building block questions

[cayce]

Is there a capacity limit on the amount of content building blocks can hold?

We will be developing a new template in Word 2007. Our goal is to have LOTS
of boiler-plate content in building blocks that the engineer can pick from to
"build" his/her document. I am leaning towards using each of the 4 custom
galleries: one to house many, many individual paragraphs or even pages of
text, a gallery just for pictures, a gallery for tables, and a gallery for
miscellaneous.

Is there a capacity issue of individual entries and all of building blocks
in general that we need to consider? Are there any special precautions or
naming conventions we need to be mindful of before venturing off into
building the galleries? Has anyone else done this sort of thing and
encountered problems or have lessons learned to share?

This is new turf for me and I want to avoid any pitfalls.

 

[Graham Mayor]

The biggest problem is likely to be one of identification of the many
paragraphs. I doubt that you will realise any practical limits as to the
content in practice. You *may* find the boiler.dot add-in
http://www.gmayor.com/downloads.htm useful as it offers an alternative
method of inserting texts graphics etc - this time stored as documents. You
might also investigate autocorrect which I find a much more convenient
method of storing repeatable items as it does not require selection from a
list and will hold anything an autotext/building block entry will load. If
you use this method, I would suggest prefixing the trigger words with a
character never found in front of those words eg #para1 or %para2 etc

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[cayce]

thanks Graham. Are there any choices about how to organize the list of items
that are placed in a Custom Gallery the user would be picking from?

 

[Graham Mayor]

Click the header of the column you require the items sorted on.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi Cayce,

Graham's answer on clicking the column header refers to the Building Block Organizer,
(Insert=>QuickParts=>Building Block Organizer).
and even that has some oddities to it compared to 'regular' Windows dialogs

For entries in the individual galleries when accessed from the ribbon they are displayed in this sequence:

Gallery
Category
Entry

Each of these is shown alphabetically, so you can get a category to appear before 'Built-in' category by calling it
' My Category' or
'~My Category' or
'1. My Category'

(i.e. a space character, numbers and punctuation appear before 'alphas'
You do not need to use the predefined entries or categories, and you can do the same with entries in the categoryl.

Note that when you edit the properties of a building block that the entries are listed in a gallery in accordance with these
assigned titles, no matter if they're actually stored in multiple/different building block template files.

==============
thanks Graham. Are there any choices about how to organize the list of items
that are placed in a Custom Gallery the user would be picking from? <<
--

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*

 

[cayce]

thanks Bob. I appreciate this added information; it should help as I start to
build the Custom Galleries.