Accelerated Authoring™ @ Method M

Systematically preventing errors in published documents is the subject of this post.

Comments, revision marks, embedded questions, internal product names, and other content not meant for general publication have been a major pain point for Word users.

Word 2007 provides the Document Inspector – a tool for preventing distribution of the content that you don’t want to share.  In addition to the out of the box routines provided by the Document Inspector, Word 2007 enables creating new inspector modules that meet very specific needs – your needs – using the “DocumentInspectors” collection type.

If you are using an earlier version of Word, the good news is that you can use VBA to create tools that mimic the functionality of Document Inspector. Ahem, ahem — get ready for a bit of shameless self-promotion — you can also  get ready-made Document Inspector-like functionality for earlier versions of Word –from Method M. For more, download the article about systematically avoiding document gaffes.
Katriel

In a previous post we talked about Accelerated Authoring™ as a collection of tools and methods to enable improved productivity for knowledge workers. Content controls are part of the Accelerated Authoring collection and are the subject of this post. Specifically, we will talk about using Content Controls to create highly formatted documents.

Most companies have multiple series of documents – say case studies or application notes – that will be prepared over time. It might be a good idea for the first one in each series to be prepared by a graphic designer (or at least by a team member with design skills).

In practice, keeping the design from slipping over time as writers and subject matter experts edit documents in the series can be challenging. Inadvertent clicks tend to cause images to move, alignment to be lost and other changes that result in:

• Design deterioration – documents have a less consistent and less professional look.
• Time and energy lost in trying to get back to the original formatting.

To read more about Editing Highly Formatted Documents in Word – and how Content Controls can be used as part of a complete methodology for enabling staff to create and update highly designed documents, download content controls and making beautiful documents.

Look for the next post about anticipating and preventing document gaffes (proactive document quality). Katriel