And you thought Word 2010 was new?
Microsoft has released a cute video on YouTube showing how the US Declaration of Independance was ‘made’ with Word 2010 and collaboration tools.
You can slow down or stop the video to show how some Word features are done.
The font used for the body appears to be the same or similar to the ‘Jefferson’ font available here.
Aside from that there’s probably a bit of, shall we say, ‘tweaking’ going on to make the final document look exactly like the original parchment. The image at 1:33 of the video looks more like an image of the Declaration than a re-creation done in Word – note the marks around the edges of the document and irregular weight of the main text.
The signatures are images pasted into the document (though the ‘John Hancock’ is animated in the video).
And it doesn’t show Word’s spell checker at work. Word should have, at least, corrected the spelling of ‘Brittish’ (4 lines from the bottom) and the English spelling of ‘neighbourhood’
Also some ‘incorrect’ capitalizations like ‘Petitioned’ that would have attracted Word’s green squiggly line. Word 2010 (US English) suggests (via the blue underline) that “to effect their Safety and Happiness” should be changed to ‘affect’ and “the State remaining in the mean time ” change to ‘meantime’.
Word’s Justified paragraph formatting would have done a neater job that the long lines at the end of sentences.
But those are quibbles, it’s a fun little video.
