files.

Successfully exploiting this issue will corrupt memory and crash the application. Given the nature of this issue, attackers may also be able to execute arbitrary code in the context of the currently logged-in user.

Labels: Microsoft Word, security

Microsoft has confirmed reports of vulnerability in Word that allows an attacker to exploit a system via the Microsoft Jet Database Engine, which shares data with Access, Visual Basic and third party applications.

Microsoft in its advisory said the potential for attack is “very limited.” Reports of the Word flaw were highlighted by Panda and Symantec in the last two weeks. On March 3, Panda researcher Ismael Briones stumbled on the new exploit. On Thursday, Symantec also noted the Jet vulnerability. According to Symantec.

The attacker needs only to find a trick to force the MS Jet library to open the file and trigger the vulnerability that will run the malicious shellcode. Some social engineering and a little help from Office applications will work out well in this specific attack. In fact, it is possible to call MSJET40.DLL directly from MS Word, without using Access at all.

Labels: Microsoft Word, security

Labels: Microsoft Word

In closing, I want to emphasize that we're not removing support – we're making the default safer. If you're among the users who do need to be opening these formats, we will continue to support you. We also recognize that we have not made any of this as usable as we'd like, and we apologize that this hasn't been as well documented or as easy as you need it to be. We're also going to take a hard look at how we can do better in the future.

Labels: Microsoft, Microsoft Word

Labels: Microsoft Word, technical communication

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

At about the same time the phone support team was logging a lot of calls regarding line spacing, my team was noticing low ratings on our how-to content that walks through the steps of changing line spacing within and between paragraphs. Mind you, this was the same help topic we'd published in the previous version of Word, updated for the new version. It hadn't shown up on our radar before as being problematic content. Why all of a sudden, we wondered, are people having trouble adjusting line spacing? It's not harder to do than it used to be, we thought. Then we looked at the customer feedback – the comments you can add after you click "Yes," "No," or "I don't know" to the "Was this information helpful?" question. Yes, we really do read your comments, especially if a topic is getting lots of traffic, a low rating, and lots of comments. From the feedback it was clear that the problem was not one of customers wanting to learn how to adjust line spacing. No. Customers just wanted Word 2007 to lay out documents the way it always had before. Instead of thinking, "Oooh, what a professional looking document!" they were thinking, "How come the spacing is screwed up?" They were frustrated that now they needed to learn how to set something in Word that they never had to set before, because they liked the old template just fine.

Labels: Microsoft Word

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

As in the previous two comparisons, Writer emerged as the winner in the majority of categories. However, in many categories, the decision is not as obvious as in previous comparisons. For the first time in several releases, Word's designers seem to be making significant changes. These changes are not always successful -- in fact, the reordering of menus into ribbons might be seen by the cynical as an attempt to hide some long-term embarrassments, such as the ongoing problems with master documents. But at least the effort is being made. Writer, by contrast, seems to be standing still, and some of its problems -- notably, cross-references -- are almost as long-neglected as some of Word's.

Labels: Microsoft Word, technical communication

Fellow MVP Lisa Wilke-Thissen has discovered a pretty nasty bug in Word 2007. If you’re searching for a slash — / — (ASCII character 47), Word 2007 will also match any inline graphics. So, let’s say you’re searching for /^p (a slash followed by a paragraph mark). /^p will indeed match any slashes followed by paragraph marks. But, it will also perfectly match any inline graphics followed by paragraph marks. If you happen to be replacing /^p with something else, you will also end up replacing any inline graphics matched, too. /^? also matches any inline graphic.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Labels: Microsoft Word

Labels: Microsoft Word

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

1. We write specs using a common template and then to save/upload them to a SharePoint site.
2. A application we created called 'the spec solution' extracts and manipulates information from the specs such as name of the program manager, their team, how close the spec is to being competed, when we expect the spec to be complete, etc.
3. Finally, the spec solution uses this data that it 'reads' from all of the specs to generate a new Word document for management to let them know how all the specs across Office are coming along.

In other words, we write documents that this 'solution' reads. The solution then uses data from those documents to write summary documents.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

The WordprocessingML format represents a stream of content (the data), and the formatting associated with it. Word does not work on this data in a hierarchical manner, nor does it infer a hierarchy when working with it. As such, there is no hierarchy stored in the file format. The way that you impose any type of hierarchy or semantics is through the use of structured document tags (SDTs) like content controls, custom XML, etc.. That hierarchy will then be reflected in the document content and in the file format.

If you intend to use wordprocessingML as a pure data interchange format, and you want the data to be hierarchical in nature, then you will want to use the SDTs in your document for this hierarchy. We actually do this today in our workflows in Microsoft, such as our spec library where we leverage the SDTs to structure the specs for easy interrogation of the spec collection.

Other approaches folks have used to get semantics out of the document would be through the use of styles. Remember though that the Styles are flat since they are just a property of the paragraph or run of text.

The vital thing to understand is formatting itself should not be viewed as structure. The "view" of the data is not PART of the data. The "view" is separate. The fact that you have Heading 2 after heading 1 does not imply a structural relationship between the 2 headings – merely that they LOOK different. In a world that espouses the separation of data and view, this is a great model. There is no attempt to try to invent some hierarchical representation based on the view of the data.

Labels: Microsoft Word, XML

An easy way to begin, one that content contributors may be comfortable with, is consistent use of the same Word templates for the same document type. Of course, they would then still be free to deviate from the template, which will cause problems down the road.

So there is a new class of tools that look exactly like Microsoft Word, but which can force your authors to create perfectly structured documents. By perfectly structured, we mean that when exported to XML, the document can be validated against a DTD (document type definition) or XML Schema Document (XSD).

Microsoft has provided an API that allows developers to customize Word. They can selectively disable Word's menus to allow only those options that are valid at a given point in the document (context-sensitive controls).

Labels: DITA, Microsoft Word, XML

Labels: Microsoft Word, software, technical communication

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

When I started studying the massive archive of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation government that ruled Iraq from April 21, 2003, to June 28, 2004, I expected my experience to be different. I didn't think any letters would fall in my lap, because the archive is paperless. The first archive of occupation created during the IT era, the CPA's virtual history can be found online at www.cpa-iraq.org, on thousands of pages that each begin "Long live the new Iraq!"

But I forgot to factor in the ubiquity of human error, and of Microsoft Word. It turns out the IT era really is different, after all. It took my 8-year-old son just a few seconds to shake loose some hidden history from within the official transcript of the CPA.

My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45 documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated Weekly Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had one of the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with the computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the "View" menu at the top of the screen and select the "Mark up" option. If you are in a Word document where "Track changes" has been turned on, hitting "Mark up" will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever made in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the initials of the editors. When my son did it, all the deleted passages in a document with the innocuous name "Administrator's Weekly Economic Report" suddenly appeared in blue and purple. It was the electronic equivalent of seeing every draft of an author's paper manuscript and all the penciled changes made by the editors. I soon figured out that with a few keystrokes I could see the deleted passages in 20 of the 42 Word documents I'd downloaded. For an academic like myself it was a small treasure trove, and after I'd stopped hooting and hollering it took some time before I could convince my startled son that he hadn't done anything wrong.

Labels: Microsoft Word, politics

Even the button sizing is interesting. Many of the buttons that used to be commonly used seem to be diminished. Most notable in the downgraded list are font controls (font size, font face, bold, italic, etc.). Instead, styles are much more prominent. The reasoning behind this is fairly obvious: The user is encouraged to choose the Emphasis style over making text italic. Why? Both methods seem to do the same thing. Well, not quite.

Although the default Emphasis style does simply make the text italic, it also adds a strong semantic value to the text. Word (or anything else parsing the text) now "knows" that the "why" is to put emphasis on the text; the "how" is through italics. If the user later decides to emphasize text by making it bold, or larger, or whatever, he or she merely changes the definition of the Emphasis style. In a nutshell, styles do for Word documents what CSS does for HTML documents, and the new interface encourages the "why-based" approach of styles over the "how-based" approach of manual text formatting.

Labels: Microsoft Word, technical communication

Labels: Microsoft Word

Some folks might ask why not just port the Win Office VBA over to the Mac? Well, VBA circa Win Office 97 (which is the closest Windows VBA to what we have on the Mac) doesn’t implement their execution engine this way at all. Instead, they have tens of thousands of lines of IA-32 assembly that directly implements all of the opcodes. That assembly does so according to the Windows Intel ABI, which is different from the Mac ABI in several important ways (the specifics of which are described here.) Also, the assembly is in MASM format which is close to but not the same as NASM as supported by GCC. So, we’d have to edit the source to be compilable by GCC, and scrub it line-by-line to find and adjust the parts that aren’t compliant with the Apple Intel ABI. We’d also end up with two completely different implementations of VBA (PPC state machine and Intel straight assembly) that we’d have to maintain and keep in sync. That would be horribly bug-prone.

Labels: Microsoft Word

Labels: Microsoft Word

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

* When the user types into the controls, the corresponding data in the data store is updated in real time (so the custom XML is always live and up to date).This means that finding out the "data" of the document is as simple as pulling out the appropriate XML data store part.
* When the data is updated inside or outside of Word, the corresponding controls are updated – so the contract that you see can be changed simply by editing the custom XML that lives with the document. That custom XML has no Word-specific information in it, and is therefore extremely easy to read and/or write.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007, XML

This is a running criticism I have of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML). It has been narrowly crafted to accommodate a single vendor's applications. Its extreme length (over 6,000 pages) stems from it having detailed every wart of MS Office in an inextensible, inflexible manner. This is not a specification; this is a DNA sequence.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007, Vista

Labels: Microsoft Word, security

The truth is that in previous versions of Word, it was often easier for people to apply formatting rather than use styles to get the look that they want. In Word 2007, the entire right side of the Home tab is dedicated to styles. You can apply a style much the way you bold text. You find the look you want and then click on it to apply it to your current selection. This makes is much easier to use styles to format your document. Word users will often refer to a document formatted with styles in this way as a "well-formatted' document. Other types of formatting, on the left of the Home tab, should be used only when there are one-time "exceptions" that you wish to apply.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007