Microsoft Word
Suppose you’re in this position: you have created a document. You have sent it to someone else for their comments or to edit it. They have now sent it back to you, but in the meantime you have made some changes to your original. How are you going to sort out this mess?!
If you and your colleague have been using Microsoft Word, then you don’t have a problem. All you need to do is use the Combine Documents feature.
A really good blog editor is hard to find. But if you create your day-to-day documents in Word, why not use that as a blog editor too?
*!@#^ #~*&%! Blast! If that sounds like you when you can’t seem to change what a piece of text looks like, don’t fret: there is a solution.
Here’s a feature which you may have noticed, perhaps without thinking about it. Type a smiley face in “text speak”, ie :-), and you will notice that it immediately converts into a smiley face.
A few days ago I switched the light on in the kitchen, there was a pop, and all the lights went out. Everything electrical was as dead a dodo. It could have been a major disaster, as I’d just finished doing several hours’ work. Fortunately, it was merely a minor inconvenience, thanks to the magic of AutoSave.
Making changes to a document, albeit provisionally, is something you can easily do in Review mode, which has been covered in a separate article. But that can easily become unwieldy, especially when more than a couple of people are involved: we all know the old saw about too many cooks.
Here’s the wrong way of reviewing a document: make the changes you think necessary, and save the document with a different name. Sounds sensible enough, doesn’t it?
It’s enough to make a grown man cry. You receive a second version of a document from a colleague, with no indication in the covering email about what’s changed. So what do you do? Print out both documents and pore over them till you’re cross-eyed?
No need:
When does a document need a table of contents? I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule about this, but let’s think about it from the other end: the reader. Is your document going to be challenging to navigate? Are there sections in it which people are likely to want to refer to or likely to wish to return to, and which they can’t see at a quick glance? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, I’d say that a table of contents is imperative, even if the document is only two or three pages long.
Do you ever get to the point, when writing a long document, where you can’t see the wood for the trees? I know I do. Should I put that section right at the start? What would it look like if I made it the second section rather than the first? Would the whole document still flow, would the structure be wrong?
Some people really make a lot of work for themselves when it comes to headings. It seems straightforward enough: just select the text you want to use for the heading
A lot of people use Microsoft Word, but it’s said that most of them use only a few of the features available. The aim of this series is to introduce to you some of the features in Word of whose existence you may not be aware, but which you will almost certainly find useful.