Word 2007 Content Control that shows partial text until selected?

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Benjamino5 - 17 Apr 2007 18:36 GMT

Hi,

I work for a publisher, and we're just beginning to look at content controls
in Word 2007, and I'm not sure what's possible and what isn't.

Ideally, we'd like to create a content control for a glossary term (in a
textbook). The author would type in the glossary term and also the
definition. Then, ONLY the glossary term would appear in the text. Only when
someone clicked the content control to open it, would the additional
text--the definition--show up.

If this is at all possible, we'd want to use a similar approach for other
material.

Essentially, what I'm picturing is a content control that would have several
fields for text entry, only one of which would appear when the content
control was not selected/opened.

Of course, there may be a way to do this in Word 2002/2003 that I'm not
aware of, and I'd be interested in finding out about that, too.

NOTE: You might be wondering why I don't just use comments, footnotes, end
notes, or floating text boxes. Suffice it to say that we've considered and
rejected all of those (mostly because we need to use them for their original
purposes, and it would be confusing, for example, to use MS Word Comments
both for actual comments and for glossary term definitions).

Thanks for any advice you can give me!

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Cindy M. - 26 Apr 2007 14:45 GMT

Hi =?Utf-8?B?QmVuamFtaW5vNQ==?=,

> NOTE: You might be wondering why I don't just use comments, footnotes, end
> notes, or floating text boxes.

Yes, that was the first thought that occurred to me...

> I work for a publisher, and we're just beginning to look at content controls
> in Word 2007, and I'm not sure what's possible and what isn't.
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
> If this is at all possible, we'd want to use a similar approach for other
> material.

The problem is, there's very little in Word that supports "mouse-over" kinds of
behavior. That's why "we" immediately think of something built-in, such as
comments.

Some possibilities occur to me, both of which would be possible in Word 2003:

1. SmartTags. Somewhere, you'd have a list of glossary terms that a SmartTag
Recognizer would look up. If it finds a match (there's a term in the document),
the term would be marked as a SmartTag. When the user goes there with the
mouse, the SmartTag icon would appear, with a menu. Theoretically, a short
definition could be displayed here. But practically, you'd probably have to
have a command that would display the definition somewhere else.

2. A SmartDocument solution. Glossary terms would be marked up with XML tags,
as you define in a schema attached to the document. When the cursor is in such
a tag, context-sensitive information (such as the definition) is displayed in
an Actions pane (task pane).

3. Office 2003 introduced "research services" and research panes (think of the
Thesaurus). I've never investigated how to implement this, but I suspect it
would require more action on the part of the user than (2)

4. Create a VSTO document-level customization solution. That could incorporate
(1) and/or (2) with much less work than doing it "from scratch".

5. Another possibility, that would work with VBA (as well as (4)) would be to
"mark" the glossary terms (could be bookmark, xml tag or content control) then
use the WindowBeforeRightClick event to display the definition or a command to
display the definition elsewhere.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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