How Much Do I Need to Understand?

The amount of detail you need to understand when working with Smart Documents and XML depends on whether you are a developer or an end user . If you are a developer, you will need to understand all of the content in this hour , and then you will need to build on that foundation with further study.

If you're an end user, you can ignore quite a number of the details. For example, you don't need to remember all of the files associated with an XML document, nor do you need to be familiar with all of the XML- related options ”menu commands, dialog boxes, and so on ”in Word's user interface. (Some of these will be touched on in this hour, but you will not learn about all of them.) What matters to you are the overall concepts. If they make sense to you, when your company asks you to start using a Smart Document instead of your familiar old .dot template, you'll have some idea of what to expect. Keep in mind that Microsoft designed these features to enable developers to hide XML from end users almost entirely. It's quite possible to use XML documents or Smart Documents without even knowing it.