It’s easy to view metadata a Microsoft Word 2007 (“.Docx”) document without Microsoft Word.  A Docx file is a combination of 10 or more xml files contained in one Zip file (as strange as that sounds). The only difference between a Word 2007 file and a Zip file is the extension. To view metadata in a Microsoft Word 2007 Docx File you only need to save a Word 2007 document to your desktop and rename the extension by changing the ".docx" to a “.zip” extension. After you rename the extension, double click on it and this will open it in Windows Explorer (or your default Zip application) and will display the Word document as XML and at the root level of the XML file.

Each XML file in the Microsoft Office 2007 document is called a “part.” Within the document part is the main document part. When inspecting the main document part, you’ll notice many elements that you know are in your document, elements like styles and content. Additionally you can view metadata elements such as the document properties and author information. The chart below shows some of these metadata xml parts.

With the current economic tsunami, many law firms are choosing to scale back technology costs and projects. Wanting to know firsthand what IT directors felt were the top technology trends law firms are still willing to invest in, I interviewed ten IT directors and discovered there are some very important technology trends making their way into to law firms now and in the near future.

Of all the ideas the IT directors gave me, there are two I felt were the most significant. Both are exciting trends in that they reduce costs while being significant technology paradigm shifts. These two trends are virtualization and cloud computing.

Continue on with an article I wrote for Lawdragon.

The big deal is using styles will make your life better. Yes, I said a better life. Think about it…what is the currency of law firms or a small law practice? The answer is “work product.” The value of your work product is everything. Now your work product is getting more complex and your clients are demanding that they also collaborate on your work product. Yes, your clients want to mess around with your documents.

Here’s my argument for using Microsoft Word Styles – When it comes to work product I believe the attorney’s role should be “word-smithing” not formatting text and paragraphs. What a waste of time! So much time can be spent in getting formatting to “just work” in Microsoft Word that word-smithing is short changed…resulting in decreased currency.

What Styles Can Do For You

I think Microsoft Word Styles are awesome. I’ve seen firms transform their work product (and morale) when users implement styles in their Word documents. Here are some advantages of using styles in your Word documents:

• Global Formatting. If you have a 60-page agreement and you need to change the font size on fifty headings in the document, you better know how to do some advanced find and replace or you’ll have to go to each heading and change it manually. What a waste of time! With Microsoft Word Styles you change the style once and the change is automatically changed throughout the document.
• Consistent look and feel to firm documents. When the same styles are used across the board in a firm, the documents have a consistent look and everyone knows how to work with them.
• Faster Formatting. All the bold, underlines, font sizes, paragraph indents, etc, can be contained in just one style.
• Building Tables of Content. Using Heading styles will make creating TOCs automatic.
• Documents are smaller. The amount of space a style definition takes up in a document is significantly less than all the direct formatting applied to fonts and paragraphs.

iRedline makes Microsoft Word 2007 even more powerful by providing additional tools and flexibility to the native “compare and track changes” features. iRedline unifies frequently used and hard to find features, fixes seemingly broken features, as well as adding features that are missing in Word 2007 and which are crucial for attorneys and law firms.

Read more…

It states – “Law firms should establish metadata policy”

Is that an understatement or what? We still find that there are still many firms who have decided to place their heads in the sand and go without or leave it up to each user to use the “document inspector“. This is one area where the technology investment will more than pay off. Trust me on that one.

Read the article – and yes they even have a quote by me.

It’s on page 4.

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