Building Blocks - barely cheerable

[Mark Tangard]

Having already written a slew of macros in Word 2003 to add "special" document
components (vaguely equivalent to Building Blocks in 2007), and being quite busy
anyway, I delayed my first foray into the Building Blocks feature for quite a
while. But each time I stumbled across a demo video about it, I came away with
the vague impression that it had revolutionized the processes for adding those
components, and eliminated or reduced the tedious formatting steps that some of
them require.

For example, my users have often stumbled when adding a cover page to a
document, because it typically requires some messing around -- a new section
break, often removing the headers & footers for the new first section, etc.

A Cover Page building block was featured at the conclusion of a demo video I saw
recently. The guy chose a cover design from the Building Block Organizer,
changed the picture, and was done; the whole thing took maybe 10 seconds. I
naturally assumed the much-ballyhooed Organizer would've taken care of the
formatting steps mentioned above, or at least would've handled the section break
and paging, so that the page following the newly inserted cover would remain
page number 1.

It doesn't do any of that.

How is this an improvement worth the hype? With all the fanfare that accompanies
any mention of the Building Blocks Organizer, I would've thought it would
address this extremely common requirement. Am I missing something?

MT

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

What a Cover Page building block does do is enable the "Different First
Page" setting, which I assure you can confuse users just as much as
inserting a section break. In my experience, any feature that makes it easy
for a user to do something without understanding what he is actually doing
makes it virtually impossible to undo that action. For example, the old
Insert | Page Numbers feature was very easy and quite powerful (there is
nothing comparable in Word 2007 for inserting Inside or Outside page numbers
or omitting them on the first page), but there was no "Remove Page Numbers"
option. And Format | Background | Printed Watermark is great until you have
several sections and find that selecting "No watermark" doesn't affect all
sections; if you don't know that the watermark is a graphic anchored to the
header, then you will have no clue how to remove it.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org