What I’m reading: Swimming with Crocodiles by Will Chaffey
What’s on the iPod: I Saw a Stranger by John Gorka
I’ve had a good start to the week — two new projects and a new client meeting scheduled for the conference. Today I’ll be working on the new assignments as well as on a current project. Plus, marketing for the conference is continuing. Earnings for this month are looking very good already. I owe you all a monthly assessment. This week, I promise. But first, another Technology Tuesday.
Because we spend so much time using it, Word is once more our focus in this technology post. Back in 2005, I was hired to proofread and format a college course catalog. I took it on not knowing much about formatting, but figuring it couldn’t be all that hard.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, it is. The formatting nearly sunk me.
But I learned as I went. Here are some neat tricks I’ve picked up over the years:
Moving footnotes to end notes. This just happened with a current client document. The client, maybe not knowing how to insert footnotes, created his own, along with his references, underneath what he was citing. That’s fine, but for a website article, the less stuff interrupting the flow of information, the better. So, to move the footnotes to end notes:
Click on the footnote field.
Right-click and select Note Options.
In the Location field, click on Convert. Then make sure the “Convert all footnotes to endnotes” option is selected (it defaults to it). Click OK.
Done.
Using column breaks and kerning.
Let’s use the college example. The course listings shouldn’t be broken up from page to page. To get this to occur, column breaks and kerning were my best friends.
Here’s the text we’re presented with:
So let’s fix it. Start with the Column Break function:
Place your cursor at the beginning of the last course description in the first column (AEDU 503).
Go to the Page Layout tab, click on Breaks, and choose Column,
This gives you one neat little column break. Now the content of that entire course description is together in the next column.
Repeat with each paragraph of your document in which you need to keep the entire contents together.
Kerning is just adjusting the spacing between the letters to help everything fit.
Let’s say the section you’re working on has one line that jumps to the next column, like this:
Note the section at the top of the second column (highlighted in gray). You don’t want to make a column break for 20 lines of text to bring that widow under control.
That’s where kerning helps. And with a little eyeballing, you can see opportunities to use it. For example, the actual description causing the issue is crammed full of characters. There isn’t much chance to kern the text. However, the description just above the one in question (in the first column, AEDU 562) has a good bit of space on some of those lines.
Highlight that description.
Right click and choose Font.
Click on the Advanced tab.
In the Spacing field, it should say Normal (the default). Go to the “By” field to the right, click the down arrow once. That will condense the font.
The result: those widowed lines are now in the same column as the rest of that paragraph.
I left the text we’ve just applied kerning to highlighted so you can see the difference.
Kerning takes a bit of trial-and-error application sometimes. But if you just can’t get the breaks to hit correctly, it’s a great tool.
Writers, what feature in Word do you use most often?
What have you discovered in Word that has made your job a little easier?
These days it's using heading so I can generate a table of contents… didn't know about the footnotes… thanks.
The headings are so useful, aren't they Anne? I used them yesterday, and I'll be doing the same today.
I don't know half of what Word does, but when I started doing resumes I learned all kinds of tricks that anyone else would probably already have known.
Paula, isn't that the way of it, too? It's how I learned. The formatting was the toughest for me because that's not normally within our job duties. But darned if I wasn't expected to do just that!