The writers at the group blog Magical Words have developed an interesting little piece of software called Character Keeper, an AIR-based program intended to keep track of character profiles and other snippets of information related to your book. Becuase it’s AIR, Adobe’s stand-alone Flash platform, it will run on any computer that can run current versions of Flash (though you’ll need to install the AIR runtime if it’s not alreadyon your system).

The program is quite simple - each note has a descriptive headline, a category (intended to keep separate your notes for different projects), and a large text space for free-form text writing. On the right-hand side, notes (they call them “clips”) are organized by category, allowing you to skim through all the notes related to a particular project. The program features one-click copying of theentire note so you can easily copy-and-paste your notes into whatever document you’re working on.

Character Keeper is a simple little application that doesn’t do much, but it may well fit into your writing workflow. It’s free at the moment; the site seems to implythat they’ll be charging for it in thefuture, but unless they add significant new features Ican’t imagine it being worth paying for. As a free app, though, it’s certainly worth a try.

Character Keeper (free)

Don’t worry, Linux has you covered.

Searching

Unix users have become very adept at managing files in plain text format that might be stored all over a computer (including extremely large server systems). Historically, unlike systems such as Windows that often store system configuration data in proprietary (read: bizarre, and all-but-incomprehensible to even veteran users) format, most Unix configuration files are kept as plain text. So, in order for Unix admins to find these configurations over an entire system, many utilities to search text were created.

Linux includes these, and you can use them not only to find and manage system configs, but anything stored in plain text (such as HTML files). The Linux utility for this is called grep. Please don’t ask me what the word means, just look here. Searching with it is as easy as entering a command like the one below:

grep -R yoursearchword *

This command will search all files in the directory you are currently in, and all those below (and the one below those, etc…) for the term “yoursearchword.” The “-R” flag stands for “recursive,” which tells grep to go into all downward directories. The “*” acts as you might expect, and searches all files; the command could have just as easily been “*.txt* to search text files or “*.html” to search web page files. The command will give you a result like the one below, listing all the files that contained the search term:

Now that we’ve found what we’re looking for, let’s say it was an old version of a draft. You might find it useful to compare it to what you have currently, say, to save that one genius piece of prose that you’d forgotten to copy over.

Comparing

There is also a Unix utility for comparing two text files for changes between them. diff looks at two files, line by line, and identifies anywhere that the two don’t match up. It will output a list of files and line numbers where the files don’t match up. So, if you know there’s a paragraph that’s missing from your current file, and it was in a different file, then you’ll be able to find it. This may not seem like a benefit if you’re comparing two files: after all, it might be easier to just look at them. Maybe… but it will probably take you more than .7 seconds, which is the length of time a two-file compare would take. You could do so with the following command:

diff yourtextfile1.txt yourtextfile2.t2t

Note the difference extensions — diff doesn’t care what the files are called, as long as they’re text. So you could compare a “.txt” file to an “.html” file. Just be prepared for a lot of results.

But what if you’re genius paragraph is buried somewhere in your several-levels-deep directory tree with dozens of files. diff will allow you to set a “base” file to compare all other files against. Consider the following:

diff -r -y --to-file="yourbasefile.txt" .

Here, the “-r” flag works the same as above, telling the program to recurse lower-level directories, and “-y” tells it to give you a side-by-side listing (you’ll want this format at first). The “ — to-file=” flag instructs diff to compare all files it finds, one file at a time, against the file “yourbasefile.txt.” Finally, the trailing “.” is Unix’s (and DOS’, if you remember) abbreviation for your current directory. So, the above command will go through the current directory, and all those below it, and compare each file it finds to “yourbasefile.txt.” Sounds slightly more useful? I agree.

With the above two programs, in addition to the drafting tools we discussed last time, gives most writers everything they would need to draft their ideas. But once your ideas are on-screen, what then? Most writers will need to add formatting (or confirm, since we’ve done that already with txt2tags), add things like tables of contents, indeces, and possibly collaborate with others on authoring. There are certainly ways to accomplish these using plain-text tools, but for many, using other programs will be more convenient. In the next installment, we’ll look at the latest version of the king of Linux word processors, OpenOffice.org, and see what’s new for writers.

Image by sirwiseowl via Flickr

In my series on collecting and organizing ideas, I discussed mind-mapping as a brainstorming tool. Mind-mapping is a kind of free-association method in which ideas are generated by association with a central idea, and then each of the generated ideas in turn becomes a source of inspiration for further brainstorming. Mind-mapping is an interesting blend of right-brain creative exploration and left-brain order-making – although the graphic format and unboundedness of mind-mapping allows for unfettered ideation, the linking of ideas creates a self-organized final product. In fact, most mind-mapping software includes an option to export the seemingly unstructured “blob” of thought that appears on the screen into a neatly-formatted traditional outline, complete with Roman numerals and sub-headings.

Chuck Frey emailed me in response to my mention of mind-mapping to tell me about a post he’d just written on the future of mind-mapping software. His blog is “The MindMapping Software Blog, so we can probably assume that Chuck has spent more than a few minutes thinking about the subject.

According to Frey, mind-mapping software is still barely out of its infancy, and we can expect to see some interesting developments ahead as programmers develop software that allows us not only to visualize the connections between ideas in our heads, but the connections between those ideas and the vast wealth of data on the Web. “The mind map needs to become more of a ‘knowledge hub’,” he writes, “where information can be gathered, manipulated and analyzed.”

Returning to the present, one of the premier mind-mapping applications out there today is iMindMap, the only mind-mapping software officially endorsed by Tony Buzan, the main figure responsible for developing and popularizing mind-mapping. The developers of iMindMap have taken great pains to make the experience of creating mind-maps on the computer as close as possible to the experience of drawing them with pencil and paper. In addition to brainstorming, iMindMap supports a wide range of planning activities, and integrates well with both MS Office and OpenOffice.

iMindMap’s Ultimate version retails for $295 USD, putting it well out of the reach for many writers (including yours truly). But Emily Van Keogh of Buzan Online has offered to give away one free copy of the Ultimate edition to one of my readers.

Which means I get to have a contest!

Now, I could make it easy on you and ask you to send me an email and pick one at random, or something like that, but I want to get into the spirit of the thing. So to enter, I’m going to ask you to answer that oldest of questions posed to writers:

Where do you get your ideas?

You can enter in one of two ways. First, you can leave a comment on this post with your answer. The other way is to write a post of your own, in any public forum you have access too – your own website, LiveJournal, even Twitter if you’re that concise – and put a link to your post in the comments on this post. Just make sure that anyone can read your answer, wherever you decide to post it. (I’d appreciate a link back to the contest, too, but it’s not a requirement.)

Enter by the end of October – that’s the 31st of October for the calendrically-challenged – and I’ll randomly select one entry as a winner. Buzan Online will supply a download link and registration code. Make sure you include your email address in your comment so I can contact you if you’re the winner!

I’m looking forward to seeing your answers to this totally clichéd question. Let’s try to be creative and informative – maybe we can come up with the perfect answer and then nobody will have to ask it any more! And feel free to spread the word – the more the merrier!

Image by ecstaticist via Flickr

The hardest part of any project for me is getting my notes and captured thoughts into some sort of usable format. That’s one of the reasons why I like conputerized note-taking systems like Evernote so much – it organizes for me by creating notebooks and allowing me to tag each entry.

But Evernote is only one of many different tools out there for organizing your thoughts. Each tool offers one or more of several key strategies for organizing ideas, so I thought I’d start this last section in this series by outlining some of the main strategies or paradigms for getting your thoughts organized in a useable form.

Strategies for Organizing Ideas

There are several different ways to organize your notes and inspirations for later recall. The ultimate goal is to be able to pull up the ideas you recorded earlier, whenever you need them and with as little effort as possible. This means imposing some sort of order on your material that makes sense to you – unfortunately, there is no single set of “best practices” that’s going to work for everyone. Here are a handful of strategies that might work for you.

1. Chronological

The simplest way to organize ideas – or anything else that occurs at various moments over time – is chronologically. You can keep an index card in your pocket, record any thoughts that come to you over the course of the day, jot a date in the corner, and drop it into an index card file at the end of the day before starting a new card. Or you could keep an idea journal, putting ideas down from front to back. Or even keep a single word processor file and add each thought to the bottom as it occurs to you.

The drawback to this kind of organization is that you have to remember when an idea occurred to you in order to find it again. Which isn’t very useful unless you have a mind like a steel trap (as they say) and a memory that goes back with some precision over several years. On the flip side, flipping through your ideas can be an inspiring activity in and of itself, and working chronologically does have the benefit of allowing you to see your ideas progress over time.

2. Project-based

If you work a lot on discrete projects, you might keep a file or folder for each project and add each idea to the appropriate place as needed. For example, you might write each new thought on an index card and, upon returning to your desk, drop each card into its respective folder. Or you could start an EverNote notebook for each project and clip notes to that notebook. This has the benefit of keeping everything you need to work on a particular project at your fingertips when you need it most, and out of the way when you don’t. On the other hand, it doesn’t help with ideas that don’t clearly belong to an active or past project, nor with ideas that might be useful in more than one context.

3. Tagging

Tagging is the newest thing in taxonomy, and if you use any modern blogging software, photo sharing site, or social media service, you’ve run across it. With tagging, you can assign a set of descriptive keywords to an item, allowing you to find it by browsing through any of the tags associated with it. Tagging eliminates the need to place individual copies of a document in several different folders – the same document can be found through any of the tags you’ve given it.

Several applications use tagging, but for the most part, tagging hasn’t quite hit its stride yet. It’s still difficult, for instance, to tag files on your computer’s file system (though see below for one solution), and no adequate system of scanning files and automatically tagging them has been developed yet. On the other hand, if you stay on the ball, you can produce a very useful set of tags, assigning everything you produce to its relevant project(s) and a set of descriptive terms that you are likely to remember.

4. Freeform

With search technology becoming more and more robust, some people have foregone organizing their thoughts altogether, depending on the ability of tools like Google Desktop to find whatever they’re looking for quicker than they could themselves. There  are tools that bring this approach to note organization as well, allowing you to dump everything into one central repository and pull out of it what you need using search or visualization techniques. For example, personal wiki software allows you to keep notes and add links on the fly using special formats like CamelCase (phrases squished together with each word capitalized to distinguish it from the words before, as in “CamelCase”) – and some newer wikis will find links between entries automatically.

Some applications for organizing your thoughts while writing

askSam: askSam has been around for years, and is the original freeform database. You can dump just about anything into askSam – including imported documents – and organize it easily in ways that make sense to you. askSam will locate links between various pieces of text and help you find exactly what you’re looking for. And it’s designed to be easy to use for non-technical users. At $150 for the basic version and almost $400 for the Pro version, it’s not cheap, but so many writers swear by askSam that I had to include it here.

The Literary Machine: A free program that whose author calls it a “document compiler”, the Literary Machine is a strange beast that some writers rave about and others loathe with all their hearts. The general idea is that you can dump ideas in and then pull them up and string them together into a final document. It’s not particularly intuitive, so I might be missing great gobs of functionality hidden under the hood; if the LM’s oddness clicks with your own particular brain quirks, you might find it an amazing extension of your thought processes. Otherwise, like me, you’ll pr’y be baffled.

Liquid Story Binder/yWriter 4/Scrivener/Story Mill: These novel-writing apps allow you to organize your ideas by project, with character sheets, setting forms, images, sounds,notes, and all manner of other information. They also feature built-in document editing, so that you work in a wholly self-contained workspace with everything you need a mouse-click or two away. I’ve written about Liquid Story Binder and yWriter on this site; Scrivener and (Story Mill (formerly “Avenir”) are Mac-only and I haven’t used them, but many writers claim they are worth switching to Mac for! yWriter is free; the rest are all commercial software.

TiddlyWiki: TiddlyWiki is designed to be a personal wiki, allowing you to store, search link, and easily update your thoughts, notes, and ideas. The system is a self-contained web page that can open in any modern browser, from any storage medium (which means you can easily run it from a thumb drive, external hard drive, even an mp3 player if it will mount as an external drive on your system). TiddlyWiki is free and very customizable, with themes and plugins such as those at TiddlyTools.

Tag Everything (formerly “Files, Folders, and Tags”): Tag Everything allows you to add tags to files and folders directly in the Windows file system, which means you can easily associate one file with several different projects. It’s not free, but at $30 it’s not terribly expensive, either, and if taging “clicks” with how yur brain works, it’s the only way at the moment to bring tags to your Windows files.

Of course, there are hundreds of other tools that can help you organize your thoughts. I’ve tried here to mention a few of the more representative ones, but I’m interested to hear your thoughts – what software, if any, helps you get your thoughts organized when you write? How do you keep track of all the odd ideas that occur to you throughout the day – once they’re recorded, then what? Let me, and the other readers, know about your system in the comments!

To reiterate: the passive voice is when you explain what’s happening in such a way that the action happens to the subject rather than having the subject do the action. Consider this sentence:

• The Fonz was standing against the wall.

It’s a weak sentence, becuase standing is sort of happening to the Fonz, who we all know is not the type of guy to take such an unengaged approach to life. Consider this, instead:

• The Fonz stood against the wall.

That’s the Fonz we know and love, taking charge of his standing!

The verb “to be” and its various forms are the hallmarks of the passive voice. They make your action into something that a character or feature is rather than something they do. Politicians love the passive voice, because it distances them from the effects of their bad decisions: “Mistakes were made” versus “I made a mistake.” “Unemployment is up” rather than “I caused unemployment to go up.”

You shouldn’t worry overmuch about the passive voice as you write — worry about it instead when you revise. (The passive voice isn’t something you should worry about too much while you’re writing; instead, it is something you should worry about when you are revising. See the difference?) Using a couple of neat tools in Word’s “Find” dialogue, you can easily highlight every potential trouble spot.

Here’s how I told you to do it in Word 2007:

1. Select a color to highlight with (the default is yellow)
2. Hit “Ctrl-F” to bring up the “Find” dialogue
3. Type the word “be” into the “Find what” space
4. Hit the “More” button to expand the advanced options
5. Check the “Find all word forms” box
6. Click “Reading Highlight” and select “Highlight all”
7. Click “Close”

Word will highlight every instance to the verb “to be” in the color you chose — including conjugations like “am”, “is”, “was”, “were”, “been”, and so on. Go through and review each sentence to see if there isn’t a stronger way to phrase it. When you’re done, hit “Ctrl-F”, click “Reading Highlight”, and select “Clear highlights”.

Previous versions of Word don’t have the “reading highlight” feature, but you can approximate the effect. You’ll need to use the “Replace” function instead of “Find” and replace the formatting around the “be” words.

1. Select a color to highlight with (the default is yellow)
2. Hit “Ctrl-H” to bring up the “Replace” dialogue
3. Type the word “be” into the “Find what” space
4. Hit the “More” button to expand the advanced options
5. Check the “Find all word forms” box
6. Click “Format” at the bottom and select “Highlight”
7. Click “Replace All”

The only disadvantage of this method is that it actually changes the document, where Word 2007’s Reading Highlight feature only temporarily highlights words. To undo it, you’ll have to do another Replace All, adding Format > Highlight to the “Find what” space and removing formatting from the “Replace” space.

That said, Word 2007 puts a lot of useful tools at your fingertips for proofreading and editing. Of course, there’s spell-check, which is a useful tool when used wisely and carefully (I can’t tell you how many papers I’ve read by students who apparently ran spell-check and simply accepted whatever changes Word recommended). But there are a lot more little tools that can prove very useful indeed — you just need to know where to look.

Here then, in no particular order, is a grab-bag of tips and tricks for editing and proofreading using Word 2007. Some of these tips might work for earlier versions of Word, but since I don’t have an earlier version available, I can’t test them to make sure.

Add space between paragraphs

If you’re like me and print your documents out to proofread them, you could probably use a little more space between paragraphs for notes and additions. Hit CTRL-A to select the entire document, then hit CTRL-0 (that’s a “zero”, not an “oh”) to add an extra line of space between every paragraph. To revert back to normal spacing, just do it again and all the extra spaces will disappear.

Check readability

Word 2007 includes a readability analyzer, which uses the length of sentences, the average syllable-count of your words, and other factors to determine how easy or hard your writing is to read. While it’s not a perfect measure, you can get a pretty good idea, especially from the “Grade Level” ranking, which tells you how many grades of education someone would need to understand what you write. I try to aim for something around 7th-9th grade as a general rule, although I usually end up closer to 10th. (This paragraph has a rating of 14.3, which means you need a couple of years of college to read it — like I said, it’s not a perfect measure!)

To activate it, click on the “Home” button (the big round button at the top right corner), click “Word Options”, go to the “Proofing” tab, and check the box next to “Show readability statistics”. Once you’ve done that, readability figures will come up in the results box after you run a spelling and grammar check.

Highlight passive voice

The “Reading Highlight” feature is useful for a lot of things, but I think it’s an especially neat way to check your writing for passive voice use. What Reading Highlight does is perform a search but, instead of taking you to the next instance of your search terms, it highlights all instances throughout the text.

To use it, select a highlight color from the “Home” tab, then hit CTRL-F to bring up a search window. Enter your search term or phrase, click the “Reading Highlight” drop-down, and select “Highlight All”. Click “Close” and watch your highlights appear. To remove the highlighting, re-open the search box, click the “Reading Highlight” drop-down, and select “Clear Highlighting”. Again, click “Close” and the highlighting will be gone.

How do you use this to find passive sentences? Well, we know that most passive statements use the verb “to be” in some form or another. So we want to search for “be” in all its variants: is, was, are, am, were, etc.

Open the search dialog (CTRL-F), type “be” as your search term, and click the “More” button. Put a check in the box next to “Find all word forms”, click the “Reading Highlight” button and select “Highlight All”, and click “Close”. Now, every permutation of “to be” will be highlighted. Not all of them are going to be passive — or too passive, anyway — but many will. Rewrite all those sentences to have more active verbs.

Look at two parts of your document at the same time

Word’s “Split” view allows you to look at two different parts of your document at the same time, scrolling through each part independently. On the “View” tab, select “Split” (in the “Window” section). You will be given a line to place on the page — place it where you’d like (I prefer straight down the middle) and now you can scroll to two separate parts of the same document — useful for cutting and pasting from one chapter to another, reviewing bibliographic citations to make sure you haven’t left anything out of the “Works Cited” page, or keeping a chapter outline visible at the top of the screen while you work at the bottom.

To revert to a normal view, just click the same button (now marked “Remove Split”) again.

Edit in Print Preview

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve looked at document in Print Preview, right before printing, and found one little thing that I need to correct. Well, instead of closing Print Preview, making your change and then previewing your changes again, you can make quick edits directly in Print Preview.

To do so, simply remove the checkmark next to “Magnifier” in the “Preview” group on the Print Preview menu. Now, instead of zooming in when you click on the document, your cursor will be placed into the text and you can make your edits.

Your tips and tricks

Word 2007 is a huge and complex piece of software. Even using the tips in this series, you’ll still only be using a fraction of its power. What other tricks do you know that offer particular aid to writers? Let us know in the comments!

But you might have seen another kind of “break” while moving through Word’s menus. They’re in a different place for some reason — go to the Page Layout tab and look at the “Page Setup” section and you’ll see a drop-down marked “Breaks”. Here you’ll find several different ways to insert section breaks:

• Next page: Inserts a section break and moves you to the next page. Useful for starting a new chapter.
• Continuous: Inserts a section break but keeps you on the same page. Useful when writing copy that you don’t know the end-formatting for, such as something that will eventually end up as a sidebar.
• Even Page: Inserts a section break and jumps you to the next even page. Useful for booklets.
• Odd Page: Inserts a section break and jumps you to the next odd page. Useful for book layouts, where you always want the chapters to start on the odd (right-hand) page.

A section is more than just a page break, though. What makes them especially powerful is that you can apply styles to each section individually.

Let’s say, for instance, that you want to include an appendix in your book, but you’d like the text to be smaller than the rest of the book, and all the headings and indented quotes and everything else to be scaled accordingly. You can define a new style for the appendix with smaller font sizes for every element, and apply it only to that section. This is incredibly useful for bibliographies, where, for instance, you might want to use hanging paragraphs (where the first line is aligned to the margin but all subsequent lines are indented one or two tabs).

The options for working with sections don’t stop at styles, though. In fact, just about everything you can customize for a document as a whole you can customize individually for each section within a document. It’s as if you were stringing together several documents, each with its own style sheet.

So your cover page can be styled one way, your front matter another, your body chapters a third, your index a fourth, and so on. Each section can be individually paginated, which means you can have no page numbers on your cover page(s), lowercase Roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv…) on your preface and introduction pages, and traditional numbering on all your chapters. (Go to “Insert > Page Numbers > Format Page Numbers” and check or uncheck the “Continue from Previous Section” option as needed.)

Other things you can do with sections:

• Insert a page in landscape layout: Set your cursor in the section you want to change the layout of, go to “Page Layout > Orientation” and choose “Landscape”.
• Insert a multi-columned page or pages: Again, set your cursor in the section you want to reformat, go to “Page Layout > Columns” and select the column layout you want.
• Remove section breaks: On the Home tab, click the “Paragraph” button (the one that looks like a backwards “P” — the popup says “Show/Hide”) to show all the layout codes in your document. Set your cursor before a section break and hit “Delete”.

Sections + Styles = Table of Contents

Here’s something neat you can do with longer documents. Assuming you’ve been good with applying styles — Heading 1 for chapter titles, Heading 2 for chapter sections, etc. — you can have Word automatically generate a Table of Contents. For some reason this is under “References”.

Create a new section near the front of your document (duh, right?). Set your cursor at the top, and click the “Table of Contents” button on the “References” tab. You can select one of the pre-defined styles, or you can click “Insert Table of Contents” to bring up a dialog to adjust the settings.

Decide how many levels you want to appear in your table of contents — if you want just the chapter titles, select “1”, for chapter titles and sub-heads, select “2”, to add sub-sub-heads select “3”. It will use your “Heading 1” text for the first level, “Heading 2” for the second, “Heading 3” for the third — creating an outline of the book based on your styled text. Pretty neat, huh?

Up next: a grab-bag of proofreading and editing tricks in Word 2007. Stay tuned, as always!

Fortunately, Word has long had a little-used feature that allows you to work with separate “chunks” of content and compile them into a single final document. It’s called a “master document” and is a pretty straight-forward but powerful tool. Simply put, a master document is a single document that pulls content in from several other documents, like individual chapters.

In the past, people have had some trouble with master documents, and it’s easy to see why: you’re asking Word to put together documents with different preferences, formatting options, and other settings, and Word has to make some difficult choices. If you’re using consistent style sets across your documents, though, much of Word’s work is done for it. And since Word 2007 makes styles so much easier to work with, many of the problems users of previous editions of Word had should be alleviated.

Creating a Master Document in Word 2007

While you can make a master document at any point in the writing process, it’s best to start your project intending to use a master document. Create a single folder for your document, and save all the pieces into it. You’ll be telling the master document where to look on your hard drive for the pieces it needs to put together, and if you decide to move them halfway through the project, you’ll confuse your master document.

Once you’ve created your project folder, open Word and create a master document. You can start from scratch or use an existing document — but since you’ve planned out your project in advance (right?), I’m going to assume you’re starting from scratch. Go to the “View” tab and select “Outline view”. The ribbon bar will change, giving you options for master documents. Click “Show Document” — the menu will change again, opening the options for master documents.

From there, you can “Create” new sub-documents, or “Insert” existing documents as sub-documents. Essentially, you’re outlining your project, with each big section — prefaces, introductions, chapters, chapter sub-sections, even big chunks of text — going into a separate document.

Next to the grey circle/minus sign icon, type a section heading — let’s say, a chapter title. Hit “Return”. Type another section heading. Hit “return”. And so on, fleshing out your outline. You can use the tab key to indent levels that will become sub-section headings and sub-sub-section headings.

Place your cursor in any heading (or sub- or sub-sub-heading) and hit the “Create” button and the heading will become an editable space. Any text you type next to the bullet point will be added to the sub-document. Double-clicking on the little “text” icon next to the header will open the sub-document, which you can edit independently. When you save the new document (you’ll be given a normal “Save” dialogue — save it into your project folder) the master document will be updated with the changes you made to the sub-document.

Placing your cursor on a heading and click the “Insert” button will allow you to select any document and insert it into your master document. I suggest copying any already-existing documents into your project folder first, so there’s no confusion about what files to edit or where everything is.

When you hit “Close Outline View”, you’ll return to the normal page layout and see your document looking like any other document.

Outlining a Document in Word 2007

You can also use the “Outline” view to create an outline of any Word document, as long as you’re using styles. Word will convert any Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. styles into appropriate level headings, and stick the paragraphs under them into the outline as separate bullet points. You can, of course, make changes, add sections, and so on from the “Outline” view.

You can convert your document into a master document, but you have to be careful of the text. Selecting a heading and all of the text under it, then hit “Create”. Or select a heading, hit “Create”, and drag and drop the text into the box around the new sub-document entry.

The “Outline” view can be a powerful tool, but it’s incredibly under-used. That’s understandable, since it is not entirely intuitive — it doesn’t work quite like you’d expect an outliner to work (and like most outlining programs work) and it’s not exactly pretty. Still, once you get a hang of it, there’s a lot to do with it, especially if you’re comfortable with master documents.

Using styles allows you to maintain a uniform set of formatting decisions across your document. Instead of formatting individual text selections independently, you can designate something as a kind of text — a header, an indented quote, a book title — and tell Word how to handle all text of that kind.

By doing this, too, you develop a semantic framework to your text — each piece of text is labeled by the type of text it is, which means you can do some nifty tricks with it, like automatically generating an outline or table of contents.

Styles in Word 2007 are organized into “sets”, pre-formatted templates with styles already defined for most of the common text elements (headers, paragraphs, indented quotes, etc.).

You can also create your own — get everything the way you want it using the normal formatting tools, then select “Save as Quick Style Set” from the “Change Style” drop-down — or modify any style set — adjust, say, the look of the headings using standard formatting tools, then right-click and select “Styles - Update to Match Selection”. Each style set can be further modified by selecting one of the color sets from the “Change Style” drop-down.

The real beauty of styles, though, isn’t in how it looks but in how it works under the hood. By designating pieces of text as “body text”, “headings”, “quote text”, etc. as you go, you are creating an underlying structure to your work that you can manipulate later. Instead of adding formatting to your text directly, you apply the formatting to the structural element, and every matching element across the entire document is updated instantly.

Consider this scenario: After writing 120 pages of your technical manual, you decide that topic subheadings should stand out more — maybe by adding a blue border around them. Without styles, you’d have to scroll through the entire document and add a border around each topic subheading individually. Applying a border is painful enough without doing 30, 40, or more times! If you’ve been marking your topic sub-headings as “Heading 3” all along, though, you can simply right-click the “Heading 3” box in the ribbon bar at the top, select “Modify”, change your formatting options, and hit “OK”. If, 40 pages later, you decide you’d also like them to be italicized, you don’t have to go back and change them all, again, individually — just modify the “Heading 3” style again.

Or maybe you aren’t comfortable with the “Modify Style” dialogue. Maybe you’re more comfortable using the standard formatting tools. Fine — pick a heading, modify it as you wish, right-click, and select “Styles > Update Heading 3 to Match Selection”. You can create new elements the same way — format a piece of text to your liking, right-click, and select “Styles > Save Selection as a New Quick Style” — it will pop up into the style selector at the top for one-click access as you go on with your document.

For styles you know you’ll use a lot, you can assign custom keyboard shortcuts, so you don’t have to do all that mousework. Right-click the style element you want to assign a shortcut to, select “Modify”, and click the “Format” button at the bottom left. The last choice is “Shortcut Key”, which opens the shortcut dialogue. Choose something you’ll remember (better yet, create a cheat sheet with your codes and tape it to your monitor) — I’d suggest using the “Alt_ key plus a letter, like “Alt-P” to apply the Paragraph style. Most of the “Ctrl+key” combinations are spoken for in Word, but few of the Alt+key” combos are. (Here’s the thing — you don’t want to pick “Ctrl+H” to apply “Heading 1”, because “Ctrl+H” opens the Find/Replace dialogue.)

And, to be honest, it deserves it. Despite its quirks, despite the bully tactics of Microsoft, despite its proprietary format and top-secret inner workings, Word is pretty much the golden standard of word processors. You might have been happy with WordPerfect under DOS, or even WordStar, but they’re gone and Word’s still around.

The newest version, Word 2007, even manages to rise above Word’s utilitarian roots. It’s actually fun to use — or it can be, once you figure out how everything works. Most of the old functions are still there, behind the more flashy “ribbon” interface — and Microsoft has taken pains to put some of the under-used but useful features front and center in the newest iteration of Word. (As always, I can really only speak about the Windows version; from what I understand, Word 2008 on the Mac is something of a travesty.)

This week, we’ll be looking at some of those useful features. We’ll start by exploring Word’s “Styles”, which make formatting easy. Then we’ll look at some of the features that help manage all the pieces of long works (like that novel you’re planning). Finally, we’ll look at some of the ways Word can help you move from first to final draft.

Of course, Word has tons more features — a built in (but not quite ready for prime time) reference manager, the same old dreaded footnoting function, and version tracking for collaboration. Maybe I’ll come back to those in a follow-up post.