Author-it & Word

A teeny tiny gotcha that I thought I’d mention here. I can’t find explicit mention of it in the Author-it Knowledge Center and it’s tripped me up a bit.

Quite simply, and I realise these will sound obvious, make sure everyone who is using Author-it is using the same version of Microsoft Word.

My particular scenario has my laptop running Word 2007, making changes to the template, but when publishing from a machine running Word 2003, the footers weren’t being displayed despite the AutoText entry being available in the output Word document.

Naturally I’m discovering this delightful quirk on the final day of the project as we do a final publish and check on our deliverables. And people wonder why I’m almost bald…

Comments

  1. Hi, Gordon 🙂

    Follow-up to my tweet (in case you don’t have access to the old Author-it Yahoo Group).

    The issue is with the templates, and it’s a Word thing. The following is the text from my 12 August 2008 post. Hope it helps 🙂

    —–
    If you’re using Word 2007, and if no one in your company is using Word 2003, then save AuthorIT.dot as AuthorIT.dotm. (Note the “m”…it tells Word 2007 that it’s a macro-enabled template.) And be sure to modify your book templates to point to the .dotm.

    To create autotext entries in Word 2007, select the content and then select Insert > Building Blocks > Save Entry as Building Block. When creating the entry, be sure to select “AutoText” as the building block type. Unlike Word 2003, Word 2007 includes a field where you can specify the template where the entry should be stored…be sure to
    specify your .dotm file.

    If you also have to support Word 2003, then you want to do all template work in Word 2003. (This means that you’ll be using a .dot file.)
    —–

    What I didn’t mention in the post was that if you edit the .dot in Word 2007, then anyone using earlier versions of Word won’t be able to publish from AIT (or the lesser evil in your case, where the headers and footers don’t show up). The problem is because Word 2003 and earlier had AutoText, and Word 2007 introduced Building Blocks, and this causes the publishing problems.

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