Hands on: Word challenges

At your own risk
Word’s master document feature allows you to create an outline, then use this as a container for sub-documents, such as the chapters of a book.

The advantage is that the master document doesn’t actually contain the text of the subdocuments, so it remains a manageable size; you can expand and collapse subdocuments, making navigation easier; and you can create indexes, tables of contents and page numbering that span all the subdocuments. The disadvantage is that this feature has never had a good reputation.

To quote from the Word MVP site: “A master document has only two possible states: Corrupt, or just about to be corrupt.”

The general consensus seems to be that you are better off working with a large document. By all means work on each chapter as a separate file, but when it comes to assembly, copy the chapters into one normal file. And keep comprehensive, up-to-date backups.

So, having looked in the Word 2007 help file for master documents and failing to find any mention, I presumed that Microsoft had quietly dropped this feature. Checking out the Office website seemed to confirm this.

However, careful investigation by reader David Allen shows the skeleton is still in the closet. If you switch to outline view from the buttons on the status bar, you’ll see the outline ribbon appear - and on here is a section for master documents. Use at your own risk.

Yet more styles
We’ve dealt with styles many times, but so far have only considered character and paragraph styles. However, with Word 2002, Microsoft introduced two more categories - list and table styles. Taking these in order, we dealt with numbered lists fairly comprehensively in August 2007. List styles offer less flexibility but combine up to nine outline levels. The easiest way to work with list styles is from the List Styles tab of the Format, Bullets and Numbering dialogue. Select the items to be listed - each should be in a separate paragraph - and apply the chosen style.

You can then move through your list using Tab and Shift and Tab to demote and promote the outline level. You can create your own list styles - or modify existing ones - but although you can format the numbering for each level as part of the style, you can’t do this with the text - you’d have to apply that directly or via a character style. You can also apply list styles from the Styles and Formatting Task Pane, but this can be rather tricky, as you don’t really see what you get. So, list styles might be more trouble than they are worth for long, complex lists, but for simple, sparsely formatted lists they can save effort.

At first glance, table styles don’t seem that much different from the Word 97 Autoformat Table options, but there’s an important difference. Whereas the Word 97 version applied the formatting directly, the latter version applies it as a style. The good point of this is that - as with other styles - you can create your own or modify an existing style and then use it over again.

There is, however, a catch. Unlike paragraph or character styles you can’t create a table style ‘by example’ - in other words you can’t format a table to your liking then save that formatting as a style. Nor can you check the ‘Update style’ box so that this happens automatically. Instead you need to base your new style on an existing one, then modify it piecemeal from the Modify Style dialogue. You can select various parts of the table - first row, last row and so on from the ‘Apply formatting to:’ list.