Submitted by Theresa de Valence on Sun, 02/01/2009 - 07:13
Plenty of people use Word, but I have never used it for more than minor editing of an existing document, so I can't be very helpful.
- What features do writers use?
- How many people are satisfied with Word?
- Are there features you wish it had?
From our Guest Bloggers
L.J. Sellers posted in her blog about how she uses Notebook Layout and Highlight features in Word and builds a Character database in Excel to help her stay organized. Check out the comments in her blog post for one issue she wished Word handled better.
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Alphabetizing with outline feature of headings
I wanted the ability to alphabetize my writing of short thoughts. I first tried index marking but that was too much work. Finally I found something easy that really works.
I use the outlining features Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3. I give each heading its own color. Red. Green. Blue. To alphabetize, do Heading 1 and sort.
Also I made the headings hidden text so it doesn't show in the printout. Just on screen.
Also I made a macro to automate it. I mark a heading with the plus sign +. The macro turns it into Heading 1 and alphabetizes the file in a few seconds. I sort in descending order from Z to A to put the good stuff at the top for printing. Just marking with + will put it at the bottom of your file for dealing with later. If I want something at the top of file, I can force it there with the letter Z.
You can tag your stray ideas and sort them so they come together.
:)
Alphabetizing with styles (Heading1, etc.)
Hello Smartings, thanks for posting.
Why is it you wanted to alphabetize? I can't imagine how alphabetizing would help in the work of writing or organizing a novel, but your technique sounds interesting, and it's obviously easy to implement. Are the "short thoughts" actually inside the text marked by the style named Heading1, or is Heading1 sorting something else? What do you use Heading2 and Heading3 for?
There are other uses where styles can be useful. Elsewhere I've written about using styles (e.g. Heading1, etc) to track CluesEtc with a word processor.
I hope you let us know more about how you're using styles. Thanks again for writing.
Regards,
Theresa
Keeping tabs on your work.
I do everything in Word. Separate documents for the synopsis and research documents. I open all the documents at the same time and keep them tabbed (a little add-on called WinTabs will tab Word for you. Wintabs has been successful with all my Word versions, 97, 2003 and 2007, and the product can be found http://17slon.com/gp/wintabs/index.htm.
Lynne Connolly
http://lynneconnolly.com