If you are a currently registered member of STC Region 1, voting has opened for the position of Director/Sponsor.

This election is necessary because Cindy Currie, former Region 1 Director/Sponsor, is now our 2nd Vice President. According to New York state law, Region 1 members must elect someone to replace her on the Board of Directors for the last year of her term.

You can read about the three candidates at STC's website.

Online voting closes August 3, 2007, at 12:00 noon ET.

Please vote!

I upgraded to Office 2007 back in December. As AuthorIT users know, I didn't have to uninstall and reinstall applications because AIT uses whatever flavor of Word is installed.

I've been happily publishing all this time using my .dot files. At one time, I did try using a .dotm (Word's new macro-enabled template), but it didn't seem to do anything different, so I went back to .dot.

But earlier today, I was updating AutoText entries in a custom Word template (which are called Building Blocks in Word 2007, and which are organized by Gallery and Category). If you use a .dot from an earlier version of Word, an AutoText Gallery is created for its autotext entries. And if they don't need to be changed, everything is fine. (It seems to depend on the changes.)

Anyway, I tweaked a header by removing a graphic. But when I published using the .dot file, the graphic suddenly "forgot" its settings, and was appearing at 500% of its original size. Then I remembered the message that appeared when I was saving the .dot (which I had quickly clicked OK to)...it said that by saving building blocks to a .dot, I might lose functionality.

So I opened the .dot again and saved it as a .dotm. I then selected this Word template on the Document tab of the Book object so that it would get used for publishing...and the graphic displayed correctly. Obviously, that formatting was one of the pieces of functionality that I lost. ;-)

[BTW, it took me a wee bit of time to get used to the Building Blocks (including remembering where the option is located, which is on the Insert ribbon under the Quick Parts button). But there is a lot of new stuff here...in addition to Gallery and Category, you can quickly see which template the building block is associated with and how its behavior is defined (insert content only, insert content in its own paragraph, or insert content in its own page). And you can change the properties of a building block at any time...change the name, assign it to a different gallery or category, change which template it will be saved in, and change the behavior. In Word 2003 and earlier, changes like these required that you resave the AutoText entry.]

So, if you're using Word 2007 with AIT and you're having problems with your AutoText entries, try saving your .dot as a .dotm and see if that solves the issues.