atw: Re: OT Writing tools

yes, and that goes back to the earlier stuff where i had already taken the 
class through bookmarks and why they are strange...

________________________________
From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Howard Silcock
Sent: Tuesday, 27 January 2009 12:39 PM
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: atw: Re: OT Writing tools

Hi Elizabeth

Wow, that is fantastic! It will be really useful for what I'm doing.

Mind you, I can also relate to the idea that this is the kind of document that 
I will never get finished. Already this task has been bumped down my priority 
list and I'm wondering when it may find its way up again.

Some of the troubleshooting headings are great - I particularly like When good 
xrefs go bad! Reminds me of the many times I've seen a simple xref to a 
procedure heading get changed, apparently on a whim of Word's, into two pages 
of steps repeated from the target procedure!
Howard
2009/1/27 Elizabeth Fullerton 
<Elizabeth_Fullerton@xxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:Elizabeth_Fullerton@xxxxxxxxxxx>>
Hi Howard

Here's the TOC, it represents most of the common things I've helped people 
with. Just a caveat - I've tried putting together this doc for several years, 
and never have enough downtime to get it done. I initially had two docs - a 
"how to" and a "best practices", and I bunged them together to create a 
reference for teaching, so the headings could use some streamlining! (Some of 
the sections are still empty - I figured that it was more important to get the 
information into the people, and they could take notes on the empty bits as we 
discussed them.)

I started off with the basic settings and the views, and then went onto styles. 
Most of the discussion revolved around styles, unsurprisingly. We also 
discussed tabs/hanging indents (tab-tab-tabbing across the page and onto the 
next line, one of my favourite things!), and bullets/numbering (and using 
outline styles instead of the buttons in the toolbars). Keep With Next, and not 
using manual page breaks. Looking in Normal view to find things you can't see 
in Print Layout. Don't even think about master documents (some people discover 
this exists, and want to try it). How having Change Tracking on with the 
changes hidden can make the document behave very strangely.

We spent quite a bit of time on really basic stuff, and I think the group got a 
lot of value out of that. It was actually stuff I kind of take for granted, 
having done this sort of work for years, so I was a bit surprised that I needed 
to explain it! I will need to put more detail in about the paragraph marks 
containing the formatting, etc. We discussed how paragraph and character styles 
work, and why they are good to use, and also style inheritance (as in heading 
levels) (which Word doesn't automatically have in the normal.dot you get when 
you load it up).

(Also, I'll let you know how I go with Christine's book for upgrading to 2007.) 
(Assuming I don't end up at 120% billability in the next few days...)



Document information.. 6

Contact for enquiries and proposed changes. 6

Document control 6

Purpose  6

Audience. 6

1          Overview.. 7

2          Definitions. 7

3          Resources. 7

4          Basic settings. 8

4.1        Displaying full menus. 8

4.2        Displaying the Standard and Formatting toolbars on two rows. 9

4.3        Displaying formatting marks. 10

4.4        Displaying field shading. 11

4.5        Displaying bookmarks. 12

4.6        Displaying table gridlines. 13

4.7        Displaying the Document Map. 13

4.8        Displaying the Styles and Formatting pane. 14

4.9        Turning off smart paragraph selection. 15

5          Views. 16

5.1        Normal view.. 16

5.2        Web Layout view.. 17

5.3        Print Layout view.. 17

5.4        Outline view.. 18

5.5        Reading Layout view.. 19

5.6        Print Preview.. 20

6          Styles. 21

6.1        Types of styles. 22

6.2        Creating a new style. 24

6.3        Modifying a style. 25

6.4        Naming a style. 26

6.5        Applying a style. 27

6.6        Clearing a style. 28

6.7        Manual overrides. 29

6.8        Bullets and numbering. 29

6.9        Outline levels. 32

6.10      Copy styles between documents. 33

7          Normal.dot 34

8          Cross references. 35

9          Customise. 36

9.1        Keystrokes. 36

9.2        Menus. 36

10        Macros. 37

10.1      How to use them... 37

11        Master documents. 38

12        Change tracking.. 39

13        Fields. 40

13.1      Creating. 40

13.2      Updating. 40

13.3      Showing codes. 40

Appendix A: Some handy keyboard shortcuts. 41

Appendix B: Best practices. 42

B.1       Bullets and numbering. 42

B.2       Capitalisation. 42

B.3       Captions / cross-refs / steps and vars in use cases. 42

B.4       Cross referencing to steps within use cases. 42

B.5       Graphics (inline vs anchor) 42

B.6       Hyphen, en‑dash or em‑dash. 43

B.7       Keep With Next 43

B.8       Non-breaking hyphens. 43

B.9       Non-breaking spaces. 43

B.10      Numbered lists using SEQ field codes. 44

B.11      Printing style definitions. 44

B.12      Sections and page numbering. 44

B.13      Sections. 44

B.14      Spaces and tabs and indents. 44

B.15      Styles. 45

B.16      Tables and figures and captions. 45

Appendix C: Troubleshooting.. 46

C.1       Bizarre formatting behaviour 46

C.2       Deleting bookmarks. 46

C.3       Jason tab. 46

C.4       Updating fields. 46

C.5       When good x-refs go bad. 46




________________________________
From: 
austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]
 On Behalf Of Howard Silcock
Sent: Tuesday, 27 January 2009 11:56 AM

To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: atw: Re: OT Writing tools

Hi Elizabeth

I'd be really interested to hear some of the most popular questions that came 
up, if you can tell us without too much work. I'm putting together a document 
that includes tips on using some of the features of Word that may cause trouble.

We're still using Word 2003 at present. The switch to Office 2007 is supposed 
to be happening sometime in the next few months and that may upset some of my 
work or make it unnecessay (or, I suspect, require me to add many extra 
sections), but I'm not thinking too much about that yet.

Howard

2009/1/27 Elizabeth Fullerton 
<Elizabeth_Fullerton@xxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:Elizabeth_Fullerton@xxxxxxxxxxx>>
Funny you should mention this - last week I presented a "Word knowledge-sharing 
session" to a bunch of my colleagues, discussing most of the things mentioned 
in this trail, and others. I started with the basic setup (non-personalised 
menus, showing formatting marks and what they mean, etc), and went on to the 
common problems I've help-desked people with through the years. It was an 
interactive session, with people asking lots of questions and meandering around 
the basic structure I had set (as was my intention) - I think they got a lot 
out of it, but at 2 hours I think we could have gone longer. Hopefully the 
session will get good feedback and I will be asked to do more - it's in 
everyone's best interests to be more efficient, especially mine, then I get to 
spend less time help-desking!

We're a bit quiet this week, so I've acquired a second laptop, downloaded 
Christine Kent's book on upgrading to 2007 (last time I tried on my own 
computer I suddenly needed to be at maximum efficiency - lost about a day 
trying to figure out 2007, removed it, which broke the dlls on my computer so I 
had to have it re-imaged which  then required about 3 days to get all my 
settings back - so less overall efficiency than I had hoped...)




-----Original Message-----
From: 
austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]
 On Behalf Of Allan Charlton
Sent: Sunday, 25 January 2009 5:18 PM
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: atw: Re: OT Writing tools

Christine
My experience is in line with the comments made by Stuart and Bob,
except that I've known a few people use Publisher quite successfully.  I
don't think I've ever come across anyone who uses the cut-down freebie
Microsoft word processor that comes with a new PC.  My uni students have
all been Word users but were never taught how to use it, which
perpetuates the behaviour that Stuart described.

Allan
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