Specifications

Although most of us use Microsoft Word most of the time, when
it’s time to write a long or complex document, such as a book, we
switch to higher-end page-layout software—or at least Microsoft
Publisher—to get the features we need. With Word 2007, Micro-
soft has added a number of capabilities that make it much easier to
author long documents. Most exciting for students and research-
ers are the greatly improved tools for providing a bibliography and
citations. You can enter the information once for each source you
want to cite into a convenient dialog, and then Word lets you place
references. With one click, Word will generate a bibliography in
one of several widely accepted standard formats.
If you have multiple contributors working on your document,
Word 2007 style sets, which are predefi ned sets of style defi ni-
tions saved as a template, can ensure everyone’s contributions are
laid out consistently. You can provide your contributors with your
style set or apply it to their contributions after you receive them.
For those who need to submit their fi nal documents electroni-
cally, Microsoft has responded to user need and added a Docu-
ment Inspector, which can remove old versions of text, hidden
text, or other potentially embarrassing or confi dential items left
around from your draft revisions.—David Cardinal, frequent
contributor
New Features for Long Documents
SOLUTIONS OFFICE
114 PC MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 6, 2007
EQUATIONS
Word 2007 offers a powerful new equa-
tion editor. Simply click on Equation on
the Insert ribbon and the Equation Editor
ribbon will appear. It is amazingly simple
to input almost any mathematical equation
and print professional-looking results. You
can customize how the equation editor
works to adapt it to the specifi c terminol-
ogy in use in your industry, and save equa-
tions to a library for easy reuse. Note that
Equations, like SmartArt and a few other
new features, will not work in Compatibility
mode (that is, if you save documents in
Word 97–2003 format).
SAVE AS PDF
One great new feature in Word 2007 for anyone
planning either to publish a document online or
to send it electronically for publication is the inte-
grated PDF export capability. You need to down-
load the free PDF converter from Microsoft Offi ce
Online, but then it’s a simple matter to generate
PDFs optimized for Web display or printing. To get
PDF export capability, go to Save As | Find add-ins
for other formats, which takes you to Microsoft’s
download page.
COMPARE
Even when you are working solo, the time will come when you want to
compare two different versions of a document. Word has always let you
compare documents, but with Word 2007, you can see two versions in
side-by-side windows, making it much easier to merge the multiple drafts
into one. So if you have multiple authors or an editor, all parties can work
on the document, even without using the change-tracking tools, and still
have a good chance of integrating the changes from both versions. The
Compare and Combine options are located on the Review ribbon.