Behind the Curtain: Stories in Word
Internally, Word thinks of all documents as a collection of stories. But these stories are not the “Once upon a time…” type. Instead, they are distinct regions of content that makeup a Word document and share properties and functionality. Put differently, behind the scenes, Word breaks all documents up into a collection of chunks with shared properties and functionality. Officially, these are called stories.
The canonical Word story is the “main story” or what most people would call the body of the document. But, Word also considers all of the following stories:
Comments
Endnotes
Footnotes
Footers
Headers
The main story
Textboxes
The glossary document
Essentially, this means that to Word, comments, the body of your document, footers, etc. are basically the same. And this is good because if a feature works in one story, there’s a very good chance it works in all stories. This is why you can track changes in not only the body of your document (i.e., “main story”), but also in headers, footers, endnotes, text boxes, etc.
Put simply, this common story architecture enables as much Word goodness in as many places in Word as possible.
Why Do I Care?
When you understand how Word thinks of your document, you can better understand how Word treats your document. For example, except for the glossary document (defined later), all stories in a document utilize a common set of properties that determine the presentation of the contents within each story. These shared properties include font information, style definitions, numbering definitions, and document settings.
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October 7th, 2008 at 11:29 am
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