[Irl-dean] Re: Irl-dean digest, Vol 1 #411 - 3 msgs

[Eamon Mag Uidhir]

Responding to

    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?


In the past, due to working with authoring processes that depended on 
writers using only a precise subset of standard paragraph styles and 
inline formatting options in Word that map to safe HTML structural 
elements, I made a VBA toolbar that offers buttons for Heading 1, 
Heading 2, .... Body Text, List Bullet, List Number, Bold, Italic etc. 
Then in the template DOT that the toolbar was attached to I hid all 
other toolbars. As long as users are schooled never to let the 
normal.dot be saved or updated, and also given some training to 
familiarise them with using the template, you get your clean document 
structures in the output.

Unfortunately Word doesn't want you to lock down toolbars, and keeps 
them all ready and waiting to contaminate your documents in the 
normal.dot, which will regenerate itself if you try to kill it off. That 
means you have to rely on user training to get your template used correctly.

If your structure is always predictable in terms of heading hierarchy, 
you could turn your template into a form. You could make part of the 
document non-editable, and  put in editable fields that only take 
certain types of data, but users can very easily make mincemeat of them 
if they merge your template with normal.dot.

If you are using DOT files to police authoring standards, you need to be 
sure the DOTs are kept in a shared and write-protected network folder 
properly designated via "Tools - Options - File Locations - Workgroup 
templates" and accessed only through "File - New" on the menu to prevent 
users corrupting the damned things. Local machine DOTs screw up very 
quickly. Users also tend to edit the DOT itself and save it as a DOC if 
they have it physically on their local machine.

Does anybody have any experience of doing this kind of thing with 
OpenOffice? It can't be as bad as MS Office surely?

Eamon

_____________________________

Eamon Mag Uidhir
Content Development Analyst
SkillSoft R&D Dublin

++353 1 218 1609
eamon_mag_uidhir at skillsoft.com
_____________________________





irl-dean-request at list.eeng.dcu.ie wrote:
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>   
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Customizing MS Office interface (Eamon Costello)
>    2. Re: Customizing MS Office interface (Eoin Campbell)
>    3. RE: Customizing MS Office interface (Eamon Costello)
>   
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject:
> [Irl-dean] Customizing MS Office interface
> From:
> "Eamon Costello" <eamon.costello at dcu.ie>
> Date:
> Tue, 30 Jan 2007 11:09:52 -0000
> To:
> <irl-dean at list.eeng.dcu.ie>
>
> To:
> <irl-dean at list.eeng.dcu.ie>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> 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?
>
> - Eamon
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: irl-dean-admin at list.eeng.dcu.ie
> [mailto:irl-dean-admin at list.eeng.dcu.ie] On Behalf Of Laurence Veale
> Sent: 26 January 2007 12:37
> To: irl-dean at list.eeng.dcu.ie
> Subject: [Irl-dean] Happy Australia Day (but not if you're blind)
>
> G'day everyone,
>
> Today is Australia Day and there's the Australia Day website,
> http://www.australiaday.gov.au/, top of the search results on Google
> when clicked through from Google's commemorative logo. One or two
> accessibility issues worth commenting on.
>
> Given the Olympics saga, strong Australian legislation and some pretty
> good skills over there, how can this still happen, particularly on a
> Government website?
>
> I've also started this conversation on our blog which I'd love you all
> to contribute to (as well as here, of course).
>
> On my post, I've posted some screenshots from JAWS (some sound clips
> may have been more effective) .
>
> http://www.iqcontent.com/blog/2007/01/australia-day-website-inaccessible
>
> Lar
>   
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject:
> Re: [Irl-dean] Customizing MS Office interface
> From:
> Eoin Campbell <ecampbell at xmlw.ie>
> Date:
> Tue, 30 Jan 2007 11:25:54 +0000
> To:
> irl-dean at list.eeng.dcu.ie
>
> To:
> irl-dean at list.eeng.dcu.ie
>
>
> 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?
>>   
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject:
> RE: [Irl-dean] Customizing MS Office interface
> From:
> "Eamon Costello" <eamon.costello at dcu.ie>
> Date:
> Tue, 30 Jan 2007 11:50:30 -0000
> To:
> <irl-dean at list.eeng.dcu.ie>
>
> To:
> <irl-dean at list.eeng.dcu.ie>
>
>
> This looks something along the lines I was thinking of. In documents I'm
> looking at creators start out with styles but then use formatting functions
> to modify those styles so I think restricting formatting functionality would
> be useful too.
>
> - Eamon 
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: irl-dean-admin at list.eeng.dcu.ie
> [mailto:irl-dean-admin at list.eeng.dcu.ie] On Behalf Of Eoin Campbell
> Sent: 30 January 2007 11:26
> To: irl-dean at list.eeng.dcu.ie
> Subject: Re: [Irl-dean] Customizing MS Office interface
>
> 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?
>>   
>>     
>
>
>   
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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