Microsoft Word 2003

Draft

Introdcution

I (Daniel K. Schneider) rarely use Word and when I have to I find it extremly difficult to produce moderatly good look text (e.g. what would be expected in a textbook. In addition, Word does things to me I didn't ask for, e.g. create new styles or renumber items.

With a program like FrameMaker I can quite easily achieve what I want (in the past I also managed with formatting software) and it does not try to do things not told to do. Also I don't know anyone who even has a moderatly good working knowledge to do things efficiently.

Therefore I will try to make an effort to write down a few tricks I might learn. For the moment just a few links, since I (for now) have the impression that you can't create larger elements efficiently, e.g. vignettes with title, pargraphs of various forms and appropriate numbeing, or figures that include a title, automatic number of the caption...

General advice for Word 2003

If plan to work on a larger document I only have little advice to give for now

Use styles

That's so obvious that I won't go into it in detail.

To see, or change, the base of a style, modify the style. Via Format->Styles and Formatting you can display the Styles. This pane has five sections:

• On top: Current style: Click on it to modify
• Select All to select all text elements with this style, New Style to create a new style
• A list of the recently used styles
• A list of all other styles
• On the bottom, you can define which styles you want to see....

To print styles you have: File->Print; Then chan "Print What" to Styles.

Set your preferences

The basic idea is to turn off all "helpful" features, since they create havoc. Read Daiya's Setting Up Word.

• Tools->Options->Edit->Prompt to Update Style; Prompt to update style
• Untick "Automatically update the style from now on" if by mistake it's on.
• When you create a style, "Add to template"

Tools->Customize-Options

Customize Word

How to manage special strands in a text

To problem is to find an efficient way to insert and specially mark various feature strands in a textbook, e.g. conclusions and summaries, list of definitions, reference boxes, review questions, self-assessment (usually simple quizzes), small exercises etc.

Styles =

Make style for each element you plan to have in these feature strands, usually:

• A title
• paragraphs
• bullets
• Maybe a caption

If you use background color, you have to make sure that there is no blank space between.

Section breaks

• Sections allow to break down a document in to several sections, each of which may have different formatting. E.g. used to separate the first pages from the rest.
• Probably not that useful, since removing one of these may crate havoc

Repurposing of tables

• One possibility is to create a table with a single cell or maybe 2-3 cells in a single column.
• You then define a new table style and give it a name. Typically you want to make the following changes in the autoformat style, i.e. not in each table. (table->Table AutoFormat->modify style)
  • Base style on Table Normal
  • Change Background color
  • Margins on top and bottom for the default cell. This will add some (colored spage) on top and bottom
  • Margins left of the table
• Formatting elements inside the table can be same as the ones you use for ordinary text.

Macros

E.g. O'Reilly provides for its authors a menu with macros to insert special text elements like figures.

A macro then would insert a series of emtpy paragraph, each one with an appropriate style.

Links

General Beginners and mid-level tutorials

These links are not sorted or commented (no time), but when I made them (August 2007) they all seemed to useful and have real contents. Most Google search for "Word XP tutorial" leads to utter junk ...

• http://www.uwec.edu/help/word03.htm Microsoft Word 2003, LTS Online Help Documentation, University of Wisconsin. Quite a good tutorial for both beginners and and somewhat advanced users.

• Word 2003 Courses at Microsoft.

• Microsoft Word XP Tutorial 2003/2002

• Tutorials at Rudgers Writing Program. Includes some good beginners tutorials for Word 2003.

• Word Tutorial I (PDF), Word XP, beginner's level, from UC Berkeley Calpact

• Word Tutorial II (PDF), Word XP, mid level, from UC Berkeley Calpact

• Microsoft Word. Three beginners tutorials from University Information services, Georgetown University

• Word 2000 Tutorial and Word 2007 Tutorial, Florida Gulf Coast University.

• Microsoft Word Modules from Intern4Classrooms (i4c).

• Tutorials - Microsoft Word at BetterSolutions.com

Word FAQ's

• The Word MVP site includes a great number of useful FAQs and mini-tutorials. Can help advanced users.

Tutorials on how to write a book with word

• So You Want to Write a Book with MS Word by Daiya Mitchell. This was the only useful link I found. The text includes links to the related The Word MVP site

• [http://daiya.mvps.org/bookword.htm One Professional�$B!G�(Bs Steps for Writing a Book] by John McGhie

Avaliable style sheets

(to write large documents, more needed)

• Microsoft has a large list of templates, e.g. Books (not useful for writing "real" books")
• O'Reilly
• BCS book template

Use of annotations

(comments for other readers)

• Editing Electronically Submitted Papers (Web by Design, Indiana University]

Software tools

• [http://www.self-pub.net/wizard.html Book Design Wizard 2.0 for Microsoft�.A�N. Word] ($35).