A little background information

Me

My name is Tony Jollans. A few years ago, in a purely selfish endeavour to learn more, I started helping people on-line, firstly at Tek TipsTek Tips [link to Tek-Tips Microsoft Office forum at http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=68], later at other on-line forums (fora?), and then in the Microsoft Newsgroups, now defunct and replaced by an assortment of web forums (for example, AnswersAnswers [link to Microsoft Answers Forums Home at http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories], MSDNMSDN [link to MSDN Forums Home at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories], or TechnetTechnet [link to Technet Forums Home at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories]). In 2006 I was honoured to receive the Microsoft MVP award for Word and I have been fortunate enough to have had it renewed every year since then. In an equally selfish endeavour, one which isn't going quite as well, to learn more about web pages, I am trying to maintain this site. I can only hope that the substance makes up for the lack of style.

My travels

Microsoft Word is a mature product that has evolved over many years and many versions, and it has a wealth of features just waiting to be explored. The latest version for the PC, Word 2010, is the second one to feature the Ribbon interface and the XML-based file format. Like its predecessor it offers enormous potential for adventure, although it becomes harder, with each release, for the ordinary user to take advantage of all the benefits. I will document some of my adventures here, in the hope that my experiences will be of some small help to others, but with a worldwide user base of, perhaps, half a billion people there will undoubtedly be users of many different versions so my journey will not be limited to new territory and, indeed, will not be limited to Word for, although it may be my favourite, there are other applications within the Office Suite also promising enjoyment.

My site

The site will not fulfil its purpose if I just develop it in secret; it has to be released into the wild to evolve or die. What I have is, therefore, on display here and being worked on, although perhaps not as often as it should be. My first article, about the new colour model in Word 2007, in particular how to work with it in VBA, growed like Topsy, but is now in need of an update to take account of the changes, mostly improvements, made in Word 2010. Other articles, fewer than I would have liked, have been added, and more will be added in the future. Please take a look and, if you like what you see, come back and watch things develop. As it is a work in progress, I may make factual errors; my apologies in advance if that happens; please tell metell me [link to e-mail the author at mailto:Tony@WordArticles.com] if you find any.

My articles spring out of what I do for my own enjoyment and, therefore, make an eclectic mix, some being far more substantial than others. I have, somewhat arbitrarily, separated them into two categories: Articles, and, for want of a better term, Shorts. The ‘shorts’ will be short write-ups of items I find to be of interest but which I may have neither time nor inclination to investigate fully, or write-up fully, at the time; some of them may be developed into more major articles, some certainly won’t. Part of what I’m trying to do is provide a repository for the overflow from my brain, the information being largely useless unless shared. As well as articles for the fun of it, occasionally I come across specific issues where things don’t, perhaps, work as one might wish, and write about them. I have, again rather arbitrarily, created a third category, Issues, just for these.

My web pages

These pages have been designed for modern browsers. So far I think they look more-or-less the same in Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8, Firefox 2, and Opera, versions 9, 10, and, now, 11. I don't have a Mac to test but I do have a slight problem with positioning at the bottom of some pages which shows up in Safari for the PC. I am not in a rush to install Chrome, but will try it in a virtual machine one day, and will keep on testing in as many browsers as I can, and endeavour to keep things running smoothly. Meanwhile, please let me knowlet me know [link to e-mail the author at mailto:Tony@WordArticles.com] if you spot anything at all odd - in any browser. Having watched the site become rather unmanageable, I have crawled on to a new learning curve: php. Time will tell how far up it I climb!