Last time I posted here, a few questions came up. One was whether people could ask questions in the comments. Another question was about charts, and we thought we'd take a few moments to address that question now. Tables and charts: Will they play together well? Could you explain how charts work with tables in Word 2007? I used to be able to highlight a table==>Insert a chart and viola, a chart of my data appeared. Now Excel opens and I need to either re-enter the data or copy and paste. Is there...

In The Republic, Plato said "…the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention." Over the years, this phrase morphed into the idiom "necessity is the mother of invention." I've found that when working with a product as rich as Word, this wisdom turns into "necessity is the mother of discovery ." For example, one of the projects we worked on during 2007 was writing the Word 2007 version of Rich Text Format (RTF) specification . I mention this because it was during this project that...

This is a true story: I'm riding my bike home from work. It's a pretty long ride—almost 18 miles. I'm about a third of the way into it, past the first big intersection and pedaling along the shoulder up a slight grade when my cell phone rings. It's my husband. "How do I turn those change marks off?" Traffic is whizzing by, so I pull over to where I'm a little safer and get off my bike. This is a common customer question. In Office, we've answered it many times—and we now know that it's still confusing...

What is an ‘end user’ and why write a post specifically for them? The vast majority of Word users are ‘end users’. An ‘end user’ is someone who uses Word but is not involved in supporting or buying Word for a business. We call individuals who support or buy Word for businesses IT Administrators (IT Admins), Business Decision Makers (BDMs), or Technical Decision Makers (TDMs). As you might guess, IT Admins et al. have different compatibility concerns than end users. This is a guide for end users....

My last blog post series was about building blocks and backwards compatibility . In this series, I'll cover how Word is used within Outlook. We typically refer to the experience of using Word within Outlook as WordMail . In my next few posts, I will talk about what to expect from WordMail, improvements in the reading and search experiences, and, lastly, tips and tricks composing emails with WordMail. Why Use Word for Reading and Writing Emails? Previous versions of Outlook used two rendering engines...

At the basic level, a template means a document that is used as a starting point for another document. The term refers to the fact that just the framework of the document is being used, not the specific content (thought part of the framework may include portions of content such as headings). So when you open last month's report and edit just the information that's changed in the last thirty days, you've used that old report as the template for your new report. Using a document as a template Word...

Spellchecking is not perfect, but I would not have gotten through school without it. :) Despite my love for spelling and grammar checking, I'm aware of its limitations. Specifically, previous versions of Word will tell you when what you type is misspelled or grammatically incorrect, but it does not catch correctly spelled words in the incorrect context. For example, think of the times you've typed "go" and meant "got", "toll" and meant "told", "some time" and meant "sometime", etc. In these cases...

Stuart J Stuple is a program manager on the Microsoft Office Word team who focuses on the formatting and editing experience of long or complex documents. His background is in book publishing and education. If ever there was a misunderstood feature, it has to be the automatic numbering features within Word. Intended to make it easy to create lists that number themselves, people have on more than one occasion described the experience as out-of-control and unpredictable. They often do this over dinner...

One of the things Word has always excelled at is content authoring, but there’s more to a document than just writing, reviewing and collaborating. Historically, many documents were received and read in a paper form, but the increasing ubiquity of digital devices has led to a world in which many documents never even reach a printer. Word has long had tools tailored for reading, but this release of Word we wanted to go even further to improve the modern consumption experience.

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You can further refine the look of the styles in your document switching out the fonts or colors used by selecting new sets from the Change Styles menu. For longer, printed documents, you may prefer to use Cambria rather than Calibri as your body font because fonts like Cambria (called Serif fonts) make printed documents more readable. The default font pair is at the top of the menu (Cambria/Calibri) and the reverse usage (Calibri/Cambria) is located about halfway down. With the choices provided...