[Irl-dean] Customizing MS Office interface

[Eoin Campbell]

Our commercial products, YAWC Online and YAWC Pro,
use this approach.
You can download a free Word template at
http://www.yawconline.com/templates/yawcOnline.dot
to see the menu changes we made.

In general, we have not done too much to remove Word features.
Instead we have added a styling menu to make it easier to apply
structure styles, and simply replaced the standard formatting toolbar
with our own version.

We also defined a number of convenient keystroke shortcuts to
simplify formatting even further, e.g.
<Ctrl>+1 = Heading 1
<Ctrl>+2 = Heading 2
<Ctrl>+3 = Heading 3
etc.

Most of this is very easy to do in Word, but one significant
feature we added is an explicit macro to check the hierarchical
structure of headings.
If a Heading 3 occurs after a Heading 1, then we report an error.

We have found that with a small bit of training, and some online
Flash demos, people are quite good at preparing structured documents,
once they understand why, and have a tool that makes it easy for them.



Eamon Costello wrote:
> I wonder if anyone has experience of customizing the interface of MS Office
> so as to force users to make better structured documents, or at least make
> it more difficult to make poorly structured documents. This could involve
> something simple like removing buttons for bold, underline, italic,
> format-painter, font colour etc, from the default toolbar and forcing them
> to use styles instead. Drop-down and context menus could be also hobbled
> (though less easily). This could be perhaps applied through workstation
> start-up scripts.
>
> This would be in addition to training obviously. Anyone any comments on this
> approach?
>   


-- 
Eoin Campbell, Technical Director, XML Workshop Ltd.
10 Greenmount Industrial Estate, Harolds Cross, Dublin, Ireland.
Phone: +353 1 4547811; fax: +353 1 4496299.
Email: ecampbell at xmlw.ie; web: www.xmlw.ie
YAWC: One-click web publishing from Word!
YAWC Online: www.yawconline.com