The New World of Word
A big part of being a program manager for Word is writing specs. The 'new world of Word' makes managing our specs much easier.
Background
To back-up a bit, 'specs' are the documents that we write to describe new features we plan to add to the next version of Word/Office. For a given version of Office, we've got hundreds of program managers writing around ten specs each. Developers are not supposed to start writing code until the specs are complete. Because of this, management likes to keep track of how specs are coming along.
With this many of specs in-progress, manually reporting progress on specs is not feasible. To avoid a crazy amount of manual work, we use Word 2007 and SharePoint to automatically pull important data from our specs and present it in a summary fashion to management.
More specifically, the process works like this:
- We write specs using a common template and then to save/upload them to a SharePoint site.
- A application we created called 'the spec solution' extracts and manipulates information from the specs such as name of the program manager, their team, how close the spec is to being competed, when we expect the spec to be complete, etc.
-
Finally, the spec solution uses this data that it 'reads' from all of the specs to generate a new Word document for management to let them know how all the specs across Office are coming along.
In other words, we write documents that this 'solution' reads. The solution then uses data from those documents to write summary documents.
Enter 2001: A Space Odyssey music.
The New World of Word Scenario
This spec process is a specific example of a general scenario that we've seen many of our customers carrying out: using software/solutions to automatically pull and push data from/to Word documents.
But hold on a minute. Unless you develop solutions for a living or are an IT professional, when you think of Word documents, you likely think of exchanging information between people directly, not this solution stuff.
When I say "pushing information into a document" and "pulling information out of a document" you hear: "writing" and "reading." You envision a person to person interaction. I.e. Joe writes a memo and Margaret reads it. None of this Matrix-esque software pulling data out of Word files and pushing it into other Word files.
Understandable.
But while this new world of machine-read and machine-written Word documents may not be as familiar as the traditional person-to-person memo scenario, I hope that if nothing else you see the value in allowing software/solutions to extract and aggregate data from Word documents.
The New World of Word and Content Controls
Assuming you buy this new world of Word, let's give it a better name—the solution developer scenario—and talk briefly about what Word 2007 did to make it easier (Note: 'solution developers' are the people that write the solutions that read and write Word documents).
Enter Content Controls.
In short, in Word 2007 we made it much easier for solution developers to read and write Word documents via this feature called Content Controls. Content Controls are to the solution developers what formatting is to typical Word users: they make the Word document easier to understand for the reader. In the solution developer scenario the reader is a solution. In the typical Word scenario the reader is a person.
It's like copying and pasting this post into Notepad, and then trying to read it. The formatting and diagrams would be gone. And with that some level of understandability would also be gone. Put differently, formatting and diagrams = less work for the reader to understand the document and less work for the writer to create an understandable document. It's the same thing with Content Controls. Content Controls = less work for the reader to understand the document and less work for the writer to create an understandable document.
For example, the spec solution I mentioned earlier required approximately ten times less code to work with Word 2007 than it did to work with Word 2003. The difference is because of Content Controls.
Anyway, if you have not already read Tristan's posts on Content Control, check them out. They go into much more detail on Content Controls and this new world of Word.
Also, videos of presentations on Content Controls that Tristan and I gave at last year's Microsoft Office System Developers Conference are available below. The first is more of an introduction and the second builds off of it.
Let us know what you think…
-Jonathan
