Office 2007 is a great software suite, but it can be a little difficult to keep all of its features and permissions organized. One way to make sure your documents are protected is to embed Creative Commons licenses into them. Creative Commons licenses are a way of protecting your work from being used without permission. They allow you to share and remix works, but they also protect the author’s rights and the property of the creator. To embed a Creative Commons license into an Office document, you first need to create a file called “licenses.txt” in the same directory as your Office document. This file contains the following information: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License This license allows you to share and remix this document, but it also protects the author’s rights and property. You can find more information about this license at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/. Next, you need to add the license code into your document’s body text. To do this, you’ll need to use one of Office’s built-in tools or create a custom tool that uses the Office editor’s “code editor.” The code editor is available in both Windows and Mac versions of Office. To insert the code into your document, follow these steps:

  1. Open up your document in Microsoft Word or another word processing program 2) Type in a few lines of code (you can use any language that Office supports) 3) Click on OK to close Microsoft Word 4) Open up an online copy of Adobe Photoshop or another image editing program 5) Paste the following code into Adobe Photoshop:<link rel=“stylesheet” href="/css/office2007/styleSheets/default_theme

First you will need to download the Creative Commons add-in for Office 2007.  Make sure and select the appropriate applications you want to include the add-in.  For the sake of not having to install it later just select all three.

After you have installed the Add-in restart Word and you will get the following message.  Go ahead and click Install.

Now you will see a new tab on the Ribbon called Creative Commons.

In that tab you will want to click on Licence and New Licence. The icon next to it is just showing the document is not yet licensed.   

A screen will pop up for you to select the type of CC License you want to associate with the document.  For more information about choosing the right type of License for your work check out CreativeCommons.org.  You will also be asked if you want to allow modifications or commercial use of your work.

After you have made all the choices about the license you can then decide to keep it as it is or remove it.  I am going to select the license I just created through the Wizard.

You then get a visual image of the CC icon that you can move to a suitable place within the document.  For this instance I put it at the end of the work.

 

The Hyperlink will point to the location of the license over at CreativeCommons.org. 

If you use the CC to protect a lot of the work you create in Office 2007 this is a great add in to have!