Office Pioneer : Word

Blog Direct from Word 2007

Jo Carpenter — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 18:09:00 GMT

Word 2007 now provides the opportunity to publish a blog directly from a document. Writing to a blog can be unreliable if you type directly into a blog post. Issues can often arise with work being lost if the browser times out or if the window is accidently closed. Writing a document in Word first is a very useful technique, as it enables you to make the most of a lot of functionality that you do not get in a blog pane. In particular I’ve found the spell check and the undo/redo options to be very useful before publishing online. Using Word also enables me to start a blog, then save it and then come back to it at a later date before I publish it. This is especially useful when I need to organise some pictures to go into the blog.

The image below shows where to find the new publish to blog option in Word 2007.

What you will notice when you enter into the Word 2007 blog publishing zone is that the new user interface has had a number of tabs removed from the ribbon to leave just three; the Blog Post, Insert and Add-Ins.

There are also some new commands available in these tabs such as ‘Manage Account’ which allows users to enter in existing Blog accounts.

You can read lots more about Blog Publishing at the official MS Word Blog

Or you can find more specific data on the Blog Information Page

Plucking needles from a haystack

GillLeFevre — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 13:00:00 GMT

The "Find" function in Word just got a whole lot cleverer.

Now, when you go to find a word, you can select the option "Reading highlight" which highlights every occurrence of the search term in your document.

Just like this:

Simplicity itself, but incredibly handy. Darren was using it yesterday afternoon, to find every occurrence of his name on a schedule (a lot easier than searching through each row). And I can see it being invaluable when writing reports and assignments - I have a tendency to overuse words; now I can just search for a particular word and see at a glance where it's ~~overused~~ repeated.

Enjoy it while it lasts….. No more Save PDF - Out of the Box

Charlene — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 18:48:00 GMT

Unfortunately one of the coolest features of Beta 2 has now been removed from the final product.

The ability to Save as PDF or our own XPS format, the crowd pleaser at product demos, will no longer be included in the final release due to pressure from Adobe.

But worry not, you will still be able to reap all the benefits of this feature by downloading free software that we be releasing to give you this capability…

Hat wasn’t quiet what I waned too right

GillLeFevre — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:52:00 GMT

Sorry… that wasn't quite what I wanted to write.

One of the drawbacks with the spell-checker in Office 2003 was that it could only check words on an individual basis. So while the title of this post makes no sense whatsoever, each word is correctly spelt. As such, if you were to rely solely on the spell-checker to proof-read a document, you could submit it with a lot of "correctly" spelt typos.

If this sounds familiar, then you are going to welcome the arrival of the wavy blue line. In the same way that the red line identifies spelling mistakes and the green line grammatical errors (although I've never been a huge fan of some of the "rules" the grammar checker wants to enforce), the blue line looks for correctly spelt words, that don't fit the context of your sentence.

So my title in Word looks something like this:

Easy to spot, easy to correct! This should definitely save me some red-faced moments in the future!

Note: the more eagle-eyed will have spotted that "too" and "right" are not underlined in the example above. Clearly, the "word choice" checker has some limits. In this particular example the incorrect usage of "waned" means that the rest of the sentence can't be accurately checked.

When you correct "waned", the checker immediately points out that "too" is incorrectly used.

Correcting "too" leaves us with:

But "right" will never get picked up, because it could, albeit unusually, be correct:

That [particularly sentence] wasn't quite what I wanted to write.
That [particular injustice] wasn't quite what I wanted to right.