Hands on: Building, music and free tools

Discover how to manage Building Blocks in Word 2007, and download a free WP

Here we take a look at Word 2007’s Autotext and Building Blocks. The first challenge is to find the Autotext entries. Go to the ‘Insert’ ribbon, and in the ‘Text’ section click on ‘Quick Parts’. If you have already created Autotext entries in Word 2007, you’ll see these in a Gallery.

You can add to this by selecting text or objects, opening Quick Parts and clicking the last item on the menu – ‘Save selection to Quick Part Gallery’. Alt & F3 will also take you there more quickly. You’ll be prompted for a name, and you can also choose a Gallery, Category and other options, which we’ll look at later on.

The rest, including the standard salutations and closings as well as entries inherited from templates predating the Word 2007 installation, can be found by clicking the ‘Building Blocks Organizer’ entry in the Quick Parts menu. This will produce a list of Autotext entries in all available templates, much as in the Word 2003 dialogue, except that with a larger dialogue more are visible.

The preview has also changed, to a full page, and hence usually unreadable, view. As we noted in last month’s column, Autotext entries aren’t just confined to text, and Word 2007 exploits this far more extensively than previous versions. If you scroll down the Building Blocks Organizer, or rearrange the contents by clicking on the Category or Template column, all will be revealed.

There’s a lot of ready-made content here, ranging from simple page numbers, sidebars, quote boxes, equations and tables to full-page illustrated covers, with ‘type here’ boxes set up for titles, dates, summaries and so on. And with these, the full-page preview makes more sense. It might be useful to promote often-used items from this very long list to the Quick Parts Gallery.

To do this, simply select the item and click the ‘Edit Properties…’ button. From the ‘Gallery:’ list, choose ‘Quick Parts’, then OK out and confirm the change. This will place the item in the Gallery at the top of the Quick Parts menu.

Many items – such as cover pages, tables, page numbers and text boxes – already have their own Galleries in the ‘Insert’ ribbon, so there’s little point in moving these to the Quick Parts Gallery unless you’re going to be using them a lot. You should also note that in any Gallery, you can locate an item in the Organizer by right-clicking it and selecting ‘Organize and Delete…’.

This isn’t quite as drastic as it sounds – to delete an item, you still have to press the Organizer’s Delete button and then confirm. Looking more closely at the various options for creating or editing a Building Block, the first – Name – is fairly obvious. This corresponds to the equivalent in earlier versions, so you can type the name, followed by F3, to insert the corresponding Block.

This can go awry if Blocks with the same name exist in different galleries – you may, for example, end up with a cover page in the header. The Undo button is your friend after such mishaps. The Gallery field determines where the item is stored in the Word interface. You can, for example, create your own header and add it to the Header Gallery via this dialogue.

The Category field is for sorting entries in the Organizer – you can create new categories such as one for your company’s custom cover pages, headers and footers, and so on. Description is self-evident, but note that this will appear as a Screen Tip when your mouse is over the item in a Gallery.

‘Save in’ defaults to the standard repository, which is the Building Blocks.dotx global template, but you can also store Blocks in the normal or document template. Finally, the Options field allows you to insert the Block in a number of ways – at the current cursor position, in a separate paragraph or on a new page.

If you’re creating a Building Block from scratch – a specially formatted text box, for example – you can cut out the middle man by opening the appropriate Gallery and ‘Save selection to Text Box Gallery’. You can also add entire Galleries to the Quick Access Bar – useful if you don’t want to keep having to turn to the ‘Insert’ ribbon. Right-click on any Gallery and you’ll see this option.

The location of the Building Blocks.dotx file can be something of a puzzle. With a standard Office installation in XP, there will be a copy at C: \Program Files\MicrosoftOffice\Office12\Document Parts\1033. This is the standard ‘out of the box’ file.

Your own customised version, which you may want to back up, will be saved in C:\DocumentsandSettings\username\ApplicationData\Microsoft\Document Building Blocks \1033. And while we’re on the subject of backing up, you’ll find your Quick Access Toolbar at C:\Documents and Settings\username\LocalSettings\ApplicationData\Microsoft\Office\Word.qat.

I’m sure there’s a reason for this technique, but it eludes me. For you lucky people using Windows Vista, the standard Building Blocks.dotx is in the same folder as XP, your personal one is at C:\Users
\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\DocumentBuildingBlocks\1033 and your Quick Access Toolbar is at C:\Users\username\AppData\Local \Microsoft\Office.

Musical documents
Here’s a fine bit of Word weirdness. My copy of Word 2007 decided it was dealing with music. If I opened my Hands On Word Processing folder from Office Button, Open, then the column headings included Album title rather than Size, Type and Date modified. This was something of a blow, as I could no longer sort by date to find recent columns. Checking in XP Explorer showed all was normal.

Hitting the Tools button at the bottom of the Word File/Open dialogue led to a Properties sheet for the folder, but turning to the Customize tab showed that the folder was using the Documents template, as in Explorer.

It was doing it for other folders as well. After some fumbling, I managed to fix it by clicking on the View button, top-right of the dialogue, and changing to Thumbnail view, then clicking again and changing back to Details. Bingo – Word’s musical aspirations vanished and I was back with the traditional Size, Type and Date modified. Why this happened is still a mystery, but should it happen, you know how to fix it.

Free WP
More than 99 per cent of reader queries are about Microsoft Word but we do try to keep an open mind and exercise positive discrimination towards alternatives. Here we’ve got a good old-fashioned install-on-your-hard-disk word processor. Abiword is absolutely free, and in its basic form has a modest 21.6MB disk footprint.

There are various plug-ins to download, such as file converters for Open Office and other formats (Word DOC and RTF support is built in), 32 proofing languages, and other tools such as Google and Wikipedia searching, and translation via Babel Fish or Freetranslation.com. Even with most of these installed we were still under 30MB, so it’s ideal for older PCs, and you’ll find it at Abiword online.

So what do you get for your no money? It’s cross-platform, so Mac and Linux versions are available. You’ll also find the usual suspects – styles, headers, footers, tables, tables of contents and indexing, fields, text boxes, mail merge, version control and bookmarks. If you’re brave enough, there’s support for scripting in Perl, Python, and Shell. We’re not, so we’ll pass quickly on to things you don’t get.

You don’t get smart quotes, drawing tools, or (sorry) Autotext and, despite lots of green underlined grammar errors, we couldn’t get Abiword to suggest corrections. Two nice touches are a separate top-level menu command for ‘Paste unformatted’ – also available on the right-click menu – and a Save button that greys out when the current document hasn’t changed since the last save.

To be honest, it looks a little dated, but it’s arguably much easier to use than Word 2007.

Quick tip
Finally, here’s a little trick that works in all versions of Word that we’ve tried, from 97 to 2007. Control & Shift & C copies the formatting at the insertion point. You can then apply this anywhere else in the document by selecting some text and pressing Control & Shift & V.

It’s rather more versatile than the Format Painter tool in that you can carry on doing other things – including normal copying and pasting – without losing the stored formatting.