Creating Building Blocks
In my last two posts I talked about building blocks in general and how to insert and swap out building blocks. In today's post I am going to talk about how to create your own building blocks.
Creating Your Own Building blocks
As mentioned in my first post, there are several different types of Word 2007 galleries that contain building blocks from cover pages and headers to equations and watermarks. When creating your own custom building blocks you may add the building block to any of the Word 2007 galleries. There are several ways you can accomplish the task of adding a building block to one of the Word 2007 galleries:
- Select content and save selection to specific gallery
- Select content and hit Alt-F3
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Modify WordML within either the building blocks template, the Word normal template, any custom template
Option 1: Select content and save selection to specific gallery
Every gallery that contains building blocks has a command that allows you to save a selection directly to that specific gallery as a building block. The command can be found at the bottom of every gallery. Take for example the Cover Page gallery:
The command is only enabled when you have content selected. Clicking on this command will then result in the following dialog box:
In this dialog box, you can select the name, description, gallery and category for the building block you are about to save. All these options allow you to control how the content is presented in the user interface and where the content will reside. By default the gallery option will be the gallery from which you clicked the Save Selection command. In this case, the gallery selected is Cover Pages.
Option 2: Select content and hit Alt-F3
This brings up the same dialogue box as option one, but the default gallery selection will be Quick Parts.
Option 3: Modify WordML within either the building blocks template, the Word normal template, any custom template
This option is more involved than the first two and requires a more in depth knowledge of WordML, which is covered in the following posts:
The contents of all building block galleries are stored in templates. There are several locations you can select from when choosing where to save your building block:
- Word's building blocks template
- Word's Normal template
- Any custom template
I will talk more about the difference between these three locations in my next post when I talk about how to deploy your building blocks.
Let me know if you have any specific questions or comments.
Zeyad Rajabi
