Core Dump

If you've used Word for any kind of technical documentation, you'll know that its numbered lists are not stable. Lists have a tendency for numbering to break, either loosing the numbers completely or making inserting or deleting new items impossible. There are workarounds - the best known is probably using SEQ fields. This requires a bit of work to set up and use but is generally completely stable.

However, if you're used to using SEQ fields in Word 2003 or earlier versions, you'll have to adjust your way of working in Word 2007. CyberText Newsletter has an article explaining how to make the transition. If you're using Word 2007 , you'll definitely want to bookmark this.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Bruce Byfield has written several comparisons of Microsoft Office versus OpenOffice.org. His latest is the fourth and covers the major parts of each suite in detail. He finds that Writer is superior to Word for many tasks - something that many writers struggling with Word's instabilities and inconsistencies may find encouraging.

The fact that OpenOffice.org is free software predisposes me to prefer it. However, until I completed the analysis, I had no idea what the results would be. They ended (if you haven't been keeping score) with OOo and MSO in a tie for general interface and spreadsheets, OOo in the lead in word processors, and MSO ahead in slide presentations. What these results suggest, I think, is that both office suites are mature products. Given a moment's thought, that shouldn't be surprising, since OOo's development goes back more than 20 years. But we tend to think of OOo as a recent development, so the closeness of the comparison may come as a bit of a surprise.

This is the fourth time I have compared the two office suites. Each time, the differences between them have gotten smaller. Now, they are less than ever before. For those of us in the Free Software community, the latest results help to prove what we have known all along: opting for free software does not mean being satisfied with inferior tools. Of course, you might disagree with my conclusions, depending on your needs and expertise. But what they emphasize, more than anything else is that today free productivity apps can stand toe to toe with their proprietary equivalents, and win as often as they lose.

Labels: Office 2007, software

Word 2007 comes with built-in citation and bibliography styles for standard formats like Chicago and APA. But they're not really customizable, and if your house style doesn't match one of the standards, you loose features. The CyberText Newsletter points out that there is an open source add-in called BibWord that provides the ability to customize these styles.

* 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

When Microsoft introduced Office 2007, it also introduced a new file format. In Word, the files have a DOCX extension. They're actually a ZIP archive of directories and XML files. If you're still using Office 2003, you can download a compatibility pack that will let you open and save in the new file format - something you might want to consider, as the files are both smaller than the DOC file format and less susceptible to corruption.

However, as this Wired article shows, there are other ways of working with the new file format. For example, you can use OpenOffice.org, which handles them seamlessly (as well as it's own XML-based format). Or send the file to one of several online converters.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

We're still not using Office 2007 at work, which is just as well, because I can just imagine the documents I'd get to edit once people started playing around with themes. Still, if you need a quick way to pretty up a document, it's hard to go wrong by picking a theme. But you may need to customize it, and for that you'll want Theme Builder, a free tool from Microsoft. LifeHacker has a brief review.

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

If you're struggling with the new ribbon interface in Microsoft's Office 2007, then check out this page. It contains both interactive guides and handy downloadable Excel spreadsheets that show the Office 2003 commands and their Office 2007 equivalents.

Labels: Microsoft, Office 2007

Brian Jones explains how to use C# and Open Office SDK to extract content from a Word 2007 document based on styles. Gear head stuff to be sure, but it's another example of soem of the ways you can post-process the new Office 2007 XML formats.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 is now being pushed out by Microsoft, and according to some repots, offers some real performance improvements. It also adds native support for OpenOffice.org ODF files.

Labels: Office 2007

Long-time Word users will likely be used to the ease with which Word's menus can be customized. However, the Office 2007 ribbon introduces a whole new level of complexity. This MSDN article explains how you can modify the ribbon interface in Office 2007 applications. Some of the customizations involve modifying an XML file; others are more complex. But if you want to master the new interface, this article (and the following two parts) are well worth looking at.

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

A lot of people don't like the new ribbon interface in Office 2007. There's been several discussions about this over the last year in the wordpc-l mailing list, for example. The general consensus seems to be that it's easier for new users, but harder for power users. You can use the Quick Launch toolbar to get around some of the ribbon's failings, but if you really don't like the ribbon, you could try UBitMenu, a free Office plug-in that brings the classic Word menu structure into Word 2007.

As for myself, I'm comfortable with the ribbon now that I'll leave things as they are.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

One of the complaints that's been made about the ribbon interface in Microsoft Office is that it's just too cluttered and distracting. However, as this article on the Microsoft Office Word Team Blog points out, you can set up your working environment to look about as spartan as an old green-screen terminal if that's what you want.
Update: Now we have Writespace, a free plug-in that turns Word into a distraction-free editor.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

The ribbon interface is probably the most controversial feature in any piece of software that Microsoft has released since the late and unlamented clippy. After a year or so of using Word 2007 at home, I find that I prefer the ribbon interface for most tasks, although I miss the easy customizations available in the earlier interface.

Microsoft's Crabby Office Lady has an article describing several ways to make it easier to adjust to the ribbon interface. If you're using Office 2007, or about to, this is one worth bookmarking.

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

Brian Jones has another article on working with the new XML-based formats in Office 2007. This article goes into a lot of detail on how you can use WordprocessingML and a bit of programming to remove all of the comments in a document. While this is easily done in VBA, the technique in the article provides a way of post-processing document files outside of Word itself.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

In Word 2007, Microsoft introduced building blocks, which are like a combination of autotext and fields - they're reusable pieces of a Word document. The excellent Office Word Team blog has been running a series of articles on building blocks, and if you're using Word 2007, you'll want to have a look at these.

• Building Blocks

• Keyboard Driven Building Block Insertion

• Managing and Adminsitrating Building Blocks

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

As if you needed one, here's another reason not to use Outlook - especially if you order a birthday cake by email from Wegman's bakery in New York.

Labels: funny, Microsoft, Office 2007

Christine Kent offers an interesting take on how Web 2.0 technologies are affecting the publishing world, and how this fits into people's reactions to Word 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

Microsoft Office Word 2007: Essential Reference for Power Users, Matthew Strawbridge, Software Reference Ltd., 10-digit ISBN: 0 9554614 1 3, 13-digit ISBN: 978 0 9554614 1 5, 640 pages, paper, $74.95

I have to admit that my first reaction when I saw Microsoft Office Word 2007: Essential Reference for Power Users was "Wow, who needs this?" Then I started looking at what was in the book, and I quickly changed my mind.

The Essential Reference is a big book - 640 pages on A4 paper, with a heft ot match. The author, Matthew Strawbridge says:

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.

As you might expect from a book of this nature, it's not intended for casual users. If you're looking for a guide on how to use Word's new ribbon interface or how to set up a template, you're probably better off with one of Christine Kent's tutorial books or one of the many aftermarket replacements for the user guide that Microsoft no longer provides. So who is this book aimed at? The author says:

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.

The first part of the book covers basic concepts about Word and the new Office button. Two chapters are devoted to the ribbon and one to task panes. The longest part of the book - almost 300 pages - covers all of Word's many dialog boxes. VBA programmers will appreciate the complete list of Word's commands, cross referenced to the dialog boxes, where appropriate. There's also a complete list of the default autotext entries and a section with thumbnails of all the new galleries. The index is thorough, although you may need a magnifying glass to read it.

But this book is more than just an extensive set of lists. Everything is cross-referenced; for example, the section on dialog boxes includes the VBA commands that call them, to name just one example. Usage tips are included throughout the book. And the level of detail is impressive. For example, the description of the Formula dialog, which has only four fields, is two full pages long and includes all of the possible field values as well as a page of examples, a note and a usage tip. This is typical. Every time I open this book, I find something new and interesting that I didn't know before.

Casual Word users may be deterred by the Essntial Reference's rather hefty size and price, but anyone who uses Word day in and day out will find it invaluable. Technical writers who work primarily in Word, consultants who develop templates or Office-based solutions, or help desk support staff in organizations with an installed base of Word 2007 users should definitely consider buying this book.

About the only thing that I could see that would improve the book would be a colour edition, but that would drive the price to astronomical levels. A PDF edition, with colour graphics, would certainly have a wide appeal.

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

The transition from Word 2003 to Word 2007 has not bean an easy one for some users. The ribbon interface, which Microsoft introduced in Office 2007, does make many features easier to find and use. But it's radically different than the previous interface and it isn't as customizable as the menu structure in previous versions of Word. While the ribbon may make life easier for novice users, it's made life more difficult for power users, including some technical writers, if the comments on the wordpc-l mailing list are any indication.

If you want to upgrade from Word 2003 to Word 2007, there are some things that you can do to make the transition easier.

First, Christine Kent, an Australian technical writer and frequent contributor to the wordpc-l mailing list, has published a couple of excellent books on Word 2007. The first, Enjoy ... Upgrading Word 2007 is a guide for users of previous versions of Word who are moving to Word 2007. As any experienced user of Word knows, taking the time to set up Word properly makes a huge difference in its usability. This book steps you through everything you'll need to do to set up Word for maximum stability and ease of use. Along the way, you'll learn the main differences between Word 2007 and earlier versions. I had a chance to read an advance copy of this last year, and I was highly impressed. Once you've worked your way through this book, you can buy Enjoy ... Microsoft Word 2007, which is a more detailed guide to Word's features. Both books are attractively laid out, full of useful tips, and well worth the reasonable price of $9.95 (for the download edition, a dead-tree version is also available).

You might also check out Christine Kent's Word 2007 blog, which is full of useful tips and articles.

Microsoft have an online tool that will help you find where features live in Word 2007. It duplicates the Word 2003 interface - point to a feature, and it'll show you its location in Word 2007. You'll need IE with scripting enable to get it to work.

There's another Microsoft tool, which adds a Getting Started tab to the ribbon interface, with links to online articles and tutorial videos. Basically, it's an expansion of the help system to include more online content.

Then there's the Search Commands add-in for Office 2007. The web site says "helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just type what you’re looking for in your own words and click the command you need. Search Commands also includes Guided Help, which acts as a tour guide for specific tasks.This adds another tab which lets you search the interface for commands." I use this one quite a bit.

Finally, as I pointed out last week, customizing the Quick Access toolbar is a great way of putting the your most used commands together in one place, especially commands that aren't in the ribbon.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

The ribbon in Word 2007 can save you quite a bit of time, once you get used to it. But even then, there are some omissions that will irk professional writers. As this post in the Word 2007 Bible blog points out, you can't always see the current style, font, and point size. Fortunately, you can easily set up the Quick Access Toolbar to mimic the formatting toolbar from Word 2003, and the post gives you detailed instructions on how to do it.

This is one modification I'm going to make to my own copy, right now.

I'll have a few more posts on Word 2007 in the next few days. There's been a lot of discussion about it on the wordpc-l mailing list, with a lot of information worth sharing.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007, technical communication

One of the major attractions of FrameMaker is that it makes it easy to work with documents that consist of multiple files - and by easy I mean automatically handling chapter and page numbering, cross-references, and indexing across files. You can do this in Word, if you have to, and if the moon is in the right phase, but it will take three times as long as it would in FrameMaker and the odds are good that Word will mangle your numbering and paragraph styles.

Word does have a master document feature, but the last technical writer I know who used it might be out of the Clarke Institute sometime next year (grin).

However, Word 2007 uses an XML-based file format and this provides a new way of assembling a Word document from multiple files. It's described in this post on Brian Jones' Office Extensibility blog. And according to the author, it won't mangle your bullets and numbering. The technique does involve a slight amount of fiddling with Word 2007's XML-based content controls, but it doesn't look like it's beyond the reach of most technical writers. (I should note that I haven't tried this, as we are still using Office 2003 at work).

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Microsoft's new XML-based data format for Office files offers some interesting possibilities for sharing and manipulating data. Brian Jones Open Office XML blog has been running a series of articles about this; the latest shows how you can share information between Excel documents and a database. Of course, once you have extracted the data, you can do anything you want with it - instead of putting it into a database, you could dump it into a Word document.

Imagine a scenario where I'm a developer working for a fictional company called Contoso. At my company, the sales team uses Excel to create sales orders for customers. These sales orders are all based on an Excel template that has designated regions that keep track of data such as customer id, invoice number, items being purchased, total dues, etc. The sales team typically creates hundreds of sales orders a day. My company has asked me to create a solution that is able to bulk export data from these sales orders into a database. The company wants this solution to be run every night on the server, so automating Excel is not an option.

Labels: Office 2007, technical communication

If you use Word 2007, you'll have certainly noticed the new ribbon interface. But there are other, more subtle changes behind the scenes. The Microsoft Office Word Team Blog has recently published a couple of posts about how styles behave differently in Word 2007. The most recent explains style inheritance between the normal style and document defaults has been changed and it may produce unexpected effects if you aren't aware of the difference.

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.

This, and many of the other articles on this blog are essential reading for Word 2007 users.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

If you're using Acrobat 9 and Word 2007, you may have experienced a problem with links in the table of contents not working. According to the CyberText Newsletter, this is a "known issue" in the Microsoft KB.

After a LOT of searching, I found that this is a ‘known issue’ (1678119) and is listed amongst many other ‘known issues’ with Acrobat 9 Pro on the Adobe website. The reason: The Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers check box was cleared in the TOC creation window.

Re-create the TOC for each of these documents, making sure that check box was selected. Save the changes to the template, if asked. After I did that, the TOC links all worked.

Labels: Office 2007

Microsoft Office 2007 implements a new interface using what Microsoft calls a ribbon - a context sensitive set of tabbed icon groups that contains most of the commonly used program functions. It's a big departure from the hierarchical menu structure of previous versions of Office, but once you get used to it you'll probably find that it is an improvement over the old interface.

Although at first glance, the ribbon interface appears to be fixed, it is possible to customize it. This article from MSDN explains how. Many of the customizations are made by editing XML template files.

Labels: Office 2007

Office 2007 SP2 will include support for the Open Document Format. I believe there is a conversion filter available now, but this will make it a native part of the software (it'll show up in the Office Save menu item as an option).

Labels: Office 2007

Microsoft has provided some free, professionally-designed templates for Office 2007. The templates are designed for small businesses and include layouts for presentations, letterhead, invoices, and other common business documents.

Labels: Office 2007

I like Office 2007 quite a lot, but every once in a while I find myself searching for a command. Microsoft Labs have released a neat little add-in for Office 2007 that should help end that frustration. "Search Commands helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just type what you’re looking for in your own words and click the command you need. Search Commands also includes Guided Help, which acts as a tour guide for specific tasks."

I tried it to find the location of the command to hide text in Word. It told me the command wasn't in the ribbon, and displayed a button which let me hide the text. Nifty, although I'm still not sure where the command lives in Word. But this should make life much easier for Office 2007 users.

Labels: Office 2007

Scientific journals and other academic publishers often have rigorous formatting standards -- ones that aren't always easy for an author to meet. There is now a Word 2007 add-in that is designed to help authors produce articles in the format used by the National Library of Medicine. It's billed as a "technology preview" so there may still be some rough edges.

Today we are making available a Technology Preview of the Article Authoring add-in for Word 2007, focused on the community of authors, editors, and publishers of scientific and technical articles. The goal is to simplify several activities in the publishing workflow, from authoring to publishing and archiving, with this last step including conversion to the XML format from the National Library of Medicine. The current process of getting an article from the authors to a journal (increasingly electronic only) is a bit complicated and many times lossy, especially in relation to the metadata related to the article, we hope that the add-in will help simplify and improve the process.

At the core of many publishing workflows is the XML format from the National Library of Medicine (the format is also used for long term archiving and preservation of articles – and actually there are four formats (DTDs) defined by the National Library of Medicine). Beyond the ability to save and open files in the NLM format from Word 2007, the add-in also enables editing of the metadata, which is an important part of the format, directly from within the Word user interface.

Labels: Office 2007

One of the major benefits of the new XML-based document formats such as Microsofts Office Open XML (OOXML) and OpenOffice.org's Open Document Format (ODF) is that you can apply pre- or post-processing to the files using XSLT. Now XSLT isn't for the fainthearted, but it is pretty well and widely documented. Content Reuse Using Open XML, by Altova (XML Spy) CEO Alexander Falk, is a good example of what you can do with a little XSLT knowledge. Although the article is written for OOXML, it probably wouldn't be too hard to adapt the XSLT to ODF.

With just a few lines of XSLT and a few templates we have already written a stylesheet that extracts the basic paragraphs and most important styles from a WordprocessingML document and turns them into HTML that can be viewed in the browser view ...

Similarly, it is quite easy to extend the stylesheet to extract meta information, other styles, or image information from the WordprocessingML document and reuse the content for any modern application scenario, from web publishing via HTML, RSS, or social media formats to mobile web applications and beyond.

Labels: Office 2007, XML

I've been a subscriber to the WordTips newsletter for quite a while. Although I know Word pretty well, I still find useful tips in it. Now Allen Wyatt is spinning off a new newsletter, Word 2007 Tips, devoted solely to Word 2007. I'm certainly going to subscribe to this one as well. There are already quite a few useful tips up on the Word 2007 Tips site, which is where you'll also find the information you need to subscribe.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

The friendly folks at the Microsoft Word Team blog have compiled a list of the top 25 "How do I" questions based on their support database. It's pretty interesting, especially since the top two deal with compatibility issues with previous versions. And yes, they do provide (brief) answers.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

If you are using Word 2007, there's a nasty bug in the search and replace function that you need to know about. Details are on the Word 2007 Bible blog.

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

eWeek has put together a web-based slide show that runs through using Sun's ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office. It looks like there are some issues with the conversions. If you're working in an environment that mixes MS Office and OpenOffice.org, you'll definitely want to look at this.

Labels: Office 2007

If you use Word 2007 and have to exchange documents with users who have an earlier verison of Word, you're probably familiar with Word's compatibility mode, which lets you save documents in Word 2003 and doesn't include any of Word's new features in the document. Word doesn't default to this mode and there doesn't seem to be any way to toggle it on permanently in the interface. However, you can force it by setting a registry key, as detailed in this post from the Word 2007 Bible blog.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

The Microsoft Word team blog has a post on how they use the new features of Word to manage their own specifications.

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

I found the Word 2007 Bible Blog in a so far fruitless attempt to get Word 2007 to do something it's apparently not able to do - display the Styles list after it's been added to the Quick Access toolbar in something other than the styles' fonts. However, the search wasn't entirely fruitless as the Word 2007 Bible Blog is full of good articles about Word 2007. Another one for my subscription list.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

The Microsoft Word team blog has a post offering some tips on how to make the transition to Word 2007 easier for users. The post links to a white paper about making the transition. Note that it's in the new .docx format, so you'll have to have Office 2007 already or download the Compatibility Pack if you want to read it in an earlier version of Office.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

If you're using Altova's XML Spy, you can now use it to work with Microsoft's Open XML files. According to Altova, this will allow developers to do things like:

- Create an XSLT 2.0 transformation to publish data in a Word or Excel document on the Web or your corporate intranet.
- Manually edit some Word XML data and save it back to an Office 2007 format to test the outcome of changes that will be made in an application being developed
- Use XQuery to extract and aggregate financial data from an Excel document and provide it in an XML form suitable for mapping to EDI messages or Web services functions

Labels: Office 2007, XML

Brian Jones has posted a series of links to various blogs and sites describing how people are using the Open XML SDK. If you're working with Office 2007 or developing MS Office applications, these might be worth a look.

Labels: Office 2007, XML

Brian Jones from Microsoft has announced OpenXML4J, a project to create "a Java library for consuming and generating files in the Open XML format." This will allow automated processing of Open XML files outside of Office applications. Jones describes some scenarios:

This scenario takes any Open XML document as input, one stylesheet to apply, and makes a restylish document compliant with your organizational formatting.

Remove comments, annotations, document properties, personal information, presentation notes, tracked changes, ... from outbound documents.

Given that the DITA Open Toolkit is based on Java, I wonder if it would be possible to get the two libraries to work together. In any case, it should allow for more sopisticated ways of handling MS Office documents.

Labels: Office 2007, XML

The New Paperclip has put together the Getting Started with Office 2007 - The Ultimate Guide, which is a compendium of how-to articles and tutorials they've published on Office 2007. If you're new to Office 2007, or thinking of upgrading, this is a useful resource.

Labels: Office 2007

There are people out there who don't like Office 2007's new ribbon interface (I'm not one of them). Quite a few of those people are probably IT managers who are too lazy or cheap to train their users. Now third-party vendors are providing an opportunity for people to mess up one of the most elegant, usable interaces in recent memory, by grafting the old menu structure on to Office 2007. ComputerWorld reviews two products that let you modify the Office 2007 inteface.

Classic Menu adds a tab filled with Office 2003 menus (it's organized to look much the same as the old familiar Office 2003 applications), though it isn't customizable. ToolbarToggle can be customized much like Office 2003's menus and tool bars can be, and you can use it in place of (or in concert with) the 2007 Ribbon.

A third tool covered in the review, RibbonCustomizer, lets you modify the Office 2007 ribbon, but within the guidelines established by Microsoft.

Labels: Office 2007

Brian Jones' Open XML Formats blog has an article about how legislators in Florida are using Office 2007's OpenXML with a database ls. They use the software to manage amendments. to help draft bills.

Basically, as a bill goes through the legislative process, amendments are added. So every day, someone needs to go through those amendments that were adopted the previous day and re-generate the bill with those new amendments. They've customized Word 2007 and with the OpenXML formats make it super easy for the people generating the new draft of the bill to bring all the amendments in.

They leverage the OpenXML formats and SQL server as a way of storing the various amendments. They then built some custom UI into Word 2007 to expose the amendments to the guys regenerating the bill so that they could easily insert them.

From a business perspective, the new XML formats in Office 2007 offer the most benefit from upgrading. While the new interface does offer some productivity benefits once users learn it, the ability to work with chunks of XML content in a document provides opportunities to manage content in new and exciting ways. Companies who are sticking with older versions of Office are missing a real opportunity to establish new and more efficient workflows.

Labels: Office 2007, XML

The Windows Weekly podcast this week features two members of the Office 2007 UI team, Jensen Harris and Jacob Jaffe. Jensen Harris has been blogging at length about the new Office 2007 ribbon interface during it's development. The podcast gives an overview of the new UI's development, the reasons behind it, and some of the challenges the designers faced.

BTW, I am very impressed with the new interface in Office 2007. It makes many tasks both easier and faster.

Labels: Office 2007, podcasts

Based on postings on techwr-l, people using older versions of Microsoft Office are already having to deal with the new file Open XML formats from Office 2007 applications. Microsoft has a Compatibility Pack available for users of Office XP and 2003 that will let them use the new file formats in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

One advantage of the new file formats is that they are much more compact than the older formats -- in some cases, files will be close to 10 times smaller. Although they haven't been out long enough to be sure, I expect that they'll be less susceptible to corruption, and easier to repair if that does happen.

Labels: Microsoft, Office 2007, technical communication

One of the "features" missing in Office 2007 is Clippy, the infamous office assistant. I don't miss it, and Office 2007 has a surfeit of helpful tooltips and other features that make Clippy quite redundant. The author of the MonkeyPi blog must have connections in Microsoft, because he's somehow managed to transcribe Clippy's exit interview

“I can’t believe what I am hearing.” Clippy stands up, and walks to the window. He stares at the wooded skyline of Washington for a few moments. “What about the users? Who will take care of them?”

“Well, we have a crack team of user assistance experts and technical writers that are more than qualified for the job.”

A lightbulb appears on the clip’s head. “But what if a user wants to write a letter?”

“It turns out that our users already know how to write letters, Clippy,” says Bill. “That’s the kind of thing that has turned our customers against your team.”

It's hilarious.

Labels: funny, Office 2007, technical communication

The New Paperclip blog is devoted to Office 2007, and if you're going to be using Office 2007, it's a site worth bookmarking. Word users will want to look at Getting Started with Word 2007 - The Ultimate Guide.

I have a copy of Office 2007 coming and will no doubt have lots more to post about it in a month or so.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Office 2007 introduces a new document construct, the XML data store, which will let you do some interesting things with XML in Office 2007 documents. The Office Team blog has an article explaining how XML and the new content controls work together.

* 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.

Brian Jones also has a post on the same subject, which links to some other articles that go into more detail on what you can do with the new capabilities.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007, XML

Here's an article that looks at how Microsoft has coded a lot of the legacy aspects of Word and other Office applications into their OpenXML standard.

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.

6,000 pages! That's what happens when you have to have backwards compatibility, not only with your own software, but applications like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
Update: Wired has an article on with more on the competition between Microsoft's Office Open XML and the OpenOffice.org Open Document Format.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007

With the recent certification of Microsoft's Open XML format as an ECMA standard, the battle between Microsoft and the open software community, including IBM, has gotten a bit hotter.

Microsoft and IBM ratcheted up their criticism and rhetoric this week in the long-standing battle to win the hearts and minds of developers and users for the document format they support.

The volley was started by IBM, which was the lone dissenter in the vote on Dec. 7 that approved Microsoft's Open XML document format as an Ecma standard.

In a public comment about its decision to vote against approving the standard, Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and standards at IBM, says on his blog that the Open XML format is nothing more than a vendor-dictated specfication that documents proprietary products via XML.

Theres more about Microsoft's point of view on Brian Jones' Office XML Formats blog.

Labels: Microsoft, Office 2007, software

If your curious about some of the details of Windows Vista or Office 2007, someone by the name of Safaraz (I couldn't find any more info about him or her on the blog) has published lengthy and detailed previews of both. These are among the most detailed that I've seen.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007, Vista

The Office Word Team blog has been running a series of articles providing detailed looks at some of the new features in Word 2007. A recent post shows how styles have been given more prominence in the new release.

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.

This is a good thing. I'm currently working on a document that includes content from more than 20 other documents and authors. Having a consistent use of styles in the material I'm receiving would make my life much easier.

Labels: Microsoft Word, Office 2007