The Microsoft Office Word Team's Blog

Not sure where to post this question, here goes: Does Word 2007 make it easier to move whole pages to new places in a docuemtn?

Is thre anything new in this area -- keen to know as it's a major headache when drafting long docs and you realise current pages 3-7 would work much better re-inserted as pages 22-25...

Is it still cut-and-paste?

Simon

I'm very confused about the availabilty of WORD 2007 as a separate program apart from the Office Suite. I have had every independent version of Word and Outlook since 97, and would like to upgrade to 2007. Why can't I find info as to if/when these 2 products 2007 will be available independently? I don't need or use the other components, and for some reason, my OEM is telling me that Office Basic 2007 is not available yet for them to ship to me (new computer 12/06).

Hi guys - very useful blog. I wonder if you could help with this question? If we create Word templates with locked and controlled content areas, served up from a sharepoint document library, checked in and out etc, and the various content areas are either XML encoded, or map to XML tags, can Shrepoint or another bundled MS package extract that XML to a database and/or track that XML, and then deliver me with composite documents constructed of, say, every piece of xml tagged text "titles" or "body text"? What I'm asking, I guess, is does Sharepoint and Word combined form a useful content management/storage/delivery system? I know I can search inside libraries, but can I *grab* all that text together? I'd rather do it this way than construct an app to strip the data and feed it to a database to store - or would that make more sense? Hope you can help!!!!

Styles and bullet/numbering question.

In previous versions of Word, bullet/number styles were attached to a list template according to its number (location) in the list template list. That could be broken by any number of circumstances. The ideal would be to name the list template and then attach the style to that named list.

That was only possible in earlier versions using VBA. Has 2007 allowed us to name list templates and attach named list templates to styles, or does that still have to be done with VBA?

If VBA is still the only option to name a list template, did you implement any other option that prevents bullet/list styles from becoming disconnected from their list template?

I started to use Word 2007 purely for the new equation capability. Why?

1) I personally feel that the Latex paradigm and its offerings has limitations in the scenario of multiple people needing to refer to and update a mathematical document, and

2) I was running into weird performance issues when many-hundreds of MathType equations were inside Word 2003.

In both of these cases the end result was reduced productivity and quality of content (not be be confused with quality of printouts, especially not with Latex).

Since the equation capability in Word 2007 still has some maturation to go through, I am taking a slight chance, but after some testing I decided to go for it.

This weekend I created simple macros that use Mathml export capability in MathType to transfer 700 equations from Word 2003 to Word 2007. Overall a success except for some accent marks.

Questions I have for the Word 2007 team:

1) Is there a good forum where I could share this with other (potential) users. Can you start a dedicated "Word 2007 equations forum"?

2) I was nearly brought to tears when I noticed that you can't do a "find and replace" with equations, am I right? At least a straightforward "find and replace" for x does not locate the x's inside my equations. The Word 2007 equation implementation seems to be so close to allowing this (is it a bug?, candidate for future update?). This is extremely important in my work, but so far I have only been able to do this in Latex source code and in Opticon (software from the Mathematica people).  

Hi Dadi,

Jen (equations PM) here.

The best forum for posting equations-specific questions is Murray Sargent's math blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/murrays/).

It's true that Find and Replace doesn't yet work with equations - which is not to say that we didn't understand how critical it is for equation authors. Please understand that this is a v1 feature, and we weren't able to accomplish everything we wanted to in one release. When it came time to evaluate tradeoffs and decide what was critical for v1, we felt that Find and Replace was something that could wait for a future release.

That said, there are some workarounds that can help. Skip this paragraph if you want to go straight to workarounds. Read on if you want some background on why the behavior is the way it is. Equations in Word2007 use Unicode's Plane I math alphanumeric chararacters. When you type "a" in an equation, it appears to be an ASCII "a" formatted with italics. But in reality it's a completely different character. (Test this: type "a" oustide of math, and then hit Alt+X to see its Unicode value. Now type "a" inside an equation, and hit Alt+X. Result? Outside of math, you see the ASCII "a" Unicode value, 0061. Inside an equation, you see the math alphanumeric value 1D44E.) By using math alphanumerics instead of formatted ASCII characters, Word is able to deliver enhanced typography. Murray Sargent talks about this in his 9/13/06 post.

When you copy an equation and paste in as plain text (for example, paste into Notepad or the Find edit box), Word converts math alphanumerics into their ASCII equivalents. So on paste, the 1D44E math "a" gets converted to the 0061 ASCII "a," and Word fails to match these two characters to each other. But there are workarounds!

For strings of characters (not structures like fractions or integrals):

1. Select the "a" in the equation and hit Ctrl+F. The math alphanumeric appears in the Find edit box. This works only for strings of math alphanumerics; it will generally fail on an entire equation.

2. Type the Unicode values in the Find dialog directly and then use Alt+X to convert them to math alphanumerics. This is a bit tedious, but it will work every time.

Now, for structures like fractions or integrals, Find and Replace workarounds are more complicated, because the Find dialog can't display these structures. Your best bet is to select the equation(s) in the document and click "Linear" before launching Find. Equations in Linear Format can't yet be matched to their Professional equivalent, but if you convert all of the equations to Linear Format before running Find/Replace, Word will be able to match these Linear strings.

I'll be the first to admit that these workarounds are far from perfect - but for the time being, they should get you somewhere.

Happy editing!

Jen