The Microsoft Office Word Team's Blog

Control Yourself…

Another post, another Word Program Manager… My name is Tristan Davis and over the last 3 years as a Program Manager (or PM if you want to use Microsoft-speak) on the Word team, I've focused on three things:

1. Losing 60 pounds, joining the Ecma TC45 Technical Committee as the WordprocessingML expert and helping develop it through to the recent final draft, and as a result, gaining back 80 (sigh)
2. Planning my upcoming wedding to another Word PM (December 18^th – two months two days and counting)
3. Thinking about integrating Word into the world of structured editing and XML

From this point on, I promise I'll only post things about #3 or the parts of #1 that don't involve choosing between protein shakes and cheeseburgers. J (All protein from here till December, though.)

Anyway, on to structured editing. One of the reasons I love Word is that you can do just about anything once you load it up and get that first blank page. For example, open up Word, double-click anywhere on the page and Word will automatically move the cursor there so you can start typing, like this:

In fact, if you click near the center or right side of the page, the cursor will change to something like this or this, and Word will automatically center or right align the text:

Now, that's really cool (it's actually how I centered the two pictures), and it demonstrates just how flexible Word is.

However, that flexibility isn't always what you want when you're creating a document. When we spent time on the road visiting our users, it was a pretty common to see that you actually want control over what's inside a document. I'll spread out what that means over four additional posts:

• I want to create a document and restrict what people can do with it, for example:
  • A document that contains legal language, and I want to ensure people don't accidentally change or delete any of that text.
  • Create a document with a region in the top left that contains the company logo and can't be removed.
  • Have a region where the date of the meeting goes, including a popup to let the editor pick it from a calendar.
  • Tie a picture and its caption together so they don't get separated.
• I want to create structured regions of a document that people fill out
  • The top of the report has drop-down lists and date pickers for the important data, but the rest is uncontrolled and generated by the report creator.
  • The cover page of the proposal can't be changed except by filling out the title, author, and so on.
• I want to give meaning to the contents of a document (i.e. tell the computer what a human could easily deduce)
  • This isn't just some text; it's the date of the conference.
  • That bulleted list is actually the names of the attendees.
  • The location of the title, subtitle, author name and date on a snazzy cover page.
• I want to get information from another source and have it appear at a specific place in a document
  • My name automatically appears when I insert the cover page.
  • The stock data shows up on the cover page of my stock report.
  • The customer data automatically appears when I create a new invoice.

To do any of this, we needed to give Word the ability for you to restrict its typical "anything goes" nature. The result: Word 2007 introduces the concept of "content controls". Content controls allow you to, unsurprisingly, control content. With these new controls, I can set up a document with form-like UI, as well as set restrictions on what you can do with them.

For example, let's take the legal clause. Here's my document with the standard copyright and legal information:

Now, we don't want anyone changing that legal information, but right now, they can accidentally over-select when they're editing the References and delete it:

Obviously, the text was there for a reason and should not have been deleted, but there's always a chance that some change might happen by accident. In Word 2007 though, the person that created this file can "group" that text and prevent me (or anyone else) from editing it without having to lock down the whole file. Sounds simple – and in terms of how you use it, it is.

The whole reason this is a big deal (and gets me excited) is that like I've said – Word's finally learning how to structure a document and respect the restrictions that you want to put on the contents, in spite of its flexibility, which I'll keep exploring in subsequent posts.

Some Basics

I love to talk about this stuff, but I'm going to hold myself back a bit and leave more for future posts. However, if you're interested and want to start exploring, here's where content controls appear in Word's new UI:

If you look at the Developer tab, the Controls group exposes all seven control types:

1. Rich Text - Just like any other text in Word, but with its structure, you can start to control its behavior (just like that legal clause).
2. Plain Text – Allows uniformly formatted text (no bolding a single word, the control's entire contents must be bold).
3. Picture - Restricts its contents to a single image.
4. Drop-Down List – A list J.
5. Combo Box - Just like a drop-down list, except that you can type in your own values as well as choose from the list.
6. Calendar – Provides a calendar to pick a date.
7. Building Blocks – Think of this like a rich text drop-down list. Instead of just text, everything in the list can be arbitrary Word content (formatted text, tables, ten paragraphs …).

(By the way, you won't see this tab by default, since we think it's only for people creating documents for others who need to set up these controls/restrictions. To get it:

1. Click on the Office Button (in the top left).
2. Click on Word Options.
3. On the initial page, check "Show Developer Tab in the Ribbon"

This tab is chock full of interesting structured editing features that I'll talk about in the future.)

That's it for now.

- Tristan