Tip #4724 - Playing with Building Blocks Printer Friendly Version | E-Mail This Tip
Playing
with Building Blocks
In your older
version of MS Word, did you use the AutoText feature regularly? Are
you a little upset that you can't seem to locate it in Word 2007?
Well, wipe that
frown off your face, because the basic idea of it is still there.
Yes, it had a face lift and it's now accessible through a different
feature, but it's definitely still there!
What you're now
looking to find is the Quick Parts feature located
on the Insert ribbon.
Word
2007 uses something called Building Blocks to save text for repeated
insertion into documents.
So, now that you
know what they are, how can you create them?
Well, first you
need to find or type the content you're looking to
make into a building block.
Then just highlight
the text. Now, it's important for me to say that if you want
the formatting (indents and line spacing, for example) saved as part
of the Building Block, you'll need to highlight the paragraph mark
along with the rest of the text. (To ensure you get everything highlighted,
you can display hidden marks like that by going to the Home ribbon
and clicking on the Show/Hide Paragraph button).
With your text
selected, you need to go to the Insert ribbon, Quick
Parts button and choose the "Save Selection
to Quick Parts Gallery" option at the bottom.
The Create New
Building Block dialogue window will then open, allowing you to name
the building block and set up your own options.
I
did find that in the Gallery field, AutoText is listed
along with a lot of other choices. After some experimenting, I found
that if I saved it as an AutoText entry, I could access
it through the AutoText button I added to my Quick Access Toolbar.
However, if I
added it to the Quick Parts Gallery, it was accessible
from the Insert ribbon, Quick Parts
button. Like this:
As
you can see, Word now begins the Quick Parts list with its gallery above
the commands you saw when you first began.
To insert a Building
Block, place your cursor at the correct insertion point
in your document, display the Quick Parts Gallery
and then click on the text you need.
Once you've got
a gallery going, it's pretty easy to use and it's definitely useful
if you have a lot of "boilerplate" text you use frequently
in your documents. If you save the different topics or paragraphs
as different Building Blocks, you can build custom documents from
them as well.
That sounds much
better than a template, don't you think? Have fun "playing"
with your blocks!
~ April
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