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
Read more →Want to line up specific elements over several rows, to make them look like individual columns? You can do this using tabs, but to do so means that if you want to change the spacing later, you need to change each line one at a time. There’s
Read more →It’s easy enough to do when you read a dead tree book – just put your thumb in the table of contents or index while you flip from page to page looking for the stuff you want. You can easily view two documents on screen as well,
Read more →When you create a cross-reference in a Word document, you can choose a number of different “hooks” to link that reference to. Headings, tables and numbered items might be the most popular such hooks. Sometimes, though, hooks aren’t precisely where you want them to be, so you
Read more →Need to explain images you put in your document? You can do so in the surrounding text, and you can also create text that’s clearly associated with the images using captions.
Read more →Look at what happened when I dragged a photo from a web page into a Word document. (This photo was taken from a Toronto Star article dated September 20, 2011.) Word’s Normal style kept the image properly left-aligned, but the image went well beyond the right boundary
Read more →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
Read more →I contributed to an anthology of work by 18 Canadian writers called Prose To Go: Tales From A Private List (a fine read, if I do say so myself. Pick it up if you get the chance.) I contributed not just an essay but I also set
Read more →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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Speed up your writing
The longer the document you need to write, the slimmer the chance of getting it right on the first draft. So don’t agonize over every word when you first write a document. Instead, dash through the first draft and, wherever you’re not sure about something, leave a
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