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I can only imagine some of you are smiling and thinking to yourself, 'Logic? What logic? Microsoft has no logic'. Ah, but it does.Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus
For those who are wrestling with 2003's advanced features, don't be intimidated by the newer interface of later versions of Word. Sure, the new look can be daunting. But no matter what, the logic behind formatting a document using MS Word hasn't changed.Determined to keep my job as a legal secretary in a past life, I went on a quest. While it may not have been the same as searching for the meaning of life, I did find the reasoning behind Word's method of formatting documents. I had to keep an open mind and not get intimidated by the then new buzz words like Styles and Templates. Like a CSI hunting for answers I worked on one Word document over and over again. until I got the hang of it. I took the Zen Approach and became 'one with the document'. I know, I don't have a life.
What I came up with is this:
Think of your Word Document as a Floor Plan.
Each Floor Plan made of of one or more Rooms.
A Word Document is made up of one or more Sections.
Each Room has it's own Decor.
Each Section in a Word document has it's own Page Formatting
Each Room is surrounded by Walls.
Each Section in a Word document is surrounded by Section Breaks
Approaching a Word Document with this mindset saved me plenty of time while attorneys hovered over my shoulder.
1 comment:
Finding this 14 years later after a quarrel with my designer friend who provided a word .doc where I was expecting a .dot. I'm trying to explain to her how word still follows the logic of a piece of paper being processed through a typewriter - one line at a time but giving you the maximum leeway to adjust those lines in the meantime, unlike Adobe's InDesign where you basically come from a bookprinter's point of view - seeing the entire layout of the page at the same time, putting in boxes here and there and basically adjusting squares, not lines.
It feels like this old Star Trek TNG episode where Captain Picard tries to communicate with a species that lives in the two-dimensional space. How can we? I think, your allegory might help with that.
Thanks! Actually, communicating with a blog post that was written so many years ago feels kind of similar. Hope, you're well!
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