Building Blocks are predefined pieces of document content saved for future use. Building Blocks can contain single or multiple paragraphs of text, tables, lists, or any other form of content. Word includes a number of predefined Building Blocks, including headers, footers, cover pages, text boxes, equations, page numbers, tables, and watermarks. Each of these is accessible by clicking on the Insert tab of the Ribbon, Quick Parts, and Building Block Organizer. This sequence of keystrokes opens the Building Block Organizer shown in Figure 1. From the Building Block Organizer, select the Building Block you wish to enter and choose Insert to have Word add that Building Block into the document.

Figure 1 - Word's Building Block Organizer

Of course, you can also add your own Building Blocks to a document. To do so, first select the contents of a document you wish to add as a Building Block. Click Quick Parts from the insert tab of the Ribbon and choose Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery… as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 - Adding a Building Block to the Building Block Organizer

This will cause Word to open the Create New Building Block dialog box pictured in Figure 3. In the Create New Building Block dialog box, complete the entries for the various pieces of information requested.

Figure 3 - Create New Building Block Dialog Box

While Name and Description are self-explanatory, the other information boxes in the Create New Building Block dialog box require a bit of explanation.

  • Gallery – Building Block Galleries are simply subdivisions of the entire set of Building Blocks. Galleries are used to group similar Building Blocks together to aid in the process of locating and inserting a Building Block into a document. Galleries present by default include Cover Pages, Page Numbers, Headers, Footers, Quick Tables, and Watermarks. By default, all new Building Blocks are assigned to the Quick Parts gallery, though users have the option of creating their own galleries or of saving a Building Block in a gallery other than the Quick Parts gallery.
  • Category – When saving a Building Block, Word prompts users to save it in a Category in addition to a Gallery. Categories are simply additional means of grouping Building Blocks together for ease of recall. Word provides only one Category by default – “General” – but users can create their own categories as necessary. For instance, one involved in preparing sets of financial statements might choose to have a gallery for Cover Letters, a gallery for Financial Statements, and a gallery for Footnotes.
  • Save in – Word saves Building Blocks in template files. More specifically, Word saves Building Blocks by default in the Building Blocks.dotx template. You may also choose to save new Building Blocks in the Normal.dotm template or any other global template so that the Building Blocks are accessible when you are working in any document. On the other hand, you may save the Building Block to a specific document template, and it will then only be accessible to any document that uses that specific template.
  • Options – This setting allows you to control how Word will insert the Building Block. The three choices available here are 1) Insert content only, 2) Insert content in its own paragraph, and 3) Insert content in its own page.

Building Blocks and Quick Parts were introduced as an improvement to Word 2007 and carryover into Word 2010. Though some of the functionality provided by these features was found in the AutoText feature of Word 2003 and prior, these tools are vastly improved in the more recent versions of Word, so spend a few minutes getting comfortable with these tremendous time-saving tools.

For a video demonstration of this tip, please visit www.tinyurl.com/k2tips73.