The best discovery of the month has definitely been the "don't add blank space between paragraphs of the same style" command in Word 2007. This is in a window of Word that I never knew existed. You get to it from the Home tab by clicking on the strange turned up corner icon next to the word "Paragraph." (see illustration) I use it at least five times a day.
I have recently had reason to investigate various ways of using Microsoft Word, specifically Word 2007 which has many delights. Apparently many of the autocorrect, spacing and text wrapping problems that people find in Word occur because we are not using Word as it was designed. As with modern HTML, one is advised not to embed formatting instructions in the text, such as "font: Times New Roman, Size 12" or whatever but instead one should mark a paragraph either "normal" "heading" "quote" or other from the choice in the drop down menu. Then once a document is complete one can decide what style to impose on the elements, and one can change them all at the flick of a switch as desired. This ensures uniformity and simplicity.
When trying to discover how to make a booklet for a church AGM I discovered that most authors actually recommend using Word. I like to learn by googling for videos. I made a good mock up booklet this way but in the end we plumped for an A4 format (see finished booklet)
I am now working on my book, incorporating all my files into a Master document
Although Word cannot normally cope with a large amount of text and pictures, it copes better if a long document is split into subdocuments which are linked together in a Master document. The Master document did not like my cover page very much and crashed once I incorporated it, and I have spent a day on a train wrestling with learning the program and incorporting my book. Then, imposing the same style commands on all the documents, one can select various style changes and manipulate it all into a pretty professional looking piece of literary history. This makes it (disconcertingly) easier to discover your total word count and to see how closely (or not, in my case) your current documents might resemble the desired sections of some final overarching document plan . C'est la vie. And yes, I know, I purists will say should really have used LaTex instead.
Finally I had to turn the church booklet into a PDF to put on the website. I did this by downloading Open Office, opening the file in Open Office and saving it as a PDF(i.e. it is a print option). This saved the hyperlinks but some of the style looked strange. The webmaster used a different program (must ask him what,) and managed to retain the style but sacrificed the hyperlinks. Word 2007 has an option for printing in XPS document which is some sort of pdfish open source format but I was not sure how accessible most people would find this. Those with Office2010 are in luck because you can easily create a pdf file in this program.
p.s. Having used my Master Document version for some time now I do not recommend editing in Master Document view. I thought I lost a lot of material using this but it was all in the sub-documents: it was the hyperlinks in the Master Document that got messed around. Also it is difficult to see where you are moving things to. I now edit the sub-documents and just use the Master Document for an overview, style or printing, which works well. When I have finished my work I will worry about finding someone with Word 2010 so I can turn it into one PDF. 30/05/2011
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