Simplified Collaboration
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a team to create an effective document. The writing task might fall to you, but there will no doubt be others—associates, managers, marketing professionals, and perhaps financial personnel—who will take a look at what you’ve done and make comments, suggestions, and edits. Although this collaboration process at first glance might seem to make things more complicated, in reality it enhances the quality of our documents. Different people with different areas of emphasis view the document through different lenses—and ultimately that means a more fully developed document for your reader.
The document-sharing features in Office Word 2007 have been given additional power, so the experience of working collaboratively in Office Word 2007 is more natural than it seemed in previous versions. This section shines a light on the new or improved features you and your team can use in Office Word 2007.
Improved Document Comparison
When you are working on a document that is making the rounds among team members, it is sometimes hard to see how the versions have changed. Improvements in Document Comparison enable you to compare two versions of the same document, checking for changes in a number of features (see Figure 4-8).
Figure 4-8. Document Comparison improvements make it easier to see which changes have been made—and by whom.
After you select the documents and the comparison features, the results window displays both documents, the merged document, and a Summary panel to highlight the changes made in the document (see Figure 4-9).
Figure 4-9. A tripanel display enables you to review the merged document and both versions of the file at the same time.
Reviewing Documents in Full-Screen Reading View
Depending on the types of documents you create in Office Word 2007, you might be relieved to know that you can hide the menus and scrollbars to get the maximum amount of room on screen. To view your document in full-screen view, click the View tab and choose Full Screen Reading. The document is displayed in two-page format, and a toolbar across the top of the display gives you options for printing, saving, reviewing, and changing the view of the displayed document (see Figure 4-10).
Figure 4-10. The Full Screen Reading view is perfect for reviewing and commenting on documents in progress.
Inspecting Your Document
When you’re working on a document collaboratively, it’s not unusual to have several different people inserting comments, changing phrases, modifying formats, and deleting text and images. With all the inserting and deleting, it’s possible that some things that need to be removed can be inadvertently left in the document. To make sure that your finished document includes only the information you really want to share with your readers, you can use the Inspect Document option that’s available when you choose Finish from the File menu.
The Document Inspector provides a set of five different checks you can run on your document (see Figure 4-11). When you click Inspect, the Document Inspector does the selected reviews and displays a results window alerting you to any problems that are found in the document. Simply click Remove All to correct the problem and click Reinspect to make sure there are no lingering problems in the document before you finalize it.
Figure 4-11. The Document Inspector runs five different sets of checks to ensure that your document includes only the information you want to share.
Finalizing Your DocumentAfter you finish the document (and have run the Document Inspector), you can mark the file as read-only so readers can’t modify it in any way. Open the File menu and point to the Finish command. In the submenu that appears, click Mark As Final. Now readers can open and read, print, and e-mail the document, but they can’t modify the content or formatting in any way. |
Better Integration with Office SharePoint Server 2007
If your company uses Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, you will enjoy the improved integration that Office Word 2007 shares with Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services and Office SharePoint Server 2007. With Office SharePoint Server 2007 you can create, track, and manage document workflow and task assignments, create libraries of resource materials, communicate with other members of your team, streamline review cycles, and much more.