Image via CrunchBase Whenever you work with other people on a document, whether they’re co-writers contributing changes and comments, editors recommending revisions, or even yourself adding and cutting a work for reprint or re-pitching, you run into the problem of how to compare the documents in a useful, productive way. Word’s “Track Changes” is good […]
Last month, I completed a project I’ve been working on for quite a while, a book of advice for college students called Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College. The book grew out of some of the frustrations I’ve had as a university instructor over the last five years, and […]
Last week, I explained how to highlight uses of the passive voice in your writing, using Word 2007. Here’s how to do the same thing in Word 2003 and earlier versions. 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 […]
I tend to prefer old-fashioned pen and paper for going over my drafts and marking revisions and edits. The screen has never struck me as a good medium for reading longer works on, and I think differently with a pen in hand than with a keyboard under my fingers. That said, Word 2007 puts a […]
Chances are, you’ve learned how to insert page breaks into Word documents (Insert > Page Break, just in case). This is useful for, say, adding a “Works Cited” page at the end of a document. But you might have seen another kind of “break” while moving through Word’s menus. They’re in a different place for […]
A book can be an unwieldy thing to write, especially on older (read: slower) hardware, and even more especially if you have illustrations, charts, and other graphic material in your file. As the document gets bigger, it gets slower and slower to open the document, to find your place, and to scroll back and forth […]
Styles are an incredibly useful feature in Word — which have unfortunately been rather hidden in previous versions. Word 2007 puts styles right on the main toolbar, so there’s no excuse not to use them. Using styles allows you to maintain a uniform set of formatting decisions across your document. Instead of formatting individual text selections independently, you […]
No tool is as central to the modern writer’s toolkit as Microsoft’s Word. It is the word processor of choice for most writers — and of necessity for most of the rest. Even when we escape Word itself, we are forced by publisher’s specifications to save our final output in Word’s .doc format. And, to be honest, […]
