Office 2007 Professional Plus Behind the Curtain

Note: This is the first of a series of "behind the curtain" posts where I'll share some of the inner workings of Word. These types of post will be less "tippy" and more "techie." While they will likely not be as immediately applicable as my traditional posts, they will give you a deeper understanding of the inner workings of Word, and I'm hoping they will be applicable over the long run.
When you think of stories in Word, you likely think of the things you read in books, magazine, and newspapers. After reading this post, when you think of stories in Word, you're list will be different.
Internally, Word thinks of all documents as a collection of stories. But these stories are not the "Once upon a time…" type. Instead, they are distinct regions of content that makeup a Word document and share properties and functionality. Put differently, behind the scenes, Word breaks all documents up into a collection of chunks with shared properties and functionality. Officially, these are called stories.
The canonical Word story is the "main story" or what most people would call the body of the document. But, Word also considers all of the following stories: Comments Endnotes Footnotes Footers Headers The main story Textboxes The glossary document
Essentially, this means that to Word, comments, the body of your document,Microsoft Office 2007 Professional, footers, etc. are basically the same. And this is good because if a feature works in one story, there's a very good chance it works in all stories. This is why you can track changes in not only the body of your document (i.e., "main story"), but also in headers, footers, endnotes, text boxes, etc.
Put simply, this common story architecture enables as much Word goodness in as many places in Word as possible. Why Do I Care?
When you understand how Word thinks of your document, you can better understand how Word treats your document. For example, except for the glossary document (defined later), all stories in a document utilize a common set of properties that determine the presentation of the contents within each story. These shared properties include font information, style definitions, numbering definitions, and document settings.
This is why changing the Normal style in Word (the default text style used) changes the look of text in more than just the body of your document. For example, in the document below, I updated Normal to not be bold, italic, or red. You'll note that the change affected the main story of the document, the textbox, the header, the footer, the footnote, and the comment. That's because all these stories share the bold, italic, and color properties.
Before Updating the Normal Style
After Updating the Normal Style

You also know how the following dialog works:

Text boxes, footnotes,Office Home And Business, and endnotes are each discrete classes of stories, so Word can easily include them in word count,Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise, or not. Exception: Glossary Document
If you've gotten this far,Purchase Office 2007, you know that Word defines a story using two characteristics: [1] a unique region of the document that [2] shares properties with other regions of the document. There is one story that defies the second rule. It's called the glossary document.
Think of a glossary document as Word's fanny pack: It doesn't match and is handy to store extra stuff needed when traveling. More seriously, the glossary document is a supplemental storage location for additional document content that travels with the document (e.g., when it is emailed) but is not automatically displayed as part of the document.
For example, cover pages are glossary documents. And this makes sense. When you insert a cover page, you'll see that it can have different styles and fonts than the rest of your document. AutoText entries and Document Building Blocks are other examples of glossary documents.
In sum,Office 2007 Professional Plus, when content needs to travel with the document (i.e., if I email this, I still expect to be able to add a cover page), needs its own properties, and needs to not be in the document until the user asks for it, then Word uses a glossary document. Wrapping it Up
Word thinks of documents a set of stories. All stories represent a distinct region of content within the document. All stories except for glossary documents share a common set of properties. Glossary documents have their own set of properties and allow Word to store content that is not always in the document.
-Jonathan <div