Introduction

A do-it-yourself introductory course to help you understand and fix the most basic problems in tour errant Microsoft Word documents.

If text keeps jumping from page to page, the answers are here.

What’s Wrong with My Document?

Plenty

Apart from the fact that you published it on the world wide web for general public reading – if it is there for read-only purposes (and surely it is because no one is going to write on your web site!), then publish it as a PDF file. PrimoPDF is FREE.

And apart from the fact that you are not making proper use of Microsoft Word’s Headers and Footer features, a quick look under the hood (Tools, Options, View, show all Formatting Marks, Field codes etc.) tells us that your document suffers from these common flaws:

(1) Superfluous paragraph marks

(2) Superfluous tab characters

(3) Superfluous space characters

(4) Superfluous section breaks

(5) Superfluous local formatting

So now that you know the good news – that you’ve stuffed too much into the document, and it is really just a matter of not doing so much stuff – you’ll be pleased to learn why your document has been misbehaving.

For as long as you’ve known it your document has caused you headaches because it:

(1) Messes up the new page boundaries

(2) Messes up the text alignment

(3) Messes up the formatting

(4) Messes up your life

And so on.

So by now you get the general idea that you are going to do LESS WORK and your document is going to be BETTER-BEHAVED.

I, Chris Greaves, promise you that. If I’m wrong, I’ll gladly treat you to lunch at The Montreal Deli . If I’m right you can at your option treat me to lunch at The Montreal Deli .

Real Questions and Brief Answers

(1) Why are Superfluous paragraph marks bad?

Because they are totally, absolutely unnecessary and as you can start to see when we look under-the-hood, you spend too much time inserting and deleting them to achieve proper page boundaries. There’s a better way, better because it is automatic; Microsoft Word does it for you!

(2) Why are Superfluous tab characters bad?

Because they are totally, absolutely unnecessary and as you can start to see when we look under-the-hood, you spend too much time inserting and deleting them to achieve text alignment. There’s a better way, better because it is automatic; Microsoft Word does it for you!

(3) Why are Superfluous space characters bad?

Because they are totally, absolutely unnecessary and as you can start to see when we look under-the-hood, you spend too much time inserting and deleting them to achieve proper text alignment. There’s a better way, better because it is automatic; Microsoft Word does it for you!

(4) Why are Superfluous section breaks bad?

Because they are totally, absolutely unnecessary and as you can start to see when we look under-the-hood, you spend too much time inserting and deleting them to achieve proper page boundaries. There’s a better way, better because it is automatic; Microsoft Word does it for you!

(5) Why is Superfluous local formatting bad?

Because it is totally, absolutely unnecessary and as you can start to see when we look under-the-hood, you spend too much time applying and removing formatting to achieve the desired appearance. There’s a better way, better because it is automatic; Microsoft Word does it for you!

Is the message sinking in?

What’s the Fastest Way to Fix Things up?

Tough question.

We must make a distinction between the time/cost of learning how to do things properly, and the time/cost of actually doing things properly.

The second cost – the doing – is very low. In fact, for most professionals it is part of the built-in automation provided by Microsoft Word – we just don’t have to do anything at all!

The first cost – the learning – will cost me nothing, but will cost you time (if you’re reading this for free), time & money if you’re sitting in one of my classes.

Your call.

Do you want to spend the rest of your miserable life swatting miscreant bugs and devils in your documents, a slave to the Big Beige Box, or do you want to let your creative juices run free?

I’ll wait while you make up your mind.

Take your time.

A New Broom Sweeps Clean

You can get rid of most of the debris by passing the contents of your Microsoft Word document through the Notepad filter. The what? Dear old Notepad, an almost-featureless text-editor. Paste your text in there and it will lose almost every feature, including all the bad ones. Paste the text back from Notepad to Word and you’ll end up with featureless and almost bug-free text. It’s that easy.

Here are the steps:

(1) In your MSWord document, select the entire body of text with Ctrl-A

(2) Copy the entire body of text to the clipboard with Ctrl-C

(3) Close your Microsoft Word document without saving changes.

(4) In your Notepad document, select the entire body of text with Ctrl-A

(5) Copy the entire body of text to the clipboard with Ctrl-C

(6) Open a new Microsoft Word document.

(7) Paste the clipboard contents into your new Microsoft Word document

(8) Save your new Microsoft Word document.

If some text stayed behind because it was in a frame, go back and copy the contents of the frame to the clipboard, paste them over the contents of Notepad, select all the new Notepad text (from your frame) and paste the clipboard into the appropriate spot in your new MSWord document.

Removing Superfluous White Space

I use a macro to do this, because I need to do it so often and it is boring and repetitive.

Really Sweeping Clean

Your Normal.dot template is full of garbage. Exit Microsoft Word, locate all copies of Normal.dot and rename them.

When you reload Microsoft Word you’ll have a nice fresh copy of Normal.dot without the accumulation of years of grime and neglect.

Fixing It Up

Styles

Say goodbye to local formatting (Format, Font, etc.) and say Hello! to Styles (Format, Styles).

Say goodbye to miserable messes (Format, Font, etc.) and say Hello! to Harmony and Light (Format, Styles).

For a full discussion of styles, see my Technical Paper s on Styles (“StyleHierarchies.doc” and “StylesInWord.doc”); in brief: Styles are good because they are consistent, and changing the formatting of the entire document can be achieved with one quick operation. A poor example would be if you decided that you hated bolding. With local formatting you’d have to search through the entire document for bolded text, clear the formatting and then apply italicizing. With styles you merely change the style definition, and everywhere the style has been used changes its appearance automatically. Try it.

Character Styles

Paragraph Styles

Heavy Stuff!

Remember how I said “There’s a better way, better because it is automatic; Microsoft Word does it for you!”? Here’s part of the reason for that:-

In Microsoft Word we can set up a style, Body Text, that serves as the foundation for all our work.

We can then base a style Heading 1 on that Body Text style, and we can base a style Heading 2 on that Heading 1 style (or any other style).

In this way we develop a hierarchy of inter-dependent styles.

Fun Stuff

Now go through your fresh clear newsletter and assign Body Text to the entire document. (Ctrl-A, Format, Style, Body text, Apply).

Now go through your newsletter and assign Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles to the appropriate paragraphs. Note that you do NOT need to select the entire paragraph; placing the cursor anywhere in the paragraph is enough to let Microsoft Word know that this is the paragraph to be styled. See how easy it all becomes? No more click-and-dragging too far or not far enough.

Page Layout

Bear in mind that we removed all your manual Section Breaks when we passed the document body through Notepad. We will now re-introduce Section breaks but only where they are needed and implemented by Microsoft Word on our behalf.

Section Breaks arise whenever we change the settings for Page Orientation (Portrait/Landscape), Margins, Columns, Line Numbering, Vertical Alignment, Headers & Footers, Page Numbering, Paper Size or Paper Source.

We will demonstrate this in two areas – Columns (for a newsletter) and Headers and Footers.

Columns

We want the newsletter to appear as a regular pages (one column) up to the point of “NEWS FROM OUR DEPARTMENTS”, and we want it to be in 2-column format after that.

Headers and Footers

The original document does not show Headers and Footers.

The first page has what we might call a “Title Block” with the name of the newsletter all the way down about 9 lines to the web site address.

Page 2 is titled “From Our Departments” and runs to page 6. Page 2 already starts a section because that is where we began our 2-column format.

Page 7 starts “Coaches Corner” and runs to page 8 where it accommodates the monthly calendar.

A Bit of Tidy-up

If you copied, rather than cut, the Title Block of text for the first page header, delete the text from the document body now.

Frames to Tables

My Word! Those frames were messy. We will use tables to layout tabular information, and in doing so we can eliminate a few of the space and hyphen characters:

Wrapping Up

Let us define a style “Body Text Bullet” and apply it to the 9-element list on page 1.

After

Here’s how your newsletter looks now.

And what you can’t see here, is that the newsletter is much easier to edit for all future issues.

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