Regenerate And Recycle With Building Blocks

You have just spent a considerable amount of time tweaking and editing your company's mission statement. Now you want to save this information and use it again in future documents, but you don't want to cut and paste from an existing file each time you need to access the text. There's the problem with time locating the original file and also with accuracy; you need to ensure you have found the correct version of the file to source from. There's also the problem of correct, but different, versions of the same text. How do you store and reuse this information without error?

Microsoft Office Word 2007 helps you recycle content in business documents by creating and using Quick Parts called Building Blocks. Building Blocks help streamline the process of locating, selecting, inserting and amending anything you need to reuse - from logos to images to text.

Building blocks are items within a document that you save using the Quick Parts tool to be reused in other documents. For example, you might save your company's contact information or mission statement, a design for a report, a special list style that you use in your documents regularly or a staff list you include on finished publications. If you've taken time to develop a logo or image which fits exactly with your company's style guidelines, it would be frustrating and extremely counter productive to use an older or incorrect version in an important document.

Building Blocks in Office Word 2007 can be used to help build documents using elements which are previously created and stored. For example disclaimer text, logos, cover page and hyperlinks. Building Blocks ensure that you don't spend time recreating content or copying and pasting between documents. Building Blocks also helps ensure consistency across all of the documents you need to create.

Quick Parts are stored in Building Block galleries and can be customised by you, the user. On the Ribbon, find the Insert tab, and in the Text group you can locate Quick Parts. Here, on the pull down menu, the Building Blocks Organizer will take you to your Building Blocks store.

Most of the features that you need to use frequently can be found on the Ribbon. The tabs for Bibliographies and Table of Contents are on the References tab, while Cover Pages, Equations, Footers, Headers and Page Numbers, Tables and Text Boxes can all be found on the Insert tab. Watermarks are located on the Page Layout tab. However, when you need to find a piece of information or a graphic that is unique to a document style or a specific audience, you need to be sure you can find the correct style, wording and logo format. This is especially relevant when you have spent time and money researching and creating clear style guidelines, and you need to be sure that you are adhering to these as far as possible.

To create a Building Block, select the content that you want to store as a reusable building block. Now click on the Insert tab and in the Text group you will see the Quick Parts option. On the drop down menu the Building Blocks Organizer will appear. Select this menu and all the options available for creating, adding and editing Building Blocks is at your fingertips.

The content you select can include text, images, and special formats. Whatever you save as a building block will be placed in the new document as it is, so lines, logos, hyperlinks, and more can be saved for reuse. A large variety of building blocks are provided for everything from cover pages to equations to page numbering in Word 2007. In the Building Blocks Organizer, you can preview, edit or delete building blocks and, if you choose, insert them in your current document.

To store paragraph formatting, for example, which could include indentation, alignment, line spacing and pagination, ensure that you have highlighted and included the paragraph mark in the selection. These symbols can be revealed by clicking on the pilcrow (paragraph) symbol on the Home tab. By default, all Quick Parts in Word 2007 are saved in the Building Blocks.dotx template. However, you can choose to save your custom Quick Parts to your Normal.dotx template. This option is found next to Save In in the Create New Building Block dialogue box.

Another useful option in Word 2007 is saving Quick Parts in order to share with others. Obviously this is imperative when you need to ensure that everyone has the most up to date and accurate Quick Part to combine into their own documents. So, when time is crucial and you need to locate the exact logo or exact wording on a footnote, remember don't recreate - but regenerate and recycle with Quick Parts Building Blocks.