Showing posts with label Reasons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reasons. Show all posts

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Top 10 reasons students will love the new Word

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

The new Office is packed with features that students will love and Word is no exception!  Today, we present the Top 10 reasons we think students will be head over heels for the new Word.  Download the Customer Preview today and tell us which of these is your favorite new feature!

You already add pictures to your school reports to make them more interesting.  With the new Word, this is easier than ever.  Whether you need a stock photo to help make the report more visually appealing or a picture you took of your lab results with your smartphone and uploaded to SkyDrive, you can use the Insert Online Pictures feature to quickly grab pictures from a variety of web locations and services.  For the times when a picture just isn’t enough, you can embed a video in your document.

Once you have pictures, videos, charts or other graphic elements in your document, chances are good the next step you take is moving and resizing them – tweaking the placement until the document layout looks just the way you want.  In the new Word, the Layout Options button will show up when you select the content and let you quickly choose a text wrapping option.

Once your content has text wrapping applied, just click and drag it to a new location.  Along the way, you’ll see the rest of the document contents updating in real time – no more guessing at what you’ll get when you let go!  When you see the green alignment guides light up, you’ll know you’re aligned with important areas like the center of the page or the top of a paragraph. 

You’ve always used Word to get things done, but the new Word can help you get more things done, even faster than before.  Need to quickly summarize your document?  How about look something up online?  Guess what?  Now there are apps that can help you do those things, and more, without leaving Word.  Click on the Apps for Office button on the Insert tab and check out the apps that are offered through the Office Store.

Writing a lab report and need to include a table of data?  That process gets easier in the new Word.  Now you can quickly insert a new column or row, just by hovering with mouse in the area where you want it and clicking on the insert widget. Once you have your table created, apply one of the new, updated table Styles to make it look great.  Prefer to copy the formatting of another table’s borders?  No problem – the new Border Sampler tool found on the Table Tools Design tab under Border Styles lets you copy the formatting from one table and quickly draw new borders with the same style.

Screenshot of table border menu

Admit it, you hate reading documents that have track changes turned on.  Unfortunately, you really need to see what changed.  With Simplified Mark-up view, you don’t have to choose between seeing all the changes and knowing how the final document will read.  Instead, you see change bars in the left margin that show you where the changes happened.  One click flips between showing and hiding the changes. 

Comments are also easier to process, thanks to the ability to reply to a comment directly.  You can also use comments as a document’s to do list - when you are done dealing with a particular comment, just right click and Mark as Done.  It won’t be deleted, just greyed out so you know you’ve finished that work.

In previous versions of Word, you could only get new or updated bibliography styles when we released an update or service pack. Obviously, your next assignment, which probably requires the latest APA style citations, can’t wait until the next service pack or version of Word. Since the new Office is connected to the cloud, all the citation styles can be stored in the cloud and updated as soon as a new format is available. Every time you start Word, it checks for updated citation styles and downloads those to your computer. Now, you don’t need to worry about your bibliography style being out of date!

Reports and papers for school can get long, fast.  Sometimes you want to focus on just one section at a time or send the paper to someone else and have them focus on just a few particular sections.  If you create your document using Styles to format your headings, you can collapse the sections by hovering over the heading and clicking the Expand / Collapse widget that appears just to the left of the heading.

You can also collapse or expand all sections at once by right clicking and using the Expand / Collapse options on the context menu.

When you collapse a heading, the contents are tucked away out of sight while you’re reading or editing the document.  You can set sections to be collapsed by default, so each time the document is opened, the reader will see the document exactly the way you intended.  To mark a section to collapse by default, right click on the heading and click Paragraph…, then check the Collapsed by default option.

For the times when you want to quickly find something in your document, whether it is a bit of text or a specific chart, the Navigation pane can help.  Click or tap on the page number in the lower left corner of the Word window to show the pane.  From there, you’ll be able to type a search term, look through the document’s headings or scan through page thumbnails to find what you need. 

You’ve worked hard to get all the right content into your report, but before you turn it in to your professor, you want to make sure it looks great.  Use the features on the new Design tab to find or create a Theme and a Style set that is uniquely yours.

You can also use the updated built-in content like coordinated cover pages, text boxes, headers and footers to add some extra polish or pizazz.   All of these will work with the Theme’s color & font sets and will update automatically if you decide to change your theme later.

Have a paper that was saved as a PDF that you need to go back and edit, but don’t have the original document anymore?  With the PDF Reflow feature, Word can convert that PDF to an editable Word document.  Word will pull the content from the fixed format PDF and preserve as much of the layout and formatting as possible. You can make the changes you need and save again in any of Word’s formats, including PDF.

You definitely have to write papers as a student, but you inevitably need read them as well.  The new Word includes a reimagined reading mode that incorporates the goodness of traditional paper while embracing new technologies.  It was designed to be used on a touch-screen device (like that awesome Surface RT that you’ve got your eye on) but it also works great when using a mouse and keyboard.  It has a clutter free UI that helps you focus on the content, but puts the tools you need right at your fingertips: you can quickly add comments, highlight important information, lookup a definition or translate a phrase, all without leaving Word. 

When you need to take a break, Word helps you remember where you left off – even if the next time you start reading, you’re on a different device.  When you are signed in to Office, your most recently used documents will be stored online, making it easy to find them the next time you open Word.  When you do open the document again, the Resume Reading feature acts like a bookmark that will take you back to the last page you were reading.

Group assignments become so much easier when everyone can work on the same document at the same time.  The new Office is integrated with Microsoft SkyDrive, so you can easily save your work in progress to your free SkyDrive account and share the document with the rest of your group, all from within Word.  If they don’t have Office yet, no problem.  All they'll need is a browser, where the document will open in the Word Web Application.  You don't even need to mess with permissions. Anyone with the link can comment and edit.  Better yet, everyone with the link can work on the document at the same time, whether they want to use the browser or Word.  When you are ready to share your changes, and see everyone else’s, just click the Save button and the document will be refreshed.


View the original article here

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Part 4 Reasons to upgrade from FM 7.x to FM 10: Catalogs and Format Overrides

Friday, April 6 2012 @ 4:01 AM, By Maxwell Hoffmann

Speaking from my over one thousand hours of experience “optimizing” unstructured FrameMaker files for translation and localization, I can vouch for the following fact: FrameMaker 10’s ability to handle catalog styles more efficiently than FrameMaker 7.x and its ability search and locate format overrides can reduce some production preparation tasks by as much as 90%!  This is particularly true if unstructured FrameMaker files involved are (a) ready to be translated into another language or (b) ready to be converted to XML, DITA or some other form of structured editing.

Document content needs to have as few inconsistencies as possible to achieve decent formatting after translation/localization. When converting unstructured FrameMaker documents, you want as few “exception” (e.g. unnecessary) paragraph or character tags as necessary before letting FrameMaker automatically construct your initial conversion table. (For more background on this process, view Tom Aldous’s excellent recorded eSeminar, “Unstructured To XML Workflow Series Part 3: Creating A FrameMaker Conversion Table – Part 2”.) Note: as with all recorded Tech Comm webinars, you will need a free Adobe account to view this eSeminar. You will be prompted to create one if you do not already have credentials. The URL link in the eSeminar title will not take you to a page that displays a description of the recording.

Very few. This is not a criticism of that stalwart release of FrameMaker, still used by so many users. Adobe has listened to its users over the past 7 to 10 years, and control over format overrides was always one of the top requests. So quite a bit of product development has taken place in recent years to give FrameMaker 10 a powerful set of built in tools to (a) manage catalogs and (b) locate and correct unwanted paragraph and character format overrides.

Basically, FrameMaker 7.x’s only indication that a paragraph style, character style or table style did not match the catalog was an asterisk appearing in front of the style name in the lower left corner of the document window. The screen capture below shows all catalogs revealed in a FrameMaker 7.2 document. Notice that there is no indication of which styles are currently in use, and which styles may be leftover, unnecessary format “artifacts.”

The screen capture below shows the same document updated to FrameMaker 10. Notice that the catalog display is more logical with the addition of a “real” tables catalog to the far left. (In the previous screen capture, the FrameMaker 7.2 “catalog” was only visible via a pull-down menu from the Table Designer menu, used for modifying or designing table styles.)

Also notice in all three catalogs (paragraph, character and table), a check mark appears in front of any styles that are currently in use within the current document. As shown later in this blog, several options may be employed to change display in the catalog. The ability to tell “at a glance” which paragraphs are unused is a real timesaver when eliminating “dead” formats from templates or unstructured FrameMaker documents before conversion to structured DITA or XML.

This particular document was an actual customer file I worked on with FrameMaker 7.2 a few years ago in a project that required conversion from unstructured to structured. The client had FrameMaker files that were originally converted from MS Word documents (bringing in some “orphan” styles during the conversion process.) The unstructured FM 7.2 documents had also been edited by “many hands” from staff who were not as coordinated as may have been desired.

The screen capture below shows that each catalog has an optoin to show (a) only used formats, (b) only usued formats, (c) to display used formats first, or (d) a feature to “Delete all unused formats.” Perhaps one of the most asked for additions is the “Customized List” option, which enables FrameMaker 10 users to display only those paragraphs they wish, and also in the order they wish to view the styles in.

Because FrameMaker 7.2 was only capable of display all styles in alphabetical order (not in order of importance,) many users resorted to putting a “z_” or “x_” in front of lesser used styles that they wished to appear at the bottom of the catalog. This of course, led to some rather illogical style names, and confusion for new staff adapting to in-house style naming conventions.

The screen capture of FrameMaker 10 below shows the effect of displaying only unused formats in the paragraph and character catalogs. (Notice that no check marks are present before any of the styles.)

In this particular document, there is a large number of unused and unnecessary character styles. The screen capture below shows the catalog options being used to first delete all unused format, and then the resulting, “trimmer” catalog of styles.

Incidentally, in FrameMaker 7.2, there is a “delete” function under catalog options, but it is performed one style at a time.

Perhaps the biggest time and money saver covered in this blog is FrameMaker 10’s ability to search for paragraph overrides and character overrides. In other words, the search will highlight any portion of character level text that does not match a character tag or paragraph tag, and will also highlight paragraphs that do not match the catalog.

In many instances, the publisher may be able to tell at a glance that a paragraph has been overridden to start a new page or column. But in all too many cases, a paragraph has been shaped to have tighter line spacing, or fractional changes in point sizes in order to get “fat” paragraphs to stay on one page.  As mentioned earlier, these types of overrides can wreak havoc with either language translation or with conversion of unstructured documents.

The screen capture below shows the result of searching for a Character Format Override. In this case, text has been highlighted which was changed to italic with Control-“i“ instead of a character tag.

The screen capture below shows an example of FrameMaker 10’s find Paragraph Format Override feature identifying a paragraph in which someone has clearly reduced line spacing. The paragraph can be corrected by simply reapplying the paragraph style from the catalog.

The last feature mentioned in this blog can save countless hours correcting or optimizing documents that may have “fallen into the wrong hands.” Sometimes when contractors are used on projects, staff with minimal knowledge of FrameMaker may “fake” their way through format edits, using the wrong tools (e.g. pull down format menus) instead of paragraph and character  styles.

In a later blog, we will cover how FrameMaker 10’s ability to publish files in native XML format can completely eliminate the possibility of making any format overrides that are not built into the controlling structured application.

Limited Period Special 30% Off Upgrade Offer

HOW TO BUY:

For any queries, please contact techcomm@adobe.com.

OFFER TERMS & CONDITIONS:

Adobe® FrameMaker® 7.X customers can receive a savings of 30% on the FULL version of FrameMaker 10 software purchased through Adobe Customer Service, or a participating reseller worldwide.Offer is available to TLP and CLP customers worldwide. Orders must be placed between April 2, 2012, 12 A.M. and June 15, 2012, 11:59 P.M. Pacific time. Offer void where prohibited.Current pricing is subject to change or withdrawal without notice. This offer is not valid for OEM bundles or Education customers. Local sales taxes and shipping charges may apply.

View the original article here