The Microsoft Office Word Team's Blog

Multilevel Lists vs List Styles

2009-06-25T20:43:00Z

Introduction

A common question that comes up is about the difference between multilevel lists and list styles. Stuart discussed these two list types in his post The Many Levels of Lists. What I hope to do in this blog post is an in-depth look at the similarities and differences between these two concepts.

Quick Overview

An easy way to look at this would be to think of list styles as an improved version of multilevel lists, since both are ways to define all nine levels of a list in one go. So, why do we need both?

Well, a multilevel list is a feature that can be found in Word documents dating back to very early versions of Office. In order for these documents to render correctly in newer version of Office, this feature is maintained and made to work alongside new Word features. The disadvantage, as Stuart mentioned, is that multilevel lists could not be named, modified or easily exported to other documents and templates.

List styles were introduced in Office 2007 to give lists the same advantages as other styles (paragraph and characters styles), which included:

Ability to modify the existing definition
Ability to share the your perfectly crafted style with other documents

By allowing the list style to be named, Word is now able to better keep the definition of the list separate from the actual instance of the list. That way a single list style can be referenced by multiple lists and each list can have its own individual tweaks if necessary.

More Details

Defining a New List

Let's start by going through the dialog used to create and modify these two list types. As a quick review, you can create a new multilevel style or a list style by going to the third numbering button on the Home tab.

Other than the differences mentioned above, the features available for both types of lists are identical (as illustrated by the diagrams below). When creating a new multilevel list, you are thrown directly into a dialog that shows all of your available options for customizing the list. This dialog can be a bit daunting, so for list styles in Office 2007, we followed the example set by the other styles and simplified the dialog you are first shown. And also like the other styles, we list all of your customization options under the "Format" button. Once you select "Numbering…" under this button, you are presented with all of the same, advanced options as multilevel lists.

Multilevel List	List Style

Sharing Lists with Other Documents

Another strong point of list styles is the ability to share them across documents. This way, once you've spent the time customizing the lists in your document, you can re-use the style in other documents you create. The easiest way to share the "formatting" of a multilevel list is to copy a list from one document to anther and then modified the items of the list to suit the needs of the new document. With list styles, you can transfer them quickly to a new document the same way as other styles: through the Styles Organizer. This way only the formatting you want is transferred not the unnecessary content.

Multilevel List	List Style

Saving to DOCX

I'm not going to go through the full details of how bullets and numbers are represented in OOXML (although, if you are interested, you can find the ISO standard here: http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/index.html )

Simply put, the xml parts, within the document package, which are most important to multilevel lists and list styles, are document.xml and numbering.xml. Numbering.xml stores the actual definition of the list, while the document.xml part contains the main document text and references the numbering.xml part for the information on how the list should be formatted. The underlying structures of a multilevel list vs. a list style are quite similar.

The way the document.xml part stores the list text and references the list definitions is identical.
The numbering.xml part is also quite similar with the main difference in the being the additional of an element in the list style which stores the name of the style.

Multilevel List	List Style

You can also tell, from the sample above , that list styles grew out of multilevel lists by the fact that the <w:multiLevelType> element for both constructs are the same.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this blog post gave you a better understanding of these two list types and why they both exist in Word today. If you have any other questions about the similarities/differences, please let me know and I'll try to pull together another blog post with the answers.

- Amani

Office Palooza

2009-06-02T20:09:00Z

Hello! My name is Stephen Oliver and I'm a programming writer at Microsoft. From time-to-time, I'll post Office developer-oriented tips—specifically around Word.

Today's post is simply to alert you to a great resource for sharpening your Office automation skills—Office Palooza . Office Palooza was a two-week event (April 20 – May 1, 2009) but the content that came out of it is an excellent store of tips, How Tos, and even full-scale solutions for automating Office applications.

Office Palooza targeted "advanced business users" (most people call them "power users"); that is, people who have a great deal more than a beginning knowledge of the Office applications (like Word!) but aren't professional programmers. So even if all you've ever done with Office automation is record a macro in Word, this is just the place for you! If you look through the list of articles, blog posts, "How To" videos and book excerpts, you'll find things like:

…and many other topics.

But don't just take my word for it. Stop by and check out the Office Palooza content for yourself!

Quick Tip: Filler Text

2009-05-12T21:39:00Z

It's super easy to put generic text into a Word document for all of your filler text needs (especially useful during demos and presentations). Just start a new paragraph and:

Type "=rand()" and press Enter for three paragraphs of text
Type "=lorem()"and press Enter for three paragraphs of random characters that approximate a normal distribution of letters know as Lorem Ipsum

Example of the result of "=rand()"

You can easily change the formatting of selected text in the document text by choosing a look for the selected text from the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab. You can also format text directly by using the other controls on the Home tab. Most controls offer a choice of using the look from the current theme or using a format that you specify directly.

To change the overall look of your document, choose new Theme elements on the Page Layout tab. To change the looks available in the Quick Style gallery, use the Change Current Quick Style Set command. Both the Themes gallery and the Quick Styles gallery provide reset commands so that you can always restore the look of your document to the original contained in your current template.

Example of "=lorem()"

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna.

Nunc viverra imperdiet enim. Fusce est. Vivamus a tellus.

Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Proin pharetra nonummy pede. Mauris et orci.

More/Less Words and More/Less Paragraphs

If you'd like more or less than three paragraphs, you can get specific like this:

=rand(insert the number of paragraphs, insert the number of sentences)
=lorem(insert the number of paragraphs, insert the number of sentences)

For example, "=lorem(1,6)" gives you:

And "=rand(1,6)" gives you:

On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers, footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks. When you create pictures, charts, or diagrams, they also coordinate with your current document look. You can easily change the formatting of selected text in the document text by choosing a look for the selected text from the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab. You can also format text directly by using the other controls on the Home tab. Most controls offer a choice of using the look from the current theme or using a format that you specify directly.

If you only include one number between the parentheses, that number will be the number of paragraphs, and each of the paragraphs will have five sentences in them. So "=rand(1)" does this:

Lastly, if you can't get enough filler text, know that you will max out at about 200 pages of filler text per "insertion." For example, you can type "=lorem(111,111)" for 111 paragraphs with 111 sentences each, or 129 pages of filler, but you cannot type "=lorem(99999999999999999, 99999999999999999)" on your least favorite co-worker's computer to bring their CPU to its knees. J

- Jonathan Bailor

PS In the interest of completeness, you can also use "=rand.old()" to insert an assorted number of sentences and paragraphs of "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

Bibliography & Citations 102 – Building Custom styles

2009-04-30T00:12:00Z

My name is Nathan Kwan. I am a PM intern on the Microsoft Word team. My internship started in early January and is sadly coming to an end at the end of April. I'm a 4^th year student at the University of Waterloo working towards my Software Engineering degree.

When I started on the team, I was given the bibliography feature. Being a student myself, I am a fan, so I was pretty excited to dig into it.

What will this post cover?

In Amani's last post, she showed you how to setup and build a simple bibliography style. We learned that bibliography styles in Word are XSLTs. We also found that we could drop our own custom styles in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Bibliography\Style and Word will display them.

Today, I'm going to be expanding on Amani's post to show you how to build more complex styles. One of the issues that "complicates" bibliography styles is that they often need to have a significant amount of conditional logic built into them. For example, if the date is specified we need to show the date, whereas if the date is not specified we may need to use an abbreviation to indicate that there is no date for that source.

For a more specific example, in the APA style, if a date is not specified for a website source, then the abbreviation n.d. is used to denote no date…and the style should do this automatically. The example is shown below:

APA website source with no date entered:

Kwan, N. (n.d.). Retrieved from www.microsoft.com

APA website source with date entered:

Kwan, N. (2006, Jan 18). Retrieved from www.microsoft.com

As you can see, what is displayed is conditional on the data entered.

Unfortunately, there is not enough space or time in this blog to go through each and every rule that a new style would need, but I will provide a foundation for you to create new styles by showing you step by step how to implement a single rule that leverages conditional logic.

The rule I will be showing is one of the most common rules. The output of virtually every style needs to change depending on whether you have a "Corporate Author" or a "Normal Author".

I'm going to show you how to display a corporate author if the corporate author is specified and display a normal author if the corporate author is not specified.

Overview of Solution

To display a corporate author only if it is filled in, we need to take the following actions:

Add a variable to count the number of corporate authors in the citation section of the code
Display the corporate author in the citation if the corporate author is filled in. Display the normal author in the citation if the corporate author is not filled in.
Add a variable to count the number of corporate authors in the bibliography section of the code
Display the corporate author in the bibliography if the corporate author is filled in. Display the normal author in the bibliography if the corporate author is not filled in.

Getting Started

Let's start by changing the citation. This is the code for citations from last time:

<xsl:template match="b:Citation/b:Source[b:SourceType = 'Book']">

<body>

<xsl:text>(</xsl:text>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Author/b:Author/b:NameList/b:Person/b:Last"/>

<xsl:text>, </xsl:text>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Year"/>

<xsl:text>)</xsl:text>

</body>

</html>

</xsl:template>

......

Step 1: Define a new variable in the citation section to count the number of Corporate Authors

We'll need to be declaring a new variable to help us determine whether a corporate author is available. This variable is a count on the number of times the corporate author field exists in our source.

<xsl:variable name="cCorporateAuthors">

<xsl:value-of select="count(b:Author/b:Author/b:Corporate)" />

</xsl:variable>

......

Step 2: Check to see whether the corporate author has been filled in

Now that we have this new variable, we need to check if the corporate author has been filled in. We can do this by checking if the count on corporate authors is not zero. If a corporate author exists, display it. If it does not exist, display the normal author.

......

<xsl:text>(</xsl:text>

<xsl:choose>

<xsl:when test ="$cCorporateAuthors!=0">

<xsl:value-of select="b:Author/b:Author/b:Corporate"/>

</xsl:when>

<xsl:otherwise>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Author/b:Author/b:NameList/b:Person/b:Last"/>

</xsl:otherwise>

</xsl:choose>

<xsl:text>, </xsl:text>

.......

Now that we made the change for citations, let's make the change for our bibliography. Here's the bibliography section from the original post:

......

<xsl: template match="b:Source[b:SourceType = 'Book']">

<xsl:value-of select="b:Author/b:Author/b:NameList/b:Person/b:Last"/>

<xsl:text>, </xsl:text>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Author/b:Author/b:NameList/b:Person/b:First"/>

<xsl:text>. (</xsl:text>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Year"/>

<xsl:text>). </xsl:text>

......

Step 3: Define a new variable in the bibliography section

Once again, let's start by adding a counting variable.

......

<xsl: template match="b:Source[b:SourceType = 'Book']">

<! --Count the number of Corporate Authors (can only be 0 or 1)-->

<xsl:variable name="cCorporateAuthors">

<xsl:value-of select="count(b:Author/b:Author/b:Corporate)" />

</xsl:variable>

......

Step 4: Check to see whether the corporate author has been filled in

Now let's add the check to see if a corporate author exists.

......

<xsl:variable name="cCorporateAuthors">

<xsl:value-of select="count(b:Author/b:Author/b:Corporate)" />

</xsl:variable>

<xsl:choose>

<xsl:when test ="$cCorporateAuthors!=0">

<xsl:value-of select="b:Author/b:Author/b:Corporate"/>

<xsl:text>. (</xsl:text>

</xsl:when>

<xsl:otherwise>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Author/b:Author/b:NameList/b:Person/b:Last"/>

<xsl:text>, </xsl:text>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Author/b:Author/b:NameList/b:Person/b:First"/>

<xsl:text>. (</xsl:text>

</xsl:otherwise>

</xsl:choose>

......

End Result

Now when we use a corporate author, it displays correctly in both our citation and bibliography!

This technique can be extended to perform any conditional statement we may need in our style.

Here's the final code that was used:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" xmlns:b="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/bibliography">

<xsl:output method="html" encoding="us-ascii"/>

<xsl:template match="/">

<xsl:apply-templates select="*" />

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="b:version">

<xsl:text>2006.5.07</xsl:text>

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="b:StyleName">

<xsl:text>Simple Book Style</xsl:text>

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="b:GetImportantFields[b:SourceType = 'Book']">

<b:ImportantFields>

<b:ImportantField>

<xsl:text>b:Author/b:Author/b:NameList</xsl:text>

</b:ImportantField>

<b:ImportantField>

<xsl:text>b:Title</xsl:text>

</b:ImportantField>

<b:ImportantField>

<xsl:text>b:Year</xsl:text>

</b:ImportantField>

<b:ImportantField>

<xsl:text>b:City</xsl:text>

</b:ImportantField>

<b:ImportantField>

<xsl:text>b:Publisher</xsl:text>

</b:ImportantField>

</b:ImportantFields>

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="b:Source[b:SourceType = 'Book']">

<xsl:variable name="cCorporateAuthors">

<xsl:value-of select="count(b:Author/b:Author/b:Corporate)" />

</xsl:variable>

<xsl:choose>

<xsl:when test ="$cCorporateAuthors!=0">

<xsl:value-of select="b:Author/b:Author/b:Corporate"/>

<xsl:text>. (</xsl:text>

</xsl:when>

<xsl:otherwise>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Author/b:Author/b:NameList/b:Person/b:Last"/>

<xsl:text>, </xsl:text>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Author/b:Author/b:NameList/b:Person/b:First"/>

<xsl:text>. (</xsl:text>

</xsl:otherwise>

</xsl:choose>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Year"/>

<xsl:text>). </xsl:text>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Title"/>

<xsl:text>. </xsl:text>

<xsl:value-of select="b:City"/>

<xsl:text>: </xsl:text>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Publisher"/>

<xsl:text>.</xsl:text>

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="b:Bibliography">

<body>

<xsl:apply-templates select ="*">

</xsl:apply-templates>

</body>

</html>

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="b:Citation/b:Source[b:SourceType = 'Book']">

<xsl:variable name="cCorporateAuthors">

<xsl:value-of select="count(b:Author/b:Author/b:Corporate)" />

</xsl:variable>

<body>

<xsl:text>(</xsl:text>

<xsl:choose>

<xsl:when test ="$cCorporateAuthors!=0">

<xsl:value-of select="b:Author/b:Author/b:Corporate"/>

</xsl:when>

<xsl:otherwise>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Author/b:Author/b:NameList/b:Person/b:Last"/>

</xsl:otherwise>

</xsl:choose>

<xsl:text>, </xsl:text>

<xsl:value-of select="b:Year"/>

<xsl:text>)</xsl:text>

</body>

</html>

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="text()" />

</xsl:stylesheet>

In conclusion, we built off of Amani's post to build a more complex style using conditional statements. The unfortunately reality is that bibliography styles are complex, but as this example shows, implementing the individual rule does not have to be.

-Nathan

Word 2007 Vodcast

2009-04-14T17:38:00Z

Quick FYI. Frequent Word Team Blog blogger Joannie Stangeland started up a vodcast series called A Writer's Guide to Microsoft Office. The vodcast is currently stepping through the scenario of creating a manuscript in Word 2007 (how to pull together your separate files, add a table of contents, etc), and has a lot of cool stuff in store. Load it up on your MP3 player and enjoy.

-Jonathan Bailor (MS)

Word Most Valuable Professionals

2009-04-02T23:51:00Z

Just wanted to say a quick and public thank you to the amazing individuals who added a huge amount of valuable feedback at our recent MVP Summit.

Standing (L-R) Beth Melton, Suzanne Barnhill, Jay Freedman

Sitting (L-R) Jim Gordon, Shauna Kelly, Joanne Orzech, Tony Jollans

The amount of knowledge and insight these guys and gals bring to the table is always impressive.

And they are all over the Word discussion groups sharing their knowledge with the world. So feel free to drop in and drop them a Word question or two.

-Jonathan Bailor (MS)

How to Freeze Part of Your Word Document

2009-03-26T01:22:00Z

I'm a big fan of Excel's ability to freeze rows and columns.

If I'm looking at a large set of data, I can keep some of the rows and columns fixed and scroll though the rest. After all, this is pretty much useless:

…while this gives me the context I need to make sense of the data:

Now what if I have a similar situation in Word? Say that I have a figure on page one and need to write about it on page three. Do I need to scroll up and down over and over? No. Do I need to copy and paste the figure into another document and do a little split screen dance? No. I just "freeze" the part of the document with the figure.

Here's a document with a figure near the top of page one:

Click on the View Tab, click Split, and put the "splitter" under wherever you want to freeze (Video).

Now you've got much of the same goodness that you have in Excel. You can keep the figure at the top of your screen, and scroll to wherever else you want in the bottom pane. You can change the zoom setting for each pane independently (as I did in the picture above) to give yourself more room to work. Or you can go so far as to vary the views and set one to print view and the other to web view (my personal favorite view in Word). Double click on the splitter when you are done to get rid of it.

Advanced Tip: You can quickly access the splitter by clicking and dragging the little horizontal line above your vertical scroll bar.

But now, you may be thinking "This is great, but is there a way to do this that doesn't take up as much vertical screen real-estate?" Yes. If you go back to the View tab and click the New Window button, you can open a mirror copy of your document, and do all sorts of fun stuff. For example, you could resize the windows like this:

…and do a little multi-monitor emulation. Your edits will be mirrored in each window automatically, but you can manipulate their views independently. That is, the window one on the left could be at the top of the document in outline view zoomed at 100%, while the one on the right could be scrolled to your figure on page 235 in web view and zoomed to 200%. When you are done, just close either of the windows and you are back to one.

Hope this helps.

Jonathan Bailor

Word Throwback “Just Write” Edition

2009-03-02T20:51:00Z

I'm a fan of Tim Ferris, author of The Four Hour Work Week. Given this, you can imagine my horror when I found out via this video that Tim doesn't do much of his text editing in Word.

Not big on documents (in the traditional sense of the word) and more about simply composing text for blogs etc, Tim is a fan of a very basic text editor that emulates the word processors of yore. Also, living his message of laser sharp focus on "major tasks," Tim is all about writing, and only writing. We're talking black screen, green text, no "distracting" buttons etc.

Tim has a point.

We know that some folks have a very discrete writing process. They write, then they edit, and then they review/format/finalize. If you want to "just write," and minimize any possible distractions, you've got a couple of options before ditching Word.

First, here is Word 2007 (Note: I changed by Office theme to black—Office Button, Word Options, set Color Scheme to Black)

Note: all screen shots in this post are of the entire screen at 1024x768 (i.e. not just Word)

Option 1: No Pages & No Ribbon

This is a good option if you want to "just write" right now for just this document. It's a quick and easy 80%-of-the-way-there option.

Double click on any Tab on the Ribbon. This will hide the Ribbon.
Click the View Tab. Click Web Layout. This will turn Word into one big writing canvas.
Right click on the Windows taskbar, click Properties, and check Auto-hide the taskbar. This will take the Windows taskbar off the screen unless you mouse over where it used to be.

^{Full-screen screen capture of Word 2007 running on Windows Vista at 1024x768}

Option 2: Create the "Just Write" Template

This is your best option if you often want to "just write" often, and don't want to fiddle with Windows settings.

Open a blank document.
Click the View Tab. Click Web Layout.
Click on the Page Layout Tab and then Page Color. Set the Page Color to Black. This will set you up for the throwback high-contrast editing experience without touching Windows.
Right click on the Normal Style on the Home Tab. Click Modify. Change the font to Lucida Console and make it green. This will complete your throwback high-contrast editing efforts.
Save as a Word Template.
Click the Office Button, Word Options, Customize, select Commands Not in the Ribbon from the drop-down on the left, select Toggle Full Screen View, and click the Add button. This will add the Toggle Full Screen View command to your Quick Access Toolbar (the thing above the Home Tab)
Do the Windows taskbar goodness mentioned above.

Now you can simply double click on the template any time you want to "just write," click Toggle Full Screen View on your Quick Access Toolbar, and "just write."

^{Full-screen screen capture of Word 2007 running on Windows Vista at 1024x768}

Option 3: Customize Windows

This is your best option if you don't want to create a template and don't mind a drastically different user interface experience in all of your applications.

Click on the Windows Start button, Control Panel, Appearance and Personalization, Personalization, Window Color and Appearance, the "Open classic appearance properties for more color options" link, and select High Contrast #2
Open a Word document
Click the View Tab. Click Web Layout.
Click Toggle Full Screen View on your Quick Access Toolbar (see detailed steps above)
Hide the Windows taskbar (see detailed steps above)

^{Full-screen screen capture of Word 2007 running on Windows Vista at 1024x768}

Tim – I love your writing and agree with you on the merits of "just writing" without any possible distractions. Give just writing in Word 2007 a shot. I think you'll like it.

- Jonathan Bailor

Advanced Comparison of Word Documents

2009-02-17T21:19:00Z

[[Update: Some readers have reported that the images in the post are not showing-up. Here's a .docx version of the post if you are seeing that issue: http://stunna42.members.winisp.net/AdvancedCompareOfWordDocuments.docx]]

With mortgage rates dipping as low as 4.5%, my fiancée and I have been doing a bit of refinancing comparison shopping. And in this economy we had to make sure our bases were covered. And covering our bases was a lot easier by comparing the myriad versions of the refinancing documents in good 'ole Word 2007. So let's build off my previous post on Compare, and get down into the details that will save you quite a bit of time and effort the next time you need to deeply understand the difference between two documents.

I'm assuming that you know how to start a document comparison in Word 2007 (or that you will now read my previous post that talks about how to do it), so let's talk about the daunting dialog you see once you have started your comparison:

You'll note that, by default, all of the comparison settings are set. Let me explain why generally, and then I'll get into what each does.

Generally, you can think of a check in each of these boxes as saying: "I care about changes made to [insert Comparison Setting]." This means that, by default, you are telling Word that you care about every possible change between two versions of a document. And while this is often what you want—and thus why it is the default—you may want to get fancy and uncheck some of the boxes from time to time to reduce the "noise" in the comparison. For example, it is possible that changes to the formatting, casing, spacing, and headers and footers of your document do not materially change the meaning of the document. If they don't change the meaning, you may not care about changes made to them, and you can uncheck these Comparison Settings to reduce the "noise" of the comparison.

Now, on to the specifics:

Moves – If content was copy and pasted, do you want Word to mark it as moved?
- Yes = checked
- No = unchecked (I don't care about showing moves…deletions and insertions are fine)
Comments – If the content within a comment is changed, do you want Word to put both versions of the comment into the document? Note: We create two comments because change-tracking mark-up is not supported in Comments.
- Yes = checked
- No = unchecked (I don't care about changes to content within comments)
Formatting – If the formatting of content changes, do you want Word to mark that up?
- Yes = checked
- No = unchecked (I don't care about formatting changes)
Case Changes – If the casing of content changes, do you want Word to mark that up?
- Yes = checked
- No = unchecked (I don't care about casing changes)
White Space – If the amount of white space in the document changes, do you want Word to mark that up?
- Yes = checked
- No = unchecked (I don't care about white space changes)
Tables – If the structure or content within tables changes, do you want Word to mark that up?
- Yes = checked
- No = unchecked (I don't care about structural changes to tables or changes to text in tables)
Headers and Footers – If anything in headers or footers changes, do you want Word to mark that up?
- Yes = checked
- No = unchecked (I don't care about changes in my headers and footers)
Footnotes and endnotes – If anything in footnotes or endnotes changes, do you want Word to mark that up?
- Yes = checked
- No = unchecked (I don't care about changes in my footnotes or endnotes)
Textboxes – If anything in text boxes changes, do you want Word to mark that up?
- Yes = checked
- No = unchecked (I don't care about changes in my text boxes)
Fields – If anything in fields changes, do you want Word to mark that up?
- Yes = checked
- No = unchecked (I don't care about changes in my fields)

Note: Settings that deal with the objects or actions that can exist or happen within "containers" supersede settings that deal with the "containers" themselves. Two examples:

Check Textboxes (container), uncheck the Formatting (something you do in a container), change the formatting in a Textbox, compare, and Word won't find any changes. The stuff you do in the container wins.
Check Headers and Footers (container), uncheck Tables (object that can exist in a container, and also is a container itself), change the contents of a table in a Header, compare, and Word won't find any changes. The setting dealing with the object that can exist in a container (table) beats-out the container (header).

In sum, the lowest level setting wins.

Now for the Show changes settings:

Show changes at…Character level: Select this if you want "dog" vs. "dogs" to be marked-up as "dogs"
Show changes at…Word level: Select this if you want "dog" vs. "dogs" to be marked-up as "dogdogs"
Show changes in…Original document: Select this if you want the first document you selected to get marked-up
Show changes in…Revised document: Select this if you want the second document you selected to get marked-up
Show changes in…New document: Select this if you don't want either document to get marked-up

And now to ensure we don't lose sight of the forest for the trees, here again is why you care about Compare and want you'll want to use it.

Don't these documents look the same? Aren't you busy? Given how similar they look and how busy you are, why not just sign the Proposed Final Version?

Almost Final Version	Proposed Final Version

Running a comparison reveals the answer in a few seconds.

The Value of Comparing the Two Documents

Shady Lenders, LLC hates document comparison. I love document comparison, and you will too the next time you are dealing with multiple versions of the same document.

- Jonathan

Managing and Administrating Building Blocks

2009-02-03T18:06:00Z

In my first blog post, I gave an overview of some of the concepts with respect to building blocks and several readers commented with questions/concerns with regard to the management of building blocks. I felt like this was a large enough topic that it was worth dedicating a post to. There are 2 aspects of management that I will cover in this post. First, I want to share a little bit about file level management/organization of building blocks and second, I will talk about sharing building blocks with other and within an organization.

File Management

By default, there is a file called "Building Blocks.dotx" in your user application data folder (in Vista its "C:/Users/<<username>>/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Document Building Block"). This is where all of the built-in building blocks are saved, and it is also the default file that new building blocks are saved to. Whenever you open up one of the building block galleries, Word loads this document. As Stefan mentioned in his comment, there are a lot of building blocks in this file, so it's easy to get them mixed up. And, this also makes it difficult to share building blocks between users. There are a couple of different things you can do to mitigate this. One of the easiest things to do is add a new template to the document building blocks folder. This works because Word doesn't just load Building Blocks.dotx, but instead loads all the templates in the document building blocks folder. You can open a new blank document in word, then "save as" a template into that document building blocks folder. Now, when I save a building block (or auto text), I have the option of saving it to my new template. (In order to see the new template, you will need to restart Word.) Once I have done this, I can easily share my custom building blocks without sharing all the built-in content. Another hint is to use a different category for my personal building blocks. If you want this category to always appear above the built-in content, you can insert a space in from of the name (like " my building blocks") and your category will be at the top.

If you already have a bunch of personal building blocks, you can move them to a different template using the organizer. You can get to the building blocks organizer from the insert ribbon, by selecting "quick parts" and then choosing "Building Blocks Organizer…"

This opens up a dialog box that lets you view all the available building blocks. If you want to change the location of a building block, you can select it and then choose "Edit Properties." You can then drop down the "Save in:" box and pick your new template.

When you exit Word, you will be prompted with a message asking if you want to save your building blocks files. This also works to move building blocks into a document template if you are currently editing it. Unfortunately, you can't copy a building block using the organizer, though you can write a macro. The following macro inserts a building block called "Random" into a document, and then saves it to another template called "Test" and then deletes the building block from the document.

Dim objTemplate As Template

Dim objBBs As BuildingBlockEntries

Dim objBlock As BuildingBlock

Dim objBlock2 As BuildingBlock

Dim objBBTemp As Template

Dim rangeValue As Range

Templates.LoadBuildingBlocks

For Each objTemplate In Templates

If objTemplate.Name = "Building Blocks.dotx" Then

Set objBBTemp = objTemplate

End If

Next objTemplate

Set objTemplate = ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate

Set objBlock = objBBTemp.BuildingBlockTypes(wdTypeAutoText).Categories("General").BuildingBlocks("Random")

Set rangeValue = objBlock.Insert(Selection.Range)

Set objBlock2 = objTemplate.BuildingBlockEntries.Add(Name:="Test", Type:=wdTypeAutoText, Category:="General", Range:=rangeValue)

rangeValue.Delete

Sharing Building Blocks

Koen asked about administrating building blocks in an organization. The easiest way to do this is to add value called "SharedDocumentParts" to the "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\General" registry key. You can set this to tell Word an additional location to look for document parts. The best thing to do is to point this at a shared network directory. That way everyone has access to the same building blocks. Also, like the Document Building Blocks folder, Word will load all the templates in this location so you can save them in many different files if you would like to. Additionally, if you are already sharing a global template within your organization, you can also save the building blocks in that template.

Stay tuned for some tips on templates and building blocks.

Happy Building.

-Jodie

Keyboard Driven Building Block Insertion

2009-01-23T18:14:00Z

In my previous post, I introduced Building Blocks. Personally, I find that they can make putting complicated documents together a lot easier. That being said, when I get "in the zone" while typing, I don't want to take my hands off the keyboard and click through the ribbon to insert a Building Block. As a result, I do several things to make my life easier. But, before I get into that, let me review some of the features that I leverage.

Word's offerings

Building blocks, AutoText, and AutoCorrect are three features that Word offers to help with the creation of complicated documents. Each one of these features offer unique options to help create professional, consistent documents.

AutoText has been around in Word for a while. AutoText facilitates reusing chunks of text, or other objects within a document. In Word 2007, AutoText was expanded to Building Blocks. Building Blocks are great because they are highly organized, and you can get a nice preview of the building block you are inserting in the galleries on the insert ribbon. That gives you a sanity check to make sure that you are inserting the right thing into your document. Also, in general, the use of galleries makes the individual building blocks significantly easier to find.

While, in general, I find building blocks to be very useful, sometimes I don't want to have to insert items by navigating through the galleries. This is especially true for my most commonly used building blocks as well as my AutoText. As a result, I have done a few things to make inserting these building blocks easier.

My 'Figure' building block

In my thesis, I'm very picky about the way that my figures look, so I have made a special building block especially for my figures. That way, I can be sure that the formatting is just what I want every time and I don't have to create it from scratch for every figure. I did this by just selecting my figure, and then going to QuickParts on the insert tab and saving it to the building blocks gallery. For those times when I'm in the zone, I can type the name of my building block, "Figure" and then hit F3 and it gets inserted.

Slash commands for automatically updating AutoText

I have saved a bunch of AutoText entries that store all the acronyms that I am using in my thesis. I want all my acronyms to be consistent across my thesis, and I want them to be automatically update should I decide to change the acronym later. I especially want to be able to easy handle changes to these acronyms, or even if I decide to stop using an acronym all together. I accomplish this by inserting a field that references my named AutoText, instead of just inserting the AutoText itself. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to insert an AutoText field, so I would like to be able to reuse my field once I have inserted it once. I had 2 options for inserting these fields. One is to save the field as a building block and then use the solution I presented above. However, because of the nature of these AutoTexts as well as the frequency of their use throughout the document, I do something slightly different. I leverage the AutoCorrect feature (you know the thing that changes 'teh' to 'the' for you) to define what I call 'slash' commands. These are words that begin with '\' followed by a descriptor, such as \xml. I define an AutoCorrect entry that AutoCorrects the command to be the field.

Here is how I do this:

First, I create an AutoText entry. You can do this by selecting the text you want to have and then hitting Alt-F3.

Then I insert a field with that auto text:

Once I have inserted the field, I select it, and then go to Word Options to set up an AutoCorrect entry so that my slash command will be automatically changed. I need to make sure that "Formatted Text" is selected, otherwise the field won't be inserted.

Now anytime I type "\xml", Word will auto correct it to use my field. That way, I can just keep on writing and be confident that my acronyms will be consistent throughout the entire document, even if I decide later to change what it looks like. By combining AutoText Fields and AutoCorrect, I have an easy way to keep my acronyms consistent throughout my document.

More information

If you want more information on how to leverage these and related features, I recommend this "Help and Tips" page, put together by Word MVP Greg Maxey. This contains a lot of great information about working more efficiently with building blocks, and auto text.

Stay tuned for tips on using Building Blocks to build powerful templates as well as managing building blocks.

-Jodie

Building Blocks

2008-12-15T23:35:00Z

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

Taking Control of Your Table of Contents or Document Map

2008-12-02T23:11:00Z

As discussed in this previous post, table of contents and the Document Map are designed to work best with documents that use styles. Styles not only apply a look and feel to a document, but also provide semantic structure. For example, applying a Heading 2 style to some content that exists under a Heading 1 style implies hierarchy within a document.

Technically speaking, this hierarchy is represented as Outline Levels within paragraphs. In the case of heading styles, each heading level is formatted with the appropriate built-in heading style. For example, Heading 3 applies an outline level of Level 3. This hierarchy is easily represented within a Document Map or table of contents because Word will indent content based on outline levels. In other words, Heading 2 appears indented compared to Heading 1.

What happens if you want to apply one of these styles, say Heading 1, to a paragraph for the look, but don't want that paragraph to show in your document hierarchy (via the Document Map or table of contents? What do you do?

Well, I was asked this question recently and thought it would make for a good post on our blog.

To illustrate the scenario, let's say I want to make this document below (notice the table of contents and Document Map):

Look like this document below (notice the change in the table of contents and Document Map, but not the look of the document):

There are several ways you can accomplish this scenario, but here is one way:

Open up your Word document that you want to modify
Place your insertion point (IP; it's the blinking cursor you see when you click anywhere in a document) in any text that has a Heading 1 style applied
Right click
Click on Styles | Save Selection as a New Quick Style as shown below:
At this point you are creating a new style that looks the same as Heading 1. You can call this new style anything you would like
At this point you will see this new style appear in the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab. In the Quick Styles gallery right click your new style that you created
Click modify
In the Modify Style dialog, click on Format | Paragraph, which is at the bottom left of the dialog
In the Paragraph dialog, change Outline Level to Body Text
Click OK to get out of the Paragraph dialog
Click Ok to get out of the Modify Style dialog

At this point you have a new style that looks like Heading 1, but will not be seen in the table of contents or Document Map. Apply this new style to all text that you do not want to show up in the Table of contents or Document Map. Do not forget to update your table of contents to see changes take effect.

Thanks,

Zeyad Rajabi

BEHIND THE CURTAINS: TABLE STYLES

2008-11-24T18:34:00Z

Table Styles are my favorite type of Style in Word. They allow you to quickly and consistently format the table itself (e.g. borders, shading, etc.), the content within the table (E.g. line spacing, font color, font size, etc.), and they can also can tell a table when to do these (e.g. shade every other row, bold text in the first column, etc.). The first two enable you to create really rich tables, and the last one (which I'll call Conditional Formatting for the rest of this post) enables you to easily work with those rich tables. Both are quite important.

Before we can get into all that, you need to know a bit about how Word thinks about tables…

The Structure of Tables

Word understands all of the following as discrete actionable parts of a table:

Whole Table
Header Row
Total Row
First Column
Last Column
Odd Banded Rows
Even Banded Rows
Odd Banded Columns
Even Banded Columns
Top Left Cell
Top Right Cell
Bottom Left Cell
Bottom Right Cell

This is cool because it allows Table Styles to specify a conditional behavior for each of these parts. For example, in the table below, the Header Row and Total Row have top and bottom blue borders and are bolded, the Odd Banded Rows have blue shading, and the First Column and Last Colum are bolded.

And it is important to note that this is not the same as saying:

The row with "College," "New students," "Graduating students," and "Change," as well as the row with "Total," "998," "908," and "90" should have top and bottom blue borders and should be bolded
The 1^st, 3^rd, 5^th, 7^th, 9^th, and 11^th rows below the "College" row should have blue shading in them
The column containing "Cedar University," "Elm College," etc., and the column containing "+7," "+9," etc., should be bolded

The former is formatting applied based on a table structural condition being true…i.e. Conditional Formatting. The latter is formatting directly applied to parts of the table. This makes a big difference when you start adding and subtracting rows and columns.

Why Conditional Formatting Based on a Rich Table Structure is Useful

Let's consider a simpler example using two tables—X and Y—where X uses a Table Style and Conditional Formatting and Y uses direct formatting.

Table X

Table Style + Conditional Formatting on the Header Row, First Column, Total Row, and Odd Banded Rows

Table X

Two rows added under "Monday," "Wednesday," "Friday"

Table Y

Direct formatting

Table Y

Two rows added under "Monday," "Wednesday," "Friday"

As Table X grew, the formatting specified by the Table Style adjusted conditionally based on the new structure of the table. As Table Y grew, the new rows were directly formatted just like the row next to them. Smiley for the former, frowny for the later.

Exercise: The first table shown in this post—the one with the colleges—uses a Table Style with Conditional Formatting. How would that table look if you added a row to top and bottom, and a column to the left and right side? See the end of this post for the answer.

Conditional Formatting's Order of Operations

Hopefully the previous example shows you why the Conditional Formatting aspect of Table Styles is so important. After all, what good is a rich table if you have to do a bunch of work every time you add a row or column?

That being said, the next question that comes to mind is around order of operations. Specifically, what is the order in which Conditional Formatting is applied in tables? I.e. In the previous example, how did Table X know that the Conditional Formatting for the First Column and Header Row should be applied "over" the shading on the Odd Banded Rows? Put yet another way, how did Word know not to make Table X look like this:

The answer is that Word shows Conditional Formatting on "smaller" parts over Conditional Formatting on "bigger" parts. We do this because otherwise you wouldn't see the Conditional Formatting on the smaller parts. If we don't show the Header Row (smaller) over the Odd Banded Rows (larger), then you don't see the Header Row (e.g. funky table immediately above). If we do show the Header Row (smaller) over the Odd Banded Rows (larger), then you see both the Header Row and the Odd Banded Rows (e.g. Table X).

With that, here's the order that Word applies Conditional Formatting:

Whole Table
Column Banding
Row Banding
Header Row, Total Row
First Column, Last Column
Top Left Cell, Top Right Cell, Bottom Left Cell, Bottom Right Cell

Note: Conditional Formatting on the four corners is only applied if the respective rows and columns also use Conditional Formatting. E.g. Top Left Cell Conditional Formatting is only applied if First Column and Header Row are conditionally formatted.

We go from big to small and conditionally format the whole table, then band the columns, move on to band the rows, gussy-up the header row and total row, take care of the first and then last column, and finish-up in the four corners.

If you want to get your hands dirty and create your very own Table Style, simply insert a new table, drop the Table Styles Gallery, and click New Table Style at the bottom of the Gallery.

Note: If you really want to flex your Table Style muscles, you can specify the number of rows or columns in a "band." E.g. Instead of having one row per band like the tables in this post, you can specify that there should be two rows per band by dropping the Table Styles Gallery, clicking Modify Table Style, click the Format button, and click Banding.

Summary

While you may not now have the same undying love for Table Styles that I have, you hopefully now know that:

In addition to formatting the table and the contents of the table, Table Styles also define the conditions for when to apply that formatting.
This is possible because Word sees tables a collection of parts that can each be acted upon conditionally.
This is useful because it makes editing rich tables much easier.
Smaller parts of tables are formatted over top of larger parts of tables.

- Jonathan Bailor

Answer to Exercise

Keyboard Customizations and Macros in WordMail

2008-11-18T02:36:00Z

In my first post on WordMail, I talked about how we fully integrated Word within Outlook for reading and writing emails. From a feature perspective, Word and WordMail are functionally the same. In other words, you have access to much of the same features in WordMail as in Word. However, from a technical perspective, Word and WordMail are two separate processes or entities. This is important to note because keyboard customizations and macros that work in Word will not automatically be available in WordMail. Today, I will show you how to add keyboard customizations and macros to WordMail for Office 2007.

Normal Email Template

As mentioned in this previous post, every document you create in Word is based off of a template. These templates store the look and feel of the document by specifying the appropriate styles. For the majority of cases, Word will use the Normal template whenever you create a new document. Similarly In the case of WordMail, every time you create an email you are creating a document based off of the NormalEmail template.

You might be asking yourself, why have separate normal templates for Word and WordMail, especially if the underlying application is just Word. Well, there are a couple of reasons:

We wanted to differentiate the look of documents authored in Word 2007 vs. emails authored in Outlook 2007. In the case of Office 2007, Word and WordMail use different paragraph spacing values, which make for a different reading and authoring experience
Because we separated Word and WordMail it was not possible for two separate applications to access one normal template at a time without running into issues. For example, trying to update the styles as defined in the normal template in both Word and WordMail may result in conflicts and synchronization errors. In other words, we would run into issues where one application had a lock on the template file while the other was trying to write back into the template

The reason I am bringing up templates is because keyboard customizations are stored within a document or template. In the case of email, keyboard customizations are stored in the NormalEmail template.

Keyboard Customizations in WordMail

Since we don't share keyboard customizations between Word and WordMail anymore, you will need to add your customizations separately for each application. To add keyboard customizations in WordMail you will need to do the following:

Boot Word
Click the Office Button
Select Open
In the Open dialog box, go to the following path %appdata%\Microsoft\Templates\
Double click on the NormalEmail template
Once the template is opened, click the Office Button again
Click on Word Options
Select the Customize tab, and click on Customize
Add as many keyboard customizations as you would like
Make sure to save changes in NormalEmail template

At this point, anytime you create a new email with WordMail you will have access to your keyboard customizations that you have just added.

Macros in WordMail

Similarly to keyboard customizations, macros don't automatically work in both "apps" if you create them in one "app." For example, let's say you tried to run the following macro to insert "hello world" into an email in Outlook 2007:

Word.Selection.TypeText "hello world"

The result you would see is a run time error of 424: Object required. With Outlook 2007 you will need to write your macros with Outlook in mind. Once you have access to the Outlook object you will then have access to the Word object. The above macro can be rewritten as follows to work with Outlook 2007:

ActiveInspector.WordEditor.Windows(1).Selection.TypeText "hello"

In other words, the Inspector.WordEditor property will give you full access to the Word object model.

With WordMail as the editor for other compose areas in Outlook, like tasks and appointments, you can write macros that will work exactly the same way in any of these Outlook items.

Accessing the Word OM in Outlook

By default, you will not see any intellisense for Word objects and properties if you try to access the Word object model in Outlook. Here is a way to remedy this limitation:

Boot Outlook
Hit Alt-F11 to invoke the VB editor
Tools | References and add the following: (Microsoft Word 12.0 Object Library)

At this point in time you should be able to access the Word OM by declaring a document object and setting it to the WordEditor of a given compose note or read note:

In summary, there's Word and WordMail. They offer essentially the same feature set, but are two separate processes or entities.

Zeyad Rajabi