Many thanks to MSDN and VMWare
I can finally open the Word templates Debra from Prentice Hall sent for me to use! It took installing Office (2007, with a completely re-done, strange interface) in Windows XP in VMWare's Fusion Beta release (since I never got Parallels running happily), but it worked. The templates didn't work in Office X for the Mac, but I dragged them over to my shiny, new VMWare image and they opened right up.
Now (well, sometime in the next few days) to actually apply the styles and submit Chapter 1. Debra bugged some people for me and got some styles to apply so that I can have syntax highlighting in each of the code samples throughout the book! That should help make things much more legible. I know I would prefer it that way, and Terry reminded me of the importance of readability, prompting me to ask for it in the first place.
On a side note, I've found that if you use Safari using ATSU for text rendering to read this blog, all inline <code>
tags have an effective width of 0px
with a displayed overflow. Weird, and very annoying, since I rather prefer that enabled.