Is there a way of creating a interactive word document?

What's the best way to tag text within a Word 2010 document?

• Wanted: ability to assign tags to text at word resolution, invisible when printed, and later find those tags.  I thought about using styles, but they don't seem quite right for these reasons: 1) they're intended for appearance, not metadata. Should I misuse them by making styles with no visual differences?   2) mixed with 'normal' styles.  Is there some way to select a style from a short list? The ribbon has ALL styles. This needs to be very quick e.g. shortcut key, type first few letters of a tag, click on autocompleted tag.  Cut/paste between word docs needs to preserve tags. Retrieval should be like the "Find" dialog - steps through all text tagged. In my dreams, it's compatible with other organization software that uses tagging -e.g. evernote or something - but that's a "nice to have" A usenet user wants a slightly fancier version of the same thing I do, and no one had an answer (can't find the poster's name).  If nothing exists, I'm happy to write it as VBA. The question becomes architectural: should I use XML, styles, or some other way? "I am a writer of non-fiction books, and have a huge quantity of research notes (amounting to over 1m words) in Word format, all organised using outlining, many containing hyperlinks.   In order to make sense of the information these notes contain, I want to do the following: - select a passage of text in a document - give that text a label or 'tag' describing what it contains. E.g., if it   is about John Smith, tag it 'John Smith'. I could do something like this by assigning that text with a style called 'John Smith'.   - extract all the text with a given tag from any given set of documents, with the extracts hyperlinked to where they came from. So, in the example above, I would tell this tool to search through all the documents in my research folder for any text tagged 'John Smith', copy and paste-as-hyperlink   the results in a new document, which will now show me all the information I have on John Smith.   Does anyone know of a tool that would do this?" http://www.wordbanter.com/showthread.php?t=110344

• Answer:

  As I see it, you have two different needs: one to tag text by category; the other to assign unique descriptive tags to text. For the former, I'd use character styles. A character style is based on the default paragraph font, so if you add nothing else, it will not appear any different to the underlying text. However, you will be able to find the tagged content -- and can copy or cut it. You can of course add attributes to a character style to make it more functional: font attributes like color can make it visible (or invisible); language can make spell check use a different language; borders and text effects can add shading or lines... I usually have two versions of templates: one used for editing has visibility attributes in character styles so I can see the differences; another used for final has such attributes turned off for the print version. The style definition dialog box lets you assign shortcut keys as an alternative to populating the ribbon. Consider assigning a set of unique 2-character codes for a series of character styles. For example, to quickly tag foreign languages with custom character styles I use Alt-c,f for French; Alt-c,s for Spanish, Alt-c,l for Latin. If you have the screen real estate, you could also bring up the Styles dialog to present available styles as a list instead of the clunky ribbon interface. The "Options..." button lets you modify what styles are included and how they are listed. For even more control, use the "Manage Styles" button to create whatever subset of styles you want included and in whatever order you want. If you use the Find dialog's "Find In" option to find all instances of a given character style, you can drop out of the dialog box and use copy (or cut) to collect all found instances to the clipboard -- and then paste them to a new document. Each instance will be in its own paragraph, so can be sorted. This is very useful for collecting tagged content for 3rd-party editing (i.e. email addresses or URLS); for building document elements (like acronym lists); or for aiding in editing (i.e. pulling citations to sort into references to ensure that each citation has a reference). When you copy/cut & paste to a different document, any underlying character styles will be carried over -- unless you select the "Keep text only" option of Paste of course. Your second need is more complex, and would probably best be done with XML. Word bookmarks won't work because you would be limited to a single instance. You could assign character styles but for the volume you describe that might become too complex. For a smaller requirement, you could use the XE (mark index entry) field code: set your desired tag as the main entry, and the content in the subentry. This would allow you to build an index with each instance collected under the main entry tag -- and you could still use Find to jump to specific tags. For example, ^d XE "Adam Smith: in your Find what box would find the next instance of the XE field code set with Adam Smith as the main entry. The "Find In" method can be used to find all instances as above.