Conant Correct by Claire Conant

I came across this online, self-paced training that Microsoft provides for their products. This may be old news for some, but helpful for others.

For Word 2003: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/CR061958171033.aspx

For Word 2007: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/CR100654561033.aspx

And of course, you can find links to online training for all other Microsoft products.

Word - you either love it or you hate it, but either way, for most freelance writers and editors, it is a required tool. I’ve been using Word since the days of Windows 95 (maybe even before then) and have weathered its progress and, dare I say, growth. I’m now happily settled with Word 2007 on a Vista operating system. I used to be a huge fan of Adobe FrameMaker as an alternative to Word and for many cases, when working on extremely large, multi-chapter documents, it is still a good choice. However, among the clients I work for, Microsoft Word is still the common choice.

When is a shortcut not a shortcut?

Word has all these nifty buttons and shortcuts (pressing the ALT key with a sequence of numbers) that you can use to do things quickly (called direct formatting), but I’ve found they are not as efficient as you would think. Word loves to keep track of your keyboard choices so that if you make a mistake, it can be quickly undone. However, sometimes the shortcut causes more grief than you bargained for. Margins become screwed up, content floats off the page to a new page, numbering changes unexpectedly and more, not to mention your file size starts bloating exponentially. In short, Word happens.

Now we’re stylin’

However, all this can be easily avoided by using styles. Styles are easy to create and a little planning goes a long way to a happy relationship with Microsoft Word. I have a few standard styles that I keep loaded on my system: Body Text, Bullet 1 (main level bullet), Bullet 2 (slightly indented from the first level bullet), Step 1 (auto numbering for procedures), Step a (for second level procedures), Body Text Indent (for explanatory text within numbered steps where you don’t want a number or a bullet), and more. If the document I’m working on doesn’t have these styles, I quickly create them.

Never be Normal

Also, when setting up these styles, there’s an option to choose on which main style to base your new style. The default is Normal. I always change this to No Style. This is because the Normal style changes based on each computer user’s preference. For example, I may like all my default text to be set in Corbel (the font you see here) but another person might prefer Arial. If our styles are based on normal, the font and size will change when that user opens my document. This will cause the document to look differently for them than it did when I was finished with it. (Of course, there’s always saving as PDF, but this post isn’t about that.)

Want to learn more?

Microsoft has some great tutorials about how to use styles and set up your own list of quick styles. I’m not going to recreate the wheel, you can read about it here.  However, give it a try. I think you’ll find that the preplanning involved in setting up styles before you get started saves you a lot of time and headaches in the long run. At least, it does for me.