A "Wiki Word" add-in for MS Word?

[Armando]

Does it exist? Would it be hard to implement?

Managing hyperlinks in word processors can be quite a pain. A system similar to the one wikis use (the famous CamelCased or "[[ ]]" Wiki Words) would probably be convenient. Anybody knows if such a functionality can be implemented (through a plugin or a macro) to MS Word (or other word processors - TextMaker, OpenOffice.org...)?

[Armando]

Bump.

[tabletguy]

TWiki has something that supports a lot of Word imports, also something for Excel. However, the plugin is now obsolete (I believe), because they've integrated it into their standard WYSIWYG editor.

I'm not familiar with "Wiki Word", if that's a product.

[iphigenie]

a wiki word is a "hook" for links within a wiki.
In a typical wiki if I type ANewPageAboutWikis then the wiki will recognise it as a potential link and either link to this document (should it exist) or create a link to allow people to create the document.
Nowadays most wikis have realised that this is a pain to read for humans so they also support a syntax like [A New Page About Wikis]

[tabletguy]

Ah, I misread the request then. He wants something for Word.  I knew what a "wiki word" was.

I just just use Ctrl-K. I highlight the phrase I want hyperlinked, and press ctrl-k to pop up the hyperlink editor, and then paste in the link, if needed. If the link is already in the clipboard, it puts it in for you.

I suppose one could make a keyboard macro to do this too.

If it's a macro to scan the word document and generate hyperlinks, that shouldn't be too hard. I have one that converts chinese tone markings (numeric) into tones (letters). It basically scans all text and does the appropriate replace. The same code should be modifyable to do something like this. You can get the macro source from www.mandarintools.com Just look for the word macro...

[Armando]

Thank you for the suggestions! Sorry for the late feedback on this one. 
My brain is dead these days, and I didn't feel apt to follow up on that one.

Yes, exactly : I'm looking for something wiki-like, but for Word :  putting a term inside [ ] (in my case, it would probably be [[ ]] to avoid confusion with comments) would transform it into a potential link -- as Iphigenie explained.

@tabletguy : I'm not sure how you'd transform the "Chinese tone marking converter" macro into one that would have a wiki bend...

The macro would probably have to :

1- Find the bracketed words
2- Create a  database or index (or use an already existing one -- there are so many desktop search software around...) to contain all these bracketed words (the wiki words), and, of course, refer back to the exact spot in the documents containing the original bracketed words (a bit like tiddlyWiki, for example -- but I have no idea how tiddlyWiki does it...)
3- Rapidly find corresponding "normal" words in MS Word documents and link them back to the original (bracketed) term (thanks to the "wiki word" database/index).

...or something like that... I'm thinking out loud, of course.

I have no idea how complex that would be to code, or if it even exists. Maybe it does.

edit : the nice thing with wiki words is that your can quickly refer back directly to the definition you want for a specific term, without having to spend time looking for it manually into a data base (or, even worse, using X1, or something else...) -- it's not just mere linking similar words together, of course. Inserting tags-keywords (as textual strings) directly in the text could do the trick, I guess, but would certainly not be as elegant, and would be more complicated to handle with large quantities of terms/tags.

[Armando]

And I wonder how the researchers here manage all their precious definitions (if not using a wiki system)... Of course, one can make his own independant dictionnary/database... But that's a bit different since there is no real automated linking involved.

[Jimdoria]

I originally answered a different question, so I'm now changing my answer. 

This shouldn't be too tough to implement in VBA, as long as you don't need anything too elaborate. Internal links (within the same document) could be managed as bookmarks in Word. External links (to other documents or bookmarks in other documents) might be tougher - I'd have to look into what is supported natively by Word's hyperlinking feature.

Word's got amazing linking/organizing capabilities if you poke around. Look in the help file for "bookmarks", "citations", "table of authorities" or "index entry."

EDIT:

Just checked. You can link to bookmarks within other documents using hyperlinks in Word. So it should be possible to create a web of deeply-linked Word documents - sort of a Word Wiki involving multiple document files. I'd expect the external links to be kind of fragile though - as in they might break if either the source or target document was moved to another folder.

[Armando]

Just came back from a loooooong work day...
Thanks for your time Jim! I'll have a look at these different elements and try to figure out what's possible.
As you said, external links would be kind of fragile, but that's to be expected...
I'll post back my discoveries -- if any!

[tabletguy]

I read something about a product called "ZuluPad" which sounds similar to what you want. Don't know if it would have an "export" to Word function, etc. but you could contact the author. There's an open source version (according to here: http://www.gersic.com/zulupad/) and a paid version. I don't know anything much about either program.

As far as rewriting the macro...  Word already has internal linking, and the macro is doing text searching (but not efficiently). I thought you could just generate the links.

Actually, probably best to ask on one of Microsofts Word forums.

[iphigenie]

I can't imagine that there isnt someone out there who has already made a set of macros to do a "wiki" structure in word.
Finding it is another question.

[Armando]

Hi everybody,

I haven't been able to put much thought and energy into this problem in the last few weeks... Even if it seems to me that a "Wiki Word" functionnality for MS Word would be extremely handy. (And not just for me, of course.  )

I read something about a product called "ZuluPad" which sounds similar to what you want. Don't know if it would have an "export" to Word function, etc. but you could contact the author. There's an open source version (according to here: http://www.gersic.com/zulupad/) and a paid version. I don't know anything much about either program.

As far as rewriting the macro...  Word already has internal linking, and the macro is doing text searching (but not efficiently). I thought you could just generate the links.

Actually, probably best to ask on one of Microsofts Word forums.

-tabletguy (August 27, 2007, 10:15 PM)

Thanks. ZuluPad is nice, but what I'm after is the same “wiki word”/cross linking feature BUT available in Word (and between MS word Documents -- of course, in an ideal computer world, it would be available in all applications). (BTW, there's a nice Mini-Review of ZuluPad / ZuluPad Pro by cthorpe here on DC)

I can't imagine that there isnt someone out there who has already made a set of macros to do a "wiki" structure in word.
Finding it is another question.

-iphigenie (August 28, 2007, 07:43 AM)

Yes... and I really wish that somebody would come up and say : "yes, it does exist! here..." 

As tabletguy suggested, I guess that I will eventually have to ask about such a feature on a specialized Microsoft Word forum.

And ALSO… to be fair, I should really invest more time into the investigation of some of the suggestions proposed by Jimdoria. The abbreviation "vba" frightens me a bit (as I'm not a programmer...), but I guess that it's never too late to learn new skills...

[Jimdoria]

I'll have some free time later in September where I might be able to help out with a project like this. I'm fairly adept at VB & VBA (although I'm no Skrommel so don't expect anything to be done in 1 hour!)

[Armando]

Thanks Jim! That's kind. I might have more time too in a few weeks -- maybe, maybe... hard to predict these days! -- so I should be able focus more on that "problem". Hopefully.

(If only I knew how to code!!!  )

[m9833]

Wow! A 13 Year old topic and I find it relevant even today. I know I should perhaps start a new topic, but all I want to do here is ask Armando if he ever found a solution.

[Shades]

• Word add-in for mediawiki.
• Microsoft Wikipedia app (requires Office 2013 or newer).
• Demo of 'Visual Editor', which allows you to create wiki pages.
• Word2MediaWikiPlus, from 2007, so it is an old project,
• MediaWiki 'Save As' option for Word. (CodePlex archive, so I'm not sure how long this will remain available.

Not exactly what you look for, but any of these options will make the creation and maintenance of a (locally and/or cloud-hosted) Wiki more convenient.

Then, there is also 'BlueSpice'. That is an extension/enhancement for MediaWiki. And it supercharges your wiki, including the editor. For the purist, they can still use the standard text editor that comes with MediaWiki, but there is a toggle switch that enables the visual editor, which is an enjoyable WYSIWYG editor. Last time I checked, 'BlueSpice' comes in 2 versions, Community and Enterprise. Community version you can download for free, the Enterprise version has a price tag, more features and (technical) support.

Discovered 'BlueSpice' when it was still version 1.x, which was already a big improvement over the standard functionality in MediaWiki. Upgraded to version 2.x, which was a significant improvement on version 1.x, especially the visual editor. And now there is version 3.x. Haven't tried that one yet, as the box that runs my wiki runs on a older version of Linux, which doesn't support a specific PHP version that 'BlueSpice 3.x' requires.

BlueSpice
Use XAMPP or WAMPP to quickly setup a test webserver on your local machine (comes with all the requirements 'BlueSpice' needs to run).

If you already have a lot of documents, you can use a converter like 'PanDoc' to convert existing Word documents to Wiki texts, which you can then easily copy into your wiki instance. PanDoc is open source software and very capable. That means you have to option to use as much or as little parameters as you dare during conversion...and that it is command-line only.

[m9833]

Hi Shades,

Thanks for adding to the discussions. I have skwire, wraith808, and you to thank for introducing me to MarkDown in another thread here. :-)

The Word add-in for mediawiki looks interesting for getting some sort of Wiki features in Word. The other suggestion are interesting too, but most of these are concerned with connecting Word to Wikipedia.