Microsoft Word Article Authoring Add-in

Add-ins, Add-ons, Extensions and Plugins are a great way to extend the functionality of a product. The new features can be supplied by third party developers or by the initial developer. In the case of Microsoft Office 2007 it’s more often than not Microsoft that is providing add-ins to the community.

The so called Article Authoring Add-in is a Microsoft Word 2007 add-in that is currently supplied as a beta version on the official Microsoft homepage. The add-in enhanced the authoring of scientific and technical articles by providing the ability to read and write files from Word 2007 into the XML format used by the National Library of Medicine for archiving articles in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature and PubMed Central.

Information on the Microsoft website is sparse but from the information provided it looks like a niche add-in targeting “the staff of scientific and technical journals, Information Repositories, and early adopters within the scholarly authoring community, as well as developers of publishing solutions and workflows”.