Using MSWord Effectively

Ashley J.S Mills

<ashley@ashleymills.com>

Copyright © 2005 The University Of Birmingham

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Styles
3. References

1. Introduction

Microsoft Word, which will be referred to as "Word" throughout the rest of this document, is a proprietary WYSIWYG word processor for the Microsoft Windows operating system family. It is widely used by the business world and many professionals rely on it.

The fact is, Word is used extensively throughout the world and anyone interested in an office career is likely to have to use it some day so it is a good idea to learn how to use it as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Familiarity with GUI systems is assumed. This tutorial is also relevant to OpenOffice, a free office suite similar to Microsoft Office: http://www.abisource.com/, this tutorial is probably also relevant to other free word processing tools too.

2. Styles

Word styles are one of the most important concepts to producing structured documents within Word. A typical Word user will edit the document and make changes on-the-fly, that is, they will alter the appearance of the document as it is being written. Often the typical Word user is blissfully unaware of how to use styles. Not using styles is inefficient and unstructured.

The default word "mode" one is dropped into when creating a new document is not oriented toward the use of styles or structured editing. The desired view is one which shows exactly which styles are applied to each part of the text.

To achieve this view, click on the menu View and then click on normal. Click on the menu item Tools, click on the item Options, a dialog box will pop up, click on the View tab.

Under the section entitled Window change the Style area width to something other than zero:

The options box, set the style area width to a non zero value

This will cause the style area to appear down the left hand side of the document:

The style area can be seen to the left of the image

At the moment there is only one paragraph in the document, containing the text "What is truly random?". The style area to the left indicates that this paragraph is in the "Normal" style. This is the default style that Word uses for each paragraph. There are two types of styles; paragraph styles and character styles. Paragraph styles are applied to a full paragraph where as character styles are applied to a selection of characters within a paragraph.

If the cursor is within a word that has a character style applied to it, the styles box in the upper left hand corner will display the character style the word uses. If the cursor is within a line but not within a word marked up by a character style, the styles box will display the paragraph style the paragraph is using. The style area only shows which paragraph style is in operation for each paragraph. The styles box is shown below:

The styles box showing some styles available to the user

Word has quite a few built in styles such as those shown above that can be used to markup certain sections of text. Notice that, to a certain extent, the styles box visually indicates, for each style, how the text of a paragraph formatted with it will look. One could select heading1 for example and the paragraph which the cursor is currently residing in will be formatted according to the parameters of the selected style.

One is not limited to the use of the built in styles, the creation of new styles is also possible. To do this, click on the menu Format and then click on Styles. The Style control dialog box will pop up:

The style control dialog box

One can use this as an alternative means to applying a style to a paragraph instead of using the drop down styles box explained earlier. One can also modify an existing style by clicking on Modify or create a new style by clicking on New. All existing styles are available to the user from the dialog box by changing the value of the List drop-down menu:

All existing styles are available to the user for modification

The creation of a new style for the single paragraph in the document is shown below:

The new style dialog box showing the creation of a new style

The style's name is set to "Question" since the paragraph contains a question, note that I am not suggesting that one should mark up each question in the document, one may however. I am merely illustrating the process of creating a new style. Notice that one can set the style type to Paragraph or Character. Character styles will be discussed later. One may also specify which style should be applied to the paragraph following the current:

Changing the style of the paragraph following the current

One may also specify a style to base the new style on so that the new style inherits the properties of another. This can be useful for short-cutting the creation of styles that only differ slightly. To finish creating the new style, exit the dialog boxes by clicking on OK and then Apply. The new style will be applied to the current paragraph:

The newly created style has been applied to the current paragraph

The new style is now available in the drop down list of styles, it can be applied to any number of paragraphs and they will all adopt the formatting parameters specified by the style. One may modify an existing style at any time. Changing the font of the Question style is shown below:

Modifying the font of the Question style
The new font of the Question style

Changing the paragraph settings of the Question style is shown below:

Changing the paragraph settings of the Question style

The result of the previously indicated formatting on the appearance of the text marked up under the Question style is shown below:

The result of the previously indicated formatting on the appearance of the text marked up under the Question style

Some more text was added to the document. A new style called Body Text was also created. The modifications are shown below:

The result of the additional formatting discussed above

Notice how every paragraph has been marked up with a style and how much clearer the structure of the document is. It is content oriented with little styling, if the styling for Question had been left plain it would be almost entirely content oriented. No structure is enforced by using styles but the structure is made more explicit, if one applies a little self discipline ones documents can always afford this kind of structural quality. The result of changing the fonts of the Question style and the Body Text style is shown below:

The result of changing the fonts of the Question and Body Text styles

The ease with which overall changes to a document marked up with styles can be made has been illustrated. By applying styles to every paragraph in a document one can ensure that the document remains consistent with regards to how reoccurring document elements appear. One can ensure that a program listing is always marked up in a certain way, that a section title is always marked up in a certain way and so on such that the document has a standard appearance. This can be enforced to an even greater extent by using templates. The steps to do this are simplistic:

  1. Create a new template

    Creating a new template

  2. Create all desired styles, make sure that the Add to template check box on the new style dialog box is checked upon creation.

    Create the styles

  3. Perhaps even create a template layout of some sort.

    A template with styles

After saving the template one may then use it as a basis for a new document, all the defined styles will be available to use. Character styles are styles that are applied to sequences of characters as apposed to paragraphs with paragraph styles. The application of a character style to a sequence of characters is simplistic.

Imagine that one wants to include Java program listings within ones documents. A new style is created called "Java Program" that will display the program listing according to the formatting options specified. This is used to markup a Java program:

A Java program marked up in the style Java Program

Note that each line of the program is marked up as Java Program. It was not necessary to markup each line separately, one may highlight many lines and apply a style. Alternatively one may set the style of the first line and the subsequent lines will be automatically marked up as Java Program because in the creation of Java Program it was specified that the following paragraph should be marked up in Java Program too.

It was decided that the word "String" should be marked up in it's own style as a "Java Object" since it is a Java Object and the desired effect is that Objects should appear differently. The word "String" was selected and it's colour changed to pink from the Word toolbar and the styles dialog box was bought up by selecting Format..Style from the menu:

Creating a character style for Java Objects

An alternative way of setting the formatting parameters of a particular style has just been illustrated. One may select the text, or whole paragraph, apply the desired formatting and then create a new style from the menu as before, the formatting that was applied to the selection will be carried through to the new style dialog box. Changing the style so that the paragraph following the current is set to Java Program is shown below:

Changing the style so that the paragraph following the current is set to Java Program

The completed modification is shown below:

The result of the modifications explained above

Notice that the the styles box shows Java Object when the cursor is within the sequence of characters marked up as the character style Java Object and that the style area on the left still shows JavaProgram. Modifying a character style within a paragraph style will only effect the character style and vice-versa.

One can transform Word documents to CSS Compliant HTML by using the macro available from: http://www.geocities.com/w2css/, the styles are converted to CSS and the document converted to HTML that implements the CSS.

3. References