JotBlog

A side effect of working feverishly on your product in a heads-down manner is that you forget to step back now and then and show your users some of the cool things you’ve been working on.

That said, we’re making a concerted effort to talk more about the features that might interest you, and we’re starting with the Import Word Document feature implemented by JotSpot team member Michael Nestler.

Purpose:
Import a Microsoft Word document as an editable page in your JotSpot wiki.

What this means to you:
If you’re at all like me (I realize that’s a big IF), you get tired of both sending and receiving Word files as attachments in emails. Sometimes you send one to somebody to get their feedback (and vice versa). Sometimes it’s purely for informational purposes (e.g. take a look at these new stats, this new product spec, or what have you). In either case, we think it’s not very efficient to be emailing this document around and possibly dealing with the headache of reconciling the differences caused by people modifying their versions of the document and sending it back to you. Instead, wouldn’t it be nice if you could import the Word document into a central place, and invite co-workers to come and make changes to it or just have them contribute some comments?

Benefits:

• Stop receiving and sending potentially virus-ridden Word documents.
• Cut down on “versionitis” caused by multiple people changing their copies of the document, and then having to fold all their changes back into one “master” document.
• Once imported, all of the fundamental features of JotSpot can be applied to the page:  editing, adding comments, emailing it to others, attaching files, user groups and permissions for access control, and more.
• It will make all your problems go away. And it’ll end world hunger. Ok, this bullet point is a total lie. But the first three are absolutely true, and 3 out of 4 ain’t bad.

Here is the process, step by step, with screenshots.

First, find a Word document you want to import. Here’s mine:

In your JotSpot account, create a new page with little or no content in it, and save it. When you’re finished, this is the page that will contain the content of your Word document. I gave my page the very creative title of “MyPage", as you can see below.

Now that you’re on your new page, choose Import Word Document from your More Actions menu:

Next, you see a page asking you for the file you wish to import. Hit the Browse… button and locate the Word document on your hard drive. Once you’ve selected the Word document you want to use, simply hit the Import document button:

After the uploading/importing of the document is complete, you’ll be back on your original JotSpot page with the content of the Word document appearing right on the page:

Now here’s the fun part. Click the Edit button (make sure to choose “WYSIWYG” mode if you’re prompted, but your preference is probably already set to that if you’ve never changed it), and you are now editing what used to be your Word document right in your JotSpot page.

My own Word document happened to have a table in it, so now I can edit the table and change the values in the cells to my heart’s content, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Now that you’ve imported your Word document and basically turned it into a regular page in your JotSpot wiki, you can also add comments to the page just like you do with any other page:

Everthing except the comment in the screenshot below was purposely dimmed to draw your attention to the comment towards the bottom of it:

Important things to know, and caveats:

The Word document you are importing is first getting converted into HTML before it ends up as a JotSpot page. I’m telling you this for a couple of reasons:

1. Conversion from Microsoft Word format to HTML isn’t perfect. You will notice differences in layout/formatting after you import your Word document. Usually they are relatively minor differences, but if you have a particularly complex Word document your mileage may vary.
2. When you edit the page after you’ve imported your Word document, you are now using JotSpot’s WYSIWYG editor to edit the page in HTML format. The page is no longer in Word format, and the Microsoft Word application is no longer part of the picture.

Also, right now we have a bug where you can only import a Word document into a page that your user has created. If a user other than you created the page and you try to import a Word doc into it, you’ll get an error.

We’re interested to hear your experiences with this feature, so try it out and drop us a line.