Hi Antti:
There is layer upon layer of detail needed to really answer your question.
Let me just hit the high points...
A) When Word 2007 comes out of the box, it will have a selection of
document themes. A theme is, in reality a "super style" that instantly
varies the look and feel, colour and style of the whole document. It's
actually an XML Style Sheet, which is somewhat similar to a web cascading
stylesheet. In XML, you can do anything you like with one of those
B) Word will also have a built-in collection of "Document Parts". Cover
pages, TOCs, Bibliographies, Indexes, whatever. These document parts adopt
the Themes. Users can add the parts to quickly build up their document from
blank, or they can start with a pre-built document and add or remove parts.
C) Word will also have a collection of document "Chunks". Things such as
Tables, Pictures, Drop-caps, multi-column pages, etc. Users can click and
drop these anywhere: Word will refuse to put them in if they cannot work in
the chosen position. It will adopt the surrounding formatting when it puts
them in otherwise.
These three collections are being created by the Microsoft design people.
Microsoft's sense of document design tends towards the garish, so they will
probably be fairly in-your-face and designed to impress the easily impressed
However, the ones I have seen so far seem a great deal more useable
than previous offerings from Redmond
So, out of the box, an unskilled user can create a relatively presentable
document just by pointing and clicking. It may not win any design award!
However, the formatting will ALL be PERFECT. No broken code. No munged
cross-references. No shattered margins or wandering tables. No broken
numbering. It may not look great, but it's built like a Mack Truck
Then the Elliots and Anttis of this world will get to work... As you and I
work, each time we need something that looks better than the standard
component, we will create it. When we're happy with it, select it and click
a button to add it to your collection in Word (or any of the other
applications).
When you get a complete layout ready to publish, save it as a template, put
a price on it, and send it to Microsoft Office Market Place for sale! If
you are a corporation, you would get a design company to create a while set
of corporate documents for you with your corporate branding.
Drop the resulting templates on the internal network and it will
automatically replace the standard components in every copy of Microsoft
Office (Win and Mac...) across the organisation.
Your corporate users can then create standard company documents, properly
formatted, branded and correctly formatted. A "manager", who got their
position largely by proving themselves totally useless as a "worker", will
be able to create documents that can safely be presented to customers
without knowing any more about publishing than they currently do.
That's the real power of the idea. If you are like me, it will take you a
month or two of reflection to get your head around the concept. The sheer
scope of this is breathtaking.
And I haven't even mentioned "Data Mining" yet. That's a whole other
breath-taking story. Because the document file format is Open XML, your
company mainframe can read your Word document and extract last months' sales
figures by product and by area automatically. And your document can read
the mainframe and get the warehouse stock levels in real time... That's a
whole other story...
I think it would be unreasonable for us to expect Microsoft to get this
working perfectly on Day One. This is a transition on the same scale as OS
9 to OS X. Except that that one was easy: OS 9 was well-known and
well-understood by everyone, and Unix had been in commercial service for 20
years before Apple got hold of it. "This" has never been done before, and
it's a completely different way of thinking. We're all going to have to do
a bit of work before we can actually hand this to to our boss with
confidence that he won't screw up the annual report! But I think it's worth
putting the effort in: it's open source, it's feasible, and it's close to
working right now. Oh, and documentation professionals such as Elliott and
I, it's a licence to print money
Now: Let me get back to learning how to make document chunks....
Cheers
That sounds great, if it is really going to materialize. Is it really so,
that writers no longer need to worry about designing documents? That must be
some kind of magic or are they just mixing up Word and Publisher and provide
users with some pre-maed templates. I hope not, because Word is a
word-processor and I hope it to remain that way.
We'll see that within a year.
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410
