The Word on MS Word
Microsoft Word is almost certainly the single “most used” business application. You owe it to yourself to read this article that highlights the “Word misuse” issue.
It will in turn point you to this article Beginner’s Guide to Professional Word Documents.
My pet peve is direct formatting. Samart people seem to be clueless about how powerful and easy Word’s “Style” feature is. I admit, however, that Word’s numbering routinely drives me crazy…
[tease]
Rule 1: Use Styles—Avoid Direct Formatting
Styles are Word’s most powerful feature. Everything you create in Word is attached to a Style. A style is a predetermined set of formats that you can use repeatedly throughout all your documents. Different parts of the document are tagged by the underlying styles. Reasons why you must use styles include:
* Consistency
Using styles ensures that document are formatted identically.
* Ease of editing
By using styles throughout a document, any change of layout or formatting can be applied to a style to make the change global.
* Efficiency of Working
Once a style has been created, it may be applied again and again eliminating the need to repeat the same old format changes and guaranty consistency.
* Table of Contents
By using heading styles, TOCs can be created automatically.
* Faster Navigation
Using styles enable faster long document navigation using the Document Map feature.
* Numbering
When numbering (and bullets) are linked to styles, numbering schemes become consistent and easier to manage.
* Efficiency and Robustness
The file structure of a document full of manual formatting (direct formatting) will be complex, bloated, slow to scroll, slow to render on screen and prone to corruption. Word is a style-based application; when a document is opened, Word first renders the contents, applies the styles and finally applies the manual formatting (that counters the style’s formatting). This makes Word sluggish because it has to labour to open, render or print the document.
* HTML and XML
A styles-based document will readily transfer into HTML or XML.
[via Gadetopia]