MS Word - Hints and Recomended Practices First don't use MS Word. Is there an important reason why your content should be viewable only by those with high powered PC's with the very latest version of MS Office installed? If not HTML/web will be easiest to maintain and viewable by EVERYONE. If you are a style nazi consider Adobe Acrobat -> PDF which is viewable by almost anything. Alas, corporate correspondence is hopelessly tied to using MS document format for the foreseeable future. In that case the following should help you avoid most of the horrors that are endemic to using Microsoft's very messy, bloated, non-intuitive, buggy, insecure, incompatible, data loss/corrupting document processing application: MS Word Update - as of 2003/09 Ok, some of the section, column vitriol regarding sections in the original copy can be 'worked around' by using some disgusting non-intuitive page setup commands. Header, Footers, Columnns, and other section based formating can inject several section transitions within a single page. A classic symptom of this is a header that refuses to reference a previous page header even though 'same as previous' is selected. When this happens you will needs to view document in normal mode to see where the section breaks are. Position cursor just after a likely section break that could be creating offending document formatting. With the cursor so placed, menu page setup - there is a tab for formatting that will allow you to change from continous -> new page. Now the offending header will show up in the header footer view mode and can be properly setup if necessary. Use page setup again to revert new page -> continous section so document is pagenated as originally intended. The above DEFIES GOOD USER INTERFACE DESIGN FOR WYSISWTG and is reminiscent of command line based text editors. Grr! Update End Styles There may be a AA symbol in the menu. This will bring up the 'styles' pallete. If a predefined style needs to be tweaked, right click in the pallete on it, popup menu, modify. Try not use any style BUT these: Clear Formating, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 (Headings 1-3 appear in TOC) Table of Contents (TOC) Menu: Insert, Reference Popup: Table of Contents, unselect: Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers Mark selected text for inclusion in TOC There should be a menu tool called 'Outline level'. It should allow Body Text, Level 1, Level 2, ..., Level 9. Levels 1-3 will appear in TOC. All other, including Body Text, will not. GET THIS - there is another menu tool called 'Style'. It has a gazillion preset styles, some of which also set TOC include levels. Be carefull not to mix these up too much. When in doubt, hilite problematic text and apply 'Clear FOrmatting' style. Figure It is best to NEVER design figures directly within MS-WOrd. Use an external package (e.g. Visio works great). Copy and paste the figure as if it were text to the point in the document. Figure Captions To add a caption, hilite figure, pop-up menu caption. Once the caption appears, it is treated as normal body text and can be centered, reformatted normally. If you edit caption via the pop-up menu, it will create a second caption since it doesn't own the first caption after it was created. Footers, Headers Be very careful NOT TO ADD MORE THAN ONE for the entire document unless you are very sure you know how to undo it things get garbled. Select the title page, Menu: View, Header and Footer cursor down to footer Choose from floating header/footer menu, auto, confidential,page #, date There is a option in the floating menu for page setup. If you mess up, you should be able to reset all headers/footer from this control panel. Sections (what header/footers on based on) What is not obvious about using several different header/footer combinations in a document is the notion of a 'section'. MS Word allows special 'break's to be inserted where ever some 'logical' transition in you content occurs. There are several break types (see Insert Menu) that can be used. It is not obvious that the insert 'break section' is key to allowing multiple header/footers. The View header/footer mode is very misleading. Notice the 'Same as Previous' button on floating toolbar. This magical button is quite powerful and misleading in that: it can create a section and a new header or footer, it can remove a header or footer, it can NOT remove a section (even though it can create them). Note that if you click the 'Same as Previous' while in a header, it does not affect the current footer and visa versa. This can be very disorienting since headers can change independent of footers but both require a section transistion. Also, the 'Same as Previous' is a toggle. Click it again and it will remove the 'new' header it just created. You should be able to see a 'Sec #' indicator in the status area at the bootom of your document window. When a page flips from one section value to another, that is where a 'possible' header/footer change may occur. Sections have other weird qualities (such as changing how pages are numbered) and which can become so twisted and corrupted as to cause a document to have to typed in from scratch to resolve - so be very careful with fancy header/footers and sections. They make the document fancy, but used too much in MS Word may cause unrecoverable corruption. Weird Cutoff Text, Margins, Header/Footer Margins are for the body text. Header/Footer (from edge) seem not to be affected by margin values. On some systems (Mac OS X) the printer settings within in the Page Setup menu may influence how MS Word checks for 'valid Margins' though it is not sensitive to wacky header/footer values. With a Xerox 8200DP printer I have seen how any attempt to set bottom margin less than 0.56 (inches) causes a 'out of bounds' message when values are commited - even though the printer regularly prints to within 0.125 with other applications. Work around is to select a different printer while setting margings, save document, then select the desired printer - wala it prints like it should have in the first place. Grr! Importing Diagrams - Visio, just select copy and paste :-) - to import EPS images into MS Word menu: Insert, Picture, From File Difficult EPS: in cases it may be best to open Adobe Illustrator select all, then paste into Word Columns Avoid the use of columns if possible. However, they can be enabled/toggled menu: format, columns if necessary. Note, once you turn on columns it may be difficult to remove them later.