Building Blocks – Part I
A cool new feature we have added in Word 2007 is the ability to reuse content easily in order to help you put together great looking documents. We call this feature building blocks. Building blocks are essentially parts of a document that can be reused. For example, a company logo with a textual slogan can be stored as a reusable cover page.
Word 2007 provides a collection of common building blocks presented in visual galleries out of the box. All building block galleries use a rich thumbnail image to preview content before inserting it, like many other features in Office. But each gallery is also a feature in its own right, for example, cover pages will insert at the beginning of the document as expected, while headers go in the document header area and textboxes are inserted in the page the cursor is in.
Here is a screenshot of the Cover Page gallery:
Different Types of Building Blocks
Insert Tab:
- Cover pages
- Headers
- Footers
- Page numbers
- Text boxes (pull quotes and sidebars)
- Quick parts (custom user blocks)
- Equations
Reference Tab:
- Table of Contents
- Bibliography
Page Layout Tab:
Header and Footer Contextual Tab:
- Repeats the header, footer, page number, and quick parts galleries for convenience
There are also a number of hidden galleries not shown by default, which can be used by template authors and solutions developers creating a custom user interface. I will cover that in more detail in a later post.
Tomorrow, I will talk about inserting and swapping out building blocks in a document.
Let me know if you have any specific questions or comments that you would like me to address here or in future posts on building blocks.
Zeyad Rajabi
