Office 2007 Download What does structured editing

In the first half of this two-part thought, I talked about the first major component of structured editing –enabling people to "tame the beast" of the freeform surface that is Word, in order to ensure that documents which contain structured content can be locked down as necessary to maintain the integrity of that structured data.
In the second half, I want to talk about a few topics more specific to structured editing in the context of a document, the unique challenges we've observed in this space,Windows 7, and the things we did as part of Word 2007 to improve this experience.
Documents Need to Look Pretty
Any sarcasm aside, this is probably the thing that was drilled home the hardest in my investigation of what our customers are doing in terms of structured editing. The end product of (almost) every document produced in Word is a document – and documents need to look professional and present the best possible impression of the creator.
Why does that matter here? Well, there are multiple sets of form controls in Word that are basically just the analogue of their web page counterparts that can do a lot of form-like UI in Word. The problem with them is that nobody wants to send a customer a document with drop-downs and date pickers that looks like this:

In their words, "it just doesn't look professional". And they're right – which one of these looks more like a document?

Almost everyone would rather send out a letter that looks like the latter. And historically,Microsoft Office 2010 Product Key, that meant trading off between having a structured editing experience in Word vs. having professional-looking output. Eliminating that was one of our primary goals for any new structured editing UI.
The result is something we informally refer to as the "acetate layer". If you've ever looked at an old encyclopedia, many of them have a dissection of the human body that allows you to expose the parts of the body in layers (skin, muscles, organs, the skeleton, etc.) via these transparent overlays – this was a design goal of the UI for content controls, which should:
appear when you need it (when you're editing the control), be invisible and unobtrusive when you're not, and most of all, not affect the layout of the screen or print version of the document
The acetate layer tries to accomplish these goals by showing nothing when you're no interacting with a control:

A shaded region when you mouse over it (to indicate that there's an 'object' here):

And the appropriate structured form-like UI when you're editing the contents:

Overall, the goal was to merge the two worlds: the richness of the document and the requirements of a structured authoring surface.
Q: When is a document not a document?
A: When it's a form.
This is another question that we spent a lot of time discussing when we started to think about building what became content controls. We didn't just want another tool for doing online forms in Word – not only is there a great tool to do it today, but people already know how to do that in Word and don't need another way to do the same thing.
When I looked at a lot of structured documents in our customer visits,Office 2007 Download, another common trend was to see a document with "islands" of structured data in a larger not-so-structured document. Clearly, these were Word documents – sometimes they were hundreds of pages long, and they all used all kinds of rich Word functionality, but there were portions of them (for example, a table on the first page) that contained structured data.
The content controls were intended to address this problem more directly, by allowing you to have form-like regions in a document without making the whole document into a form. Specifically, the controls let me put drop-down lists, date pickers, and so on in that table on the first page, apply the right kind of locking, and group the table without restricting any other part of the document.
The form-like regions behave like forms, but the rest of the document is still a document. This was the second major requirement we saw after looking at many real examples of "structured" documents in Word - they are, above all, still documents, and can't afford to sacrifice the richness that Word allows.
Dissecting the "Acetate Layer"
So although we've seen it in a few screenshots throughout my posts,Windows 7 Serial, I wanted to finish up by taking a quick tour through the acetate and its constituent parts:
The border – It's pretty obvious, and I'm repeating myself here, but the major component of the acetate is that it frames things with a border without affecting the look of the document. So what normally looks like this:
Looks identical when the acetate is displayed:
The text is not displaced to draw the structured content. The title – Any content control can have an optional title, depending on whether having it will add clarity or clutter:
I probably don't need one above, but it's useful if the context isn't part of the printed page:
The handle – Each content control, if it's locking settings allow it to be moved and/or deleted, have a handle that you can use to grab it, move it around, or even quickly select + delete it.
For example, when I select a control with its handle, its color changes to indicate that fact:
The actions – Depending on the control,Office 2010 Activation, there are also actions (e.g. the button on a drop-down list) that apply to that control. In fact, we utilized this architecture to add actions to other objects – here's a table of contents inserted from the References tab:
You can see that the actions for this object are at the top, and in this case allow you to swap out the TOC for another, or refresh its content with a single click.
That's all for now – feedback appreciated, as always.
- Tristan