Entries tagged with word - Channel 10

Word and Excel Docs Can Now Be Added To Slideshare

sarahintampa — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:31:00 GMT

Slideshare is a popular website that made sharing PowerPoint presentations (and PDFs) easy. Recently, the site added a new feature: support for Microsoft Word and Excel files. The move was likely due to Slideshare’s competition from sites like Scribd, DocStoc, Zoho Share, and others. If you’re wondering what the difference is between all these sites and the services they offer, I have to point you over to the Digital Inspiration site, where the news broke. There, blogger Amit Agarwal has put together handy charts for your reference which compare the features, file size limits, viewer sizes, among other things. He even compares the traffic of the sites – a comparison which shows Slideshare has a lot of catching up to do if they want to compete with Scribd!

Three Flickr Plugins You’ll Love

sarahintampa — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:11:00 GMT

If you’re a flickr user, there are three plugins that you need to know about: Flickr4Writer, Flickr4Outlook, and Flickr4Word. I had mentioned the Flickr4Writer plugin before when I blogged about some of my favorite plugins for Windows Live Writer - it helps you to insert flickr photos into your blog posts. However, thanks to gHacks, I learned that there are also similar plugins for both Word and Outlook. Like the WLW plugin, they give you easy access to your flickr photos from directly within the application. You can also use the built-in search feature to find photos from other flickr users that match the tags you enter in the search box. The Outlook and Word plugins only support Office 2007 installations (Word 2007, Outlook 2007). All of the plugins are available from their respective sites (linked above) as free downloads. Hey, does this count as software+services? I think it might!

5 Microsoft Office Ribbon Tweaks You May Not Have Known

sarahintampa — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:19:00 GMT

Thanks to some internal emails that were going around recently, we’ve discovered some great Microsoft Office ribbon tweaks, tips, and customizations. I’ll confess, I hadn’t known about all of these, but they certainly are handy:

Hide the Ribbon: To hide the ribbon out of view leaving only the tab names showing, just double-click on any tab’s name.
Customize the Quick Access Toolbar: By default, the Quick Access Toolbar has the “Save,” “Undo,” and “Redo” buttons on it, but you can change that. To do so, go to any tab and right-click on the little pull-down menu symbol next to the window title on any Ribbon app. Here, you have the option to click on “Customize Quick Access Toolbar.” From the menu that displays, you can add and remove commands from the Quick Access Toolbar to suit your preferences. Add your most frequently used commands and you can hide the ribbon to get more screen real estate without losing access to the commands you use the most.
Find Hidden Commands: Because the Ribbon is meant to bring more simplicity to working with Office software, there are some infrequently used commands that are not available on the ribbon or are just harder to find. To bring these back into view, follow the steps above in #2 to customize the Quick Access Toolbar and you can get access to these commands once again. A couple examples of hidden commands include Excel’s pop-up calculator and PowerPoint’s Advanced Document Properties, which lets you see how big the file is.
Customize the Quick Access Toolbar on the Fly: No need to hunt down the little right-click menu, though, you can just right-click any command on the ribbon and choose “Add to Quick Access Toolbar.”
Scroll Through Tabs With a Mouse Wheel: If you have a mouse with a wheel, you can scroll through the tabs if the cursor is over the Ribbon – very useful for quick switching.

We would like to thank both Steven Levy and Alex Babanov for these great tips!

Free Download: Microsoft Math for Word

sarahintampa — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:15:00 GMT

Have you ever heard of Microsoft Math? It’s a downloadable product for students which features a graphing calculator, formula & equations library, triangle solver, unit conversion tool, and more. Math is pretty affordable at only $14.95 (U.S.), but that’s not the free Math download I’m referring to in this blog post’s title. The free download I’m talking about is a Microsoft Math add-in for Word 2007 users. This add-in lets Word handle things that you may have thought only Excel was capable of doing. With the Math add-in, for example, you can create graphs, perform calculations, and solve for variables – and all from within Word. You can even plot elements in 2-D and 3-D. This is great for those who are writing research papers on mathematical subjects, for teachers who are creating study guides for students, as well as anyone else who needs to do some math in Word. But you won’t find this free add-in on the Microsoft Math homepage, though – you’ll need to go straight to this page on the Microsoft Download Center site instead.

Word for scientific publishing

JonUdell — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Pablo Fernicola is a group manager at Microsoft. He runs a project focused on delivering tools and services for scientific and technical publishing, with a particular interest on the transition from print to electronic and web based content, and its implications for collaboration, search, and content discovery in the future.

In this interview, Pablo explains how a new add-in for Word, now available as a technical preview, helps authors and publishers of scientific articles work more effectively with one another, and with online archives like PubMed Central.

Pablo Fernicola

Links

Technical Computing @ Microsoft - Scholarly Publishing

Download details for the Article Authoring Add-in

Pablo Fernicola's blog: ex Scientia

JU: Hi Pablo, thanks for joining us to talk about a new Word add-in for authors of scientific journal articles. It's an interesting story about applying the XML capabilities of Office, and also about the evolution of journal publishing. How did this project get started?

PF: It's an incubation project. Three people had an idea: Jean Paoli, an XML pioneer, Jim Gray...

JU: Oh really? I didn't know he had been involved.

PF: Yes, he and Jean really pushed to get this started, and they both recruited me for this project. It's been a little over a year since Jim disappeared, and that was a big blow, considering his key role.

And third key person is Tony Hey.

JU: We should explain that Tony runs what's called the technical computing initiative, and is very involved in figuring out how Microsoft can help various people in the scientific community address computing and information management challenges.

PF: Right. Scientific authors in many disciplines use Word to write articles. We looked into how to simplify the workflow, streamline the process, and lower the cost. And not just for the authors, but also for the journal publishers.

JU: It's been true for a long time in publishing, and not just scientific publishing, that there have been real challenges getting that Word content converted into the kinds of long-term formats we need: XML that's richly decorated with metadata.

Publishers have tended to use strategies that involve giving people templates that try to use styles to control what's in the document. But since Word 2003, and especially since Word 2007, there have been a set of XML capabilities which have made possible a much more robust approach.

PF: That's right. Before Word 2003, styles were the best you could do. And people got quite far by relying on them. But they were very fragile. When you copied and pasted, styles would bleed across. It was hard to disentangle that when you converted the file.

JU: That's part of the problem. And part of is that, along with the content itself, there's a process involving the metadata, and that process is divided between the author and the journal publisher. It's a shared responsibility, and you need an information management system that embraces that division of labor.

PF: Also: What kind of user interface do you present to these different groups? There are really three groups. First the authors, who are subject-matter experts but don't know anything about the publishing process, and shouldn't have to know.

Second, the journal editors. They're also subject-matter experts, but they also know about the structure of the journal, and about the metadata they need to apply

And third, you have companies and vendors who do backend tools and services, as well as the folks who work on the electronic archives. With the move from print to electronic journals, the role of the archive becomes very significant. Either the journals have their own repositories, or you have centralized repositories at university libraries or larger institutions, for example the National Library of Medicine with PubMed Central, or Cornell with Arxiv.org.

That group is very technical in terms of understanding file formats, elements, and properties.

JU: But even those folks shouldn't necessarily need to master all of that. They'd rather spend their time on math and physics, not the minutia of XML publishing.

PF: That's right. The way the pipeline is set up today, you start with a Word document, and then at a certain point you convert to XML, and from that point on, all the editing happens in an XML editor.

JU: So in biology and medicine, the format defined by the National Library of Medicine, and the one you're supporting in this Word add-in, is called the NLM DTD.

PF: Yes. It's not only used by PubMed Central, but also a lot of the commercial publishers are using it for their archival format. And we're also seeing it used by publishers in other disciplines, for example law and social science.

JU: Really? It's general enough for that?

PF: It is fairly general, and I'm really impressed by how the community related to scientific, technical, and medical publishing is not reinventing the wheel, but instead leveraging something that's in common use.

A significant point is that the format usually does not encode any presentation elements. It's all about the semantics and the metadata, not about what font or background color. As you try to preserve data for the long term, for centuries from now, the presentation is not relevant, it's the content that matters. You can always generate a presentation from it.

JU: So as we see in the accompanying screencast, you've created an add-in that presents editing enhancements both for authors and for editors. The interface for the author helps that person fill in the template and also apply those metadata elements which are appropriate for the author to apply. Then there's a separate interface for the editor. Explain a bit about how this can change the workflow.

PF: If you start from the author side, a key premise was requiring less effort to produce a valid document. You want to avoid having the author round-trip with the editor, back and forth, because they didn't fill in all the required information.

JU: And that happens a lot?

PF: Yes. And it's not just failure to provide the required information. We want to make it easier to provide the correct information. Consider co-authors. You'll likely work with the same ones over and over. You want to avoid having to repetitively enter that information, and avoid having errors creep in. Remember: As we move to electronic publishing, search becomes key. It's the main way people will find articles. To have good search results, you need to know the information in the articles is good. If the last name of the author is misspelled, it's harder to find all the papers from that author.

JU: In terms of the consistency of author information, you can help with this Word add-in by normalizing the metadata editing process, but there still has to be a reliable disambiguated set of author names which are managed by the publishers, and ideally by a federation of publishers, and ultimately even more broadly than that.

PF: Correct. If we look down the road, we see something like a global directory, but we're not there yet. We have to build up to that. When you look at the add-in, we're taking small steps that will get us to at least a better baseline than we have today.

JU: Or, given that the world is moving to that baseline anyway, will help make it quicker and easier to get there.

PF: That's right. If we think of the authors, the key thing is to provide a very simple interface. As we consider features, if they look complicated we'll drop them. One of the prevailing rules is: Don't duplicate Word UI. If there's a way to do tables or equations or reference lists in the Word UI, we'll use those. We don't want to provide a lot of new UI for the authors to learn.

JU: What I find interesting, here, from a workflow perspective, is how people in different roles are touching different pieces of data and metadata. Historically that's been a one-way process. Once the article is converted into the NLM format, it's typically not available to go back to the author for editing in the original context. So the person at the journal has to be responsible for round-tripping change requests.

Similarly with the editing of the metadata. The author might want to make some changes, the journal publisher might want to make some changes, and those things tend to happen in disparate environments. What this is showing is what has always been the promise of robust XML editing on the desktop. You can bring all these chores into a common environment. The unit of workflow, the document, is something that can flow to different people in different contexts, and be modified in different ways, but it hangs together as it moves through the process.

That's a big deal, and it goes far beyond the specific domain of scientific and technical publishing.

PF: Right. And in addition to keeping all the data together and providing a simple interface, publishers have told us that as they move to electronic-first, they expect the cycle times to shrink. With the current disconnected tools and formats, that's hard to achieve. If you want to make a quick revision and send it to the journal, it may be too late because they've started the process of conversion, and once that starts there's no stopping it.

And to your point about other domains, people have told us they want to use this for things like grant requests as well, moving away from article content to other kinds of content that can benefit from the structure and validation.

JU: The problem is almost universal.

PF: Yes, anytime you want to validate content, or preserve it for a long time, these capabilities are relevant.

JU: So 2003 was the first major deployment of XML capability for Office and for Word. We haven't yet seen as much use of that capability as I'd expected. Why?

PF: The biggest challenge was that XML wasn't the default format. You had to have authors do special things to produce XML. Also, if you think of the NLM formats, they contain things that aren't part of normal Word content or UI. In Word 2003, extending the document content, or extending the UI, wasn't as easy as it has become in Word 2007.

With Word 2007, you end up with a set of things, in a single installation, that bring all the enabling capabilities together at the same time and in the same place.

JU: So what you did have, in Word 2003, was user-defined schema, but you're saying that wasn't enough, and that the newer capability of including arbitrary chunks of XML is more flexible for this purpose?

PF: Yeah. There's two parts to that. There's content within the document, so the ability to have new XML elements that are part of the document, and that's more robust and expressive in Word 2007's Open XML format. Then there's the ability to have other XML data packaged within the file. Custom XML is what that's usually called.

JU: And that's the method you're using for the journal metadata?

PF: Right. And since this is all defined as part of the Open XML format, and since the packaging of the file follows the standard as well, developers can build their own tools to create metadata, access metadata, or even create the whole file, they can.

JU: So this is a first cut you're putting out for publishers to experiment with, and to help you refine the templates they'll deploy to authors?

PF: Yes, this is a technology preview for evaluation and feedback. The idea is that the publishers will create the templates themselves.

JU: Who are you working with?

PF: We're talking to many different journals, publishers, and archives. Each constituency has a different set of interests and requirements. Journal editors care a lot about the templates, but folks at PubMed Central and Arxiv care more about how the metadata gets validated.

We expect a beta shortly, and a 1.0 release by late summer. It'll be a free add-in for Word.

JU: Well thanks Pablo. I fear that this will only seem interesting to the relatively small number of folks who have a direct interest in scientific, technical, and medical publishing. But I hope it will be apparent that it's much broader. You hinted at that when you mentioned that the NLM format, despite having been invented for the particular purposes of certain disciplines, is being taken up by people in legal and other disciplines.

I'm excited about it because I care about publishing and metadata and robust information systems and open formats, and this brings all those things together. I'm glad to know that it's happening, and I'm glad you're working on it.

PF: It's really proving the value proposition of XML, and show how it's coming of age in a mainstream production environment.

JU: Yep. For those of us who've been thinking about this for a long time, there's been a tendency to get frustrated and feel like it'll never happen. But it just takes a while for things like this to make their way into the mainstream, and this is a great example of that.

Well, thanks Pablo!

PF: OK, thanks!

Pablo Fernicola demonstrates the Word add-in for scientific authors

JonUdell — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:29:00 GMT

In this screencast, Pablo Fernicola demonstrates the technical preview of a new scientific publishing add-in for Word. The add-in enables reading and writing of XML-based documents in the archival format used by the National Library of Medicine.

Microsoft Word Productivity Tips

sarahintampa — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:46:00 GMT

I love little productivity tips that help me do things faster and more efficiently, so I really enjoyed this blog post over at Web Worker Daily. Samuel gathered some of his favorite keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Word, like Ctrl+Shift+C to copy and Ctrl+Shift+V to paste formatting and Ctrl + Shift to select all text between the current location of your cursor and the end of the current paragraph.

His list was short and sweet, but it was no match for the super massive list of all shortcuts for Word 2002, Word 2003, and Word 2007 found here. Wow, you really don't even need a mouse, do you?

Back to work, Mac

Larry — Wed, 16 May 2007 06:23:00 GMT

According to the Office for Mac Team Blog, a free converter for Office 2007 Word documents is available for OSX. Geoff Price writes:

"Why a stand-alone converter application? We chose this route because it supports both Office 2004 and Office v.X for Mac users, while providing some bonus functionality such as batch conversion... The user interface for the converter actually began life as an internal test tool (where you can imagine the batch processing comes in handy) - it was so slick it quickly became obvious that it was a great solution for the converter. You can drag and drop files onto the converter icon or application of course, but can also simply double-click .docx files to invoke it."

The aptly named Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 0.1b, otherwise known as MOOXFFCM.1b (pronounced mōō-zffc-mmm-dŏt-wŭn-be, it helps if you speak the Tlingit dialect of Na-Dene) can be found here.

Office 2007 - Microsoft Word

Tina — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 01:02:00 GMT

Microsoft Word 2007 rules! It seems like we've used Word our whole lives but this is - by far - the greatest improvement in features and interface. High School and College kids around the globe will love the new Microsoft Word 2007. It's got a comprehensive set of new tools integrated with the incredible new ribbon interface.