Building Blocks
I'm Jodie Boyer, the newest PM on the Word Team. I joined the Word team 6 months ago after spending 5 years in graduate school working towards a PhD in Computer Science. I decided to leave the program earlier this year, and I will receive a master's degree as soon as I complete my thesis.
When I started on the team, I was given 2 features, namely Building Blocks and Templates. Building Blocks were relatively new to me, so I had to spend a lot of time developing expertise on them. Because the best way to learn is to teach, I've decided to put together a set of post of building blocks and using them in Word. Many of these things I have learned while working on my aforementioned thesis, so many of the examples I use will be from that. This post will cover some basics about Building Blocks, and in the future, I will write about quick entry of Building Blocks, as well as the use of Building Blocks in Templates. Of course, if there is anything else you want to hear about, I'm happy to take suggestions.
"So, what are Building Blocks?"
In the simplest terms, Building Blocks are reusable chunks of a Word document. They can contain any thing a Word document can contain, including pictures, shapes, fields, and even other building blocks.
"Sounds a lot like AutoText, how is this different?"
In many ways, Building Blocks are an extension of AutoText. However, you can do a few things with building blocks that you can't do with AutoText. My personal favorite is that you can define how building blocks insert. AutoText always insert relative to the current position of the cursor, but you can tell building blocks to insert in a new paragraph, or even on a new page.
A great example of this is when you are working on a paper, and you would like to add a cover page. Instead of scrolling to the top of the document, adding a page break and formatting your own cover page, you can simply go to the Insert tab and pick a cover page.
No matter where you are in your document, the cover page will get inserted at the beginning of the document, without messing up the formatting of the rest of your paper. In addition, if you right click on a cover page, you can insert it in all kind of other places too, like the beginning of the current section.
"They sound neat, but what would I use them for?"
Building blocks can be used to save anything that can be in a Word document. Personally, I like to use them for complicated things, like cover pages. Sometimes I spend a long time getting things just right, and I'd hate to have to do it again, so I save it as a building block. You can also use them to create powerful, multipurpose templates, but that is a topic for another post.
"Ok, I'm convinced, but it sounds like a lot of work to get started"
Actually, Word comes with more than 50 different building blocks designed by professionals here at Microsoft. If you visit the Insert ribbon, you can check out cover pages, text boxes, header, footers, and more.
That's just a quick intro. Over the next month or so, I'll cover quick ways to insert Building Blocks, using Building Blocks to make powerful templates, and more. If you want more information today, feel free to check-out these posts from Zeyad and Jonathan:
Happy building!
Jodie
Edited 11:48 12-17-2008 to correct typos
