Tag: Word for authors

Categories
The writing process

Word Tip 2: Make Your Novel a Trampoline

Microsoft Word Tips for Authors

Welcome to the next in a series of tips on using Microsoft Word, geared towards authors.
Most Word advice is rather complicated and full of things you’ll never need to know.
I shall do my best to keep it simple, because you’re not stupid… just busy.
Please note: 
– Not all versions of Word are the same, but most are near enough.
– There are different ways of doing the same thing. I shall demonstrate just one (or two).

Your novel becomes a trampoline when you’re editing. You need to be able to see its structure at a glance and quickly jump between chapters and sometimes sections of chapters.

This tip only works if you have defined heading paragraphs as shown in Tip 1.

Press Ctrl/F, which you probably use for searching in the novel.

The window that appears has three tabs: Headings, Pages and Results. Click on Headings. You’ll see all headings in the novel. If you’ve defined sub-headings, these will appear, too, and you can expand and collapse headings using the arrows, as you would for file names in Explorer.

I like to give my chapters names, even if these won’t remain in the final version, because the names show up in that pane on the left. And sometimes I separate a chapter into sections and give them names, too. Just so that I can see the novel’s structure at a glance.

Working with Word

How do you jump to a specific chapter or section in the novel?

Just click on it.

Questions and suggestions for future topics are welcome in the comments below.

Categories
The writing process

Word Tip 1: A Matter of Style

Microsoft Word Tips for Authors

Welcome to the first in a series of tips on using Microsoft Word, geared towards authors.
Most Word advice is rather complicated and full of things you’ll never need to know.
I shall do my best to keep it simple, because you’re not stupid… just busy.
Please note: 
– Not all versions of Word are the same, but most are near enough.
– There are different ways of doing the same thing. I shall demonstrate just one (or two).

You might think this one is a bit complex for a first tip. But I will be mentioning styles in most of the other tips, often along with alternatives, so I had to start by explaining what they are.

If you’ve never used styles, the chances are that everything you write uses the Normal style. The chances are that you just started writing using the font, font size, indentation and spacing that were defined for the Normal style. What did you do when asked to send your file in a different format? You selected the whole document (hopefully you know that Ctrl/A does that) and changed the font and size.

But what if you have headings (chapter headings or short story title)? Changing everything at once changes the headings, too. You might have to go through the novel, changing all the headings back to the way they were.

Instead, you can define the Heading 1 style for your chapter headings and keep the Normal style for the text. Here’s how:

  1. Click the arrow in the bottom right corner of Styles, which is in the Home tab. The Styles box appears.

    Styles Box in Word
    Styles Box
  2. Hover next to Heading 1 and click the arrow that appears.
  3. Choose Modify. The Modify Style window appears.
  4. Click Format (at the bottom) and choose Font.
  5. In the Font window, you can change Font style, Size and other details.
  6. Remember to click OK at the end.

Similarly, you can change the Normal style.

How do you define a chapter heading as Header 1? Here are two possible ways:

  • Click in the header and click Header 1 in Styles.
  • Click in the header and press Shift/Alt/←

You can also use the Heading 2 style for sub-headings. Next week, I’ll show you why that might be useful when editing a novel.

Questions and suggestions for future topics are welcome in the comments below.

Categories
The writing process

Word Tips for Authors

Microsoft Word Tips for Authors

If you’re an author, you will probably use Word at some stage. Even if you don’t use it to create your novel or story or non-fiction book, you will probably use it when interacting with an editor.

There are plenty of Word tips out there, but these contain so much information that they look too complicated to authors who have limited time for technology and a limited number of things they want to do with Word.

And yet, there are features that would make their Word experience much more pleasant, if only they knew about them.

I’m going to try to make those features clearer by posting a tip once a week on Fridays, starting next week, 5th April. I’ll be using the hashtag #MSWordTipsForAuthors. See you back here.

If you have any questions or suggestions for topics, that’s what comments are for.

↓↓↓

Categories
Books Social anxiety The writing process

What Not How

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

The other day, I tweeted the following:

You don’t have to remember how. You only have to remember what.

It was in reply to this, from @jamesgarside_:

People: How do I [do thing] on computer?
Me: *googles how to [do thing] and shows them*
People: Well, I could have just googled that!
Me: But you didn’t. You asked me.
People: YOU should know how to do it without searching for it first.
Me: You didn’t know how to do it at all!!!

The tweet contained an appropriate head-banging GIF.

I could definitely relate that to Microsoft Word. I think most authors use it, even though there is sophisticated software dedicated to writing novels. And most authors have no idea what Word can do – features that would help them immensely if only they knew about them. What, not how. Once you know that a thing is possible, you can find out how to make it happen. But if you don’t know it’s possible, you won’t think of searching, to discover how to make it happen.

Shocked SmileyImage by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

I was shocked to hear one author’s method of working with Word. She creates an Excel sheet with the starting and ending page numbers of each chapter, so that she can go directly to the chapter she wants to review. During (or after) every revision, she updates the Excel files with the new page numbers.

That would never work for me. I have so many revisions that I would never manage to keep the spreadsheet up to date. Fortunately, Word itself has a much simpler solution – one that doesn’t have mistakes because it’s built in.

Working with Word
Cropped screen shot of Cultivating a Fuji in Word

This is how Word looks as I’m working on a novel. Down the left-hand side is my list of chapters. I give the chapters names, even if the names won’t remain in the final version. That way, I know roughly what’s in each chapter. When I want to review a specific chapter, I click on the chapter in the list and Word jumps right there. So much simpler than going to a separate file, rembering a page number and then going to that page in the Word file.

Sometimes I divide the chapter into scenes by creating sub-headings, which also appear in the list. The sub-headings won’t be included in the final version of the novel, but they’re useful while it’s still being written/edited.

I might not remember exactly how to set this up without trying it out, first. I might even need to google it. But the main thing is that I know it’s possible. What, not how.

You don’t have to remember how. You only have to remember what.

Could that apply to other walks of life? What do you think?

~~~~~

News

To celebrate the forthcoming publication of my novel, Cultivating a Fuji, the ebook version of my non-fiction book, Social Anxiety Revealed, is completely free for one day only. Today. Do hurry to download it before time runs out…