Proposal for Developing Microsoft Word Academic

Y

Yongjun Dan

Word document of Microsoft Office is a general writing software. For
academic writing, it seems not adequate.
Some among the features for academic writing, which means to write a
manuscript or paper for class in universities, journal, or magazine, include
the functions of theme categorization, format selection, special references,
and organizations. Relatively, Microsoft Word is too general to meet these
requirements. A lot of time is spent on manually formatting paper styles.
Generally, academic writing can be categorized as qualitative and
quantitative styles. Some disciplines belong to the qualitative writing, such
as history, anthropology, social studies, and language; other belongs to
quantitative writing, such as mathematics and business, some may use both,
such as psychology, education, and human sciences. The academic writing
software can be designed for qualitative writing, quantitative writing, or
both. Also they maybe designed that appropriate for different disciplines of
categories of disciplines.
Special features for Microsoft Word Academic include but are not limited to
the following:
• Function of selection of writing formats, including references and their
changes.
• Theme categorizations
• Simple calculation
• Management of related documents
• Special drawing and graph functions.
Word academic can be viewed as an advanced edition or a parallel edition
Word document. One approach to make such a change is to add more tags on the
existing Word document, with which new features can be selected by students
or professors, such as reference, categorization function, and
discipline/major function. Of course, their editions can be more categorized
to meet the requirements of different disciplines.
There are some softwares in the market to fill the insufficiencies of
Microsoft Word, such as reference softwares and some qualitative writing
softwares, but they can only solve one or another problem in the academic
writing. Furthermore, such softwares cause economic and match problems for
users.
I wish you can accept my proposal and develop a special Word Document. I, as
an individual, are willing to organize a group comprising some professors
from Texas Tech University and cooperate with you in defining the new
functions in the new word document.
I have no much requirement, if you give the cooperation opportunity to us,
it is enough.
September 10th, 2009


----------------
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http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...3f227f&dg=microsoft.public.word.docmanagement
 
Y

Yves Dhondt

I know this is a suggestion, but what tools are you actually looking for
that aren't there yet?
Function of selection of writing formats, including references and their
changes.

Isn't that the idea of styles, bibliography styles, and templates? I can
agree that the bibliography styles are still pretty basic, but they are
there. The other two functions are pretty mature. As long as your journal
takes the time to create a decent template, contributors could write
perfectly formatted papers in minutes.
Theme categorizations

Isn't that the same as "themes"?
Simple calculation

You can do simple calculations in Word using the formula (=) field. Also,
Word supports calculations in tables.

Or do you mean display equations? For that you can use the equation editor.
As of Word 2007, even MathML equations can be pasted into Word. So it should
be really easy to copy them from somewhere else.
Special drawing and graph functions.

You can include any Excel graph, Powerpoint drawing, or Visio drawing in
your Word document. Most people who have access to Word have access to Excel
and Powerpoint. And most of these objects can be fully edited by double
clicking on them in Word.

Yves
 

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