Hands on: Use Word for long projects

In the past few columns, we’ve been concentrating on the layout features of Word ­ in particular, graphics, columns and text boxes. This month we’re going to start looking at the basics of creating long documents, such as books.

So, you want to write a book, a thesis or other long document. If it’s a novel, then you don’t really need much in the way of word processing goodies beyond a word count, page numbering and a search-and-replace feature should you decide to change the name of your protagonist from Tony to Gordon.

Technical documents and other non-fiction requires rather more, though. You’ll probably want to split your document into sections or chapters, have running headers and footnotes, an index and a table of contents. We’ll be illustrating this with examples from Microsoft Word, but the principles apply to all word processing applications.

Planning ahead
For long documents, a little planning can go a long way, so rather than plunge straight in, do your magnum opus the favour of having its very own template. This way, you can avoid ‘legacy clutter’, but you’ll still be able to modify the template later when editing documents based on it.

Having created and saved the new template, which we’ve imaginatively called ‘Long document.dot’, check that you have the correct default proofing language. In Word 2003 and earlier, this is at Tools, Set language, Language, and in 2007 it’s at Review, Proofing, Set Language.

Next, think of the styles you’re likely to need. It doesn’t matter if you later want to add or change a style, the important thing is to employ a set of styles and use them consistently. Promise yourself that you’ll only use directly applied formatting for occasional things such as an italicised word or a unique situation, such as a title page.