What does structured editing mean anyway? (Part 1)
Ah, structured editing. I hear that term a lot, but I know it often means different things to different people. So far, I've talked about what content controls are, and locking (which is a big part of structuring a document, as I use the term), but over this and the next post, I'm going to try to clarify what I mean by it, and how all of the parts of content controls fit together to make it easier/better in Word 2007.
In the first post, I showed the example of how you can literally type anywhere on the page. Cool – but if you're creating a document where you don't want the look to accidentally change, it's also more than a little terrifying. Let me give you a real-life example:
During our planning process for Office 2007, we visited a company that produces a very elaborate, very carefully branded document which goes from Word directly to PDF/DOC/HTML and gets sent to their customers. The look of this document is *crucial* - the front page was designed to optimally showcase the contents of the report and cannot be changed. Their problem was, they couldn't just build the first page automatically - most of the content on the front page was stuff that needed to be added by specific employees by hand.
So, we asked them how they managed this, and they showed us their process: When the employee needed to edit the document, it opens in Word, but a custom application then covers the document with a special dialog box where the employee fills out the necessary information using text boxes, drop-down controls and date pickers, which is then pumped into the document via the automatic process, and the file is saved and closed.
Basically, the guy editing the Word document actually never got to type into Word!
This was a really eye-opening experience, and it drives home the fact that many companies:
- Have documents that are required to have a specific look/structure.
- Needs parts of that document to be filled in by user(s).
- Don't have the ability to tell Word to prevent the user from changing it while filling it out – again, flexibility being both a strength and a curse depending on what you're doing.
Let's look at this in terms of an example. Here's an example of a cover page for a company's monthly report:
It's pretty obvious just by looking at it that it was done by someone with design skills (no, not me J), and that there's lots of content that the report editor needs to fill out (the Title, Year, Summary, Company Name, and so on). However, it's also not hard for me to accidentally move the image:
And once I've moved it, even when I try to put it back, I'm probably not going to get it perfect. So in the last post, we showed how grouping lets me lock down the cover page. That saves me from accidentally moving the image – step one.
However, before I lock it down, I also need to specify the areas where the person needs to type in the Title, etc. That's where the rest of the controls come in – I can select the regions where I want the user to be able to interact with the document in a specific way and apply the appropriate controls to them, e.g.:
- Year should be a date picker, so I apply a date picker content control (circled in red below)
- Company Name should be a choice of either "Contoso, Inc.", "Woodgrove Bank – A Subsidiary of Contoso, Inc.", or "Lucerne Publishing – A Division of Contoso, Inc.", so I apply a drop-down list content control (circled in blue), then use the Properties button to set those three options.
- The Title should just be text, so I apply the plain text content control (circled in green).
- And so on…
Then, *after* I've decided where you can edit, I group the page and make sure that you can't edit anywhere else. (The workflow doesn't have to be that linear, but I'll talk about that soon.)
The result is that I can't move the image or the location of the text, but I can type in it, use the controls, etc.:
That document is now a structured document: your actions are rigidly controlled in some places and not in others as needed, there is assistive UI (like the date picker) when appropriate, and each of those controlled regions is deliberately storing important information about the report.
So in that first post, I mentioned the idea of "structured regions", basically parts of a document that provide structured editing. That's really just the cover page above, a combination of locking and the appropriate editable content controls.
Trying to keep from going too long, in the next post I'll actually go through each of the controls in detail and describe what you can do with them.
- Tristan
