Copywriter, technical writer, translator (FR>EN, ES>EN, IT>EN), journalist

Posts Tagged style

Creating headers and footers

Readers need signposts to help them navigate long documents. Writers provide those signposts using headers and footers, blocks of text at either the top or bottom of the page, respectively. Headers and footers are visually separate from the main body of the document. Page numbers may be

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Inserting images

The cliché bears repeating: a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s why you find graphs in financial reports and photos in memoirs, among many other uses. You can easily bring photos, graphs, scanned drawings and other graphical information into a Word document. The key is to

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Creating fields

In my work as a copywriter and journalist, I use a Word template that provides important information about the document I’m writing – word count, document name, current section of document (according to heading style) and so forth. Word automatically fills in most of this information since,

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Out with unused styles!

Chances are you’ll copy text from other places and paste them into your Word document. When you do, you’ll bring along not just the text, but the style(s) from that source document. This isn’t a big deal, but it can on occasion cause minor formatting headaches which

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What page was that on again?

If you create a long business document, chances are you need to use the same concepts in more than one place. So to prevent redundancy, you create a cross reference that says something like “as discussed in topic X on page Y.” If you type this, then

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Reuse your own genius

Have you completed a document using Microsoft Word (or another word processor) and made it look exactly right? Did you hone the styles so that formatting is practically automated? Congratulations! You accomplished a grand feat, one that likely took lots of learning, work and revision. Here’s the

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Creating new Word styles – the easy way

While you’re drafting a document, you might want to create a new character style or paragraph style. (The difference? You can apply character styles to words, even individual characters, while paragraph styles apply from one pilcrow to the next.) Chances are the style you want to create

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Find (and create) the look you want for your document

Good artists copy. Great artists steal. How does this apply to you? If you’re working on a Word document that has to impress somebody and you’re daunted by the blank canvas Word presents you with when you create a new document, worry not. Become a great artist

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Avoid overformatting your documents

If you’ve ever felt like you spend too much time formatting your documents, you aren’t alone. Part of the problem is the level of detail to which you CAN format a document. One solution: Draft documents using a word processor that doesn’t give you as many formatting

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Better Word formatting in 20 minutes

Microsoft provides great learning resources for people who want to master its products. For example, Microsoft published a course called “Format Your Document by Using Styles”. Claiming it takes about 20 minutes to complete, it gives you a basic handle on style usage in Word. You can

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