First Blog Post Using Word 2007

December 13th, 2006 | Posted in Technical Writing 8 Comments »

This is my first post from Word 2007. In creating a new document, you have the option of writing a blog post. I think that is about the coolest thing in the world.

I was actually seeing testing out Word tonight to see if the numbering structure fixed the numbering problem when generating a print output from RoboHelp. Nope, but I’m pretty sure the problem is with RoboHelp rather than Word.

Here’s
a
little
formatting.

Wow, Word 2007 is amazing. It is about 100 times better than Word 2003, mainly because you can find things — quickly. It’s usable. I love the tabs, and the style sets. I’m already a convert.

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Paul says:

June 12, 2007 at 2:02 pm

Tom,

You’ve now been using Word 2007 for about 7 months, right? You’ve never commented much on your experience, except for this post, and a mention that RH 6 isn’t compatible with Word 2007.

Anyway, are you still using Word 2007? How has the new UI affected your work as a technical writer? What are the best new features in 2007 that help your workflow? What do you dislike most?

Anyway, I would love to read a technical writer’s perspective on Word 2007 as I try to decide if it is worth the battle to get a requisition order passed through purchasing….

Tom says:

June 12, 2007 at 11:18 pm

Wow, you have a pretty amazing memory. I used a trial version of Word 2007 about seven months ago; after the trial expired I was back on XP for a while. Then a couple months ago I got Word 2007 at work.

Except for the style sets and the print to PDF feature, Word 2007 hasn’t revolutionized the way I work. There are a handful of things I can’t figure out how to do without searching for it in the help. But I’m finding that the style menu isn’t much of an improvement. In the old Word, I could put a little style bar in my toolbar that would show me what style I was on. The new style pane doesn’t seem to sync with the style I’m on (you have to scroll until you see something highlighted) — and it creates dozens of styles for every new bit of formatting in my document.

I guess my reluctance is that I am already a power user of Word and I despise having to relearn how to do simple tasks (like see the word count).

From a technical writer’s perspective, I’d say stick with Word 2003 until you are forced to upgrade.

Otherwise you’ll be having to save documents in Word 2003 compatible formats for everyone else who doesn’t have it. I also loved the ability to completely customize the menus, which is severely limited in Word 2007.

Word 2007 does have a feature that will be very handy if you are creating templates. You can restrict the styles used in the document to only a few styles. When you restrict the styles like this, the entire formatting toolbar is grayed out, making it impossible for users not to resort to the styles for formatting. That might be useful.

If you prepare a lot of reports, Word 2007 does make formatting a lot easier. You can make professional looking documents without much trouble. But these are like prepackaged themes for documents, which may not help you if you already have an established corporate brand.

What I have been using a lot lately is SharePoint 2007. This gets my vote for the killer app for enterprises in 2007. It has blogs, wikis, RSS, workspaces, top nav bar, searchability, and a lot of other features that I really like. If you need a platform for your corporate intranet, it’s worth exploring.

kreative_96 » First Blog Post Using Word 2007 says:

December 22, 2007 at 8:16 pm

[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerptFirst Blog Post Using Word 2007 December 13th, 2006 Tom Posted in Technical Writing | 2 Comments » This is my first post from Word 2007. In creating a new document, you have the option of writing a blog post. I think that is about the coolest thing in the world. I was actually seeing testing out Word tonight to see if the numbering structure fixed the numbering problem when generating a print output from RoboHelp. Nope, but I’m pretty sure the problem is with RoboHelp rather than Word. Her [...]

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June 3, 2008 at 11:51 am

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