Daily Archives: July 19, 2007

Doneness indicator in creative applications

I just thought of a feature I would like in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc…

Sometimes I get a section of text just how I want it. In other places within the document I have just started or the copy is really rough, but I want to come back to it later. It would be nice to be able to flag sections of documents/slideshows/spreadsheets with an indicator that tells me what I’ve finished and what still needs work. That way every time I open a document I don’t have to get all reacquainted with what needs work and what doesn’t. It would also make it easier to jump around the document when I work because I wouldn’t be afraid of leaving something undone.

It could be something as simple as highlighting the text and choosing “needs revision” or “final version” from the right-click menu. It would be like a text style, except that it wouldn’t change the style of the text — it would just give it a semantic tag. Maybe I could use bookmarks for this in Word, and regions in Excel, but I don’t know how I would do it in PowerPoint.

(This post would be tagged as “needs revision).