Tag Archives: styles

Q&A: How can I tell what section of a document I’m in?

QI’m working in a document with dozens of headings and subheadings. I want to check which section I’m working in without having to scroll back up to find the heading. Is that possible?

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Shrink Files by Deleting Unused Styles

Word files can get bloated, taking up far more MB than they should. If you’re dealing with a book-length manuscript full of tracked changes and comments, that bloat can bog down the computer and lead to failures, glitches, and basic Office malfeasance.

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Turbo Boost Manuscript Styling with This Simple Macro for MS Word

Like many manuscripts, this imaginary sample has a standard sequence of content that can be styled automatically with a macro applied on each heading line: head, first paragraph, subsequent paragraphs.

Styles have many wonderful uses, so it behoves any editorial process to use them. We’ve looked at several ways to apply styles, now we’ll look at a macro that will apply several styles in one click!

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Quick Tricks for Applying Styles to Word Documents

Styles are applied to many good ends, in Word: production workflow, ebook coding, and making restructuring easy, to name a few. There are several easy ways to apply styles, too!

  • Styles area of the Home ribbon
  • Styles panel
  • Format painter
  • Keyboard shortcut
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Try This! Restructure Using Styles

In this exercise, you’ll practice applying Styles and using the Outline View.

Heading levels must be indicated in the manuscript in some way. Heads can’t simply be formatted as body text—even boldfacing will help the designer as much as the editor. And the reader absolutely needs them.

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Working with Tables: Aligning Numbers

Left and right alignment aren’t going to cut it when aligning numbers in tables. Best practice to align numbers on the decimal. Aesthetics dictate that the numbers also be centred. Tab settings make this process elegant, and the ruler makes it intuitive. See it in action in the demo video at the end, and read the steps below.

  1. Select the cells whose contents you want to align by clicking and dragging across them.
  2. On the ruler (revealed via the View ribbon), click the left corner edge several times to change the tab mark selection to “decimal align” (the up arrow on a point, shown at right).
  3. Click on the ruler to place the tab.
  4. Click on the tab mark and drag it along the ruler to adjust its placement.

Word is not a layout tool, but sometimes, it is what you have to use. Compositors also appreciate having table formatting close to ideal, so editors end up tweaking alignment frequently.

Check out all the other posts in this series about Working with Tables and download your free multimedia ebook of them all!



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