[Irl-dean] Customizing MS Office interface

[Eoin Campbell]

Eamon Mag Uidhir wrote:
> 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.
We tried this once, but found that it irritates authors beyond belief, 
because for some reason,
Word disables the Word Count feature if a document contains protected 
sections (needed to
use inline forms).

If you really want to collect structured data, use a dialog box instead, 
and save the data
as custom properties on a per file basis. This is the approach we use to 
store
Dublin Core Metadata in Word documents.

If you want to collect data at multiple points in a document, you can 
still use a dialog box
instead of a form, and store the data as hidden text in the document 
body. A bit risky,
but it keeps authors on your side much more.


-- 
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
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