We writers have many tools.

We have our words, the nouns and verbs and adjectives and even the woefully despised adverbs, poor dears. We have our talent, our rare gift for putting the right words in the right order to make our readers weep, laugh, thrill, buy — or just turn the page. We have our minds, straining through the days and nights to create and hold onto the ideas that fill our words with meaning.

And we have our word processors. The tools we use to actually capture those ideas and put them down in words, the software and laptops and notebooks and ballpoints. These tools aren’t quite so glamorous. They seem so everyday, so mundane, so… boring.

And yet, there are few writers that aren’t infinitely fussy when it comes to their physical tools, who don’t demand just the right pencil on just the right paper, or who don’t secretly thrill at the prospect of a new notebook computer to carry down to that oh-so-perfect café. (We’re a little fussy about places, too.)

And why not? The tools we use to get our thoughts out of our head and onto paper (or increasingly, the screen) are the medium of our calling. You wouldn’t look askance at a painter who demanded the right brand of oil paint and a canvas prepared just so, right? A word processor or legal pad is a writer’s canvas; a keyboard or fountain pen her brush.

The truth is, there is inspiration in our tools. Just as the heft of a good chisel can make a woodworker itch to carve, a well-made writing instrument — whether a fine pen or a beautifully-designed word processor — can make us long to write, drawing from us the creative spark.

There are writers who write just to feel the flow of ink on the page (I’m one of them). There are others who are inspired by the shape of a font, the feel of a keyboard, the image of their words spilling across the screen (I’m one of those, too). I’m not kidding when I say that I was so impressed by Adobe’s gorgeous online word processor Buzzword that I wrote a book. Just so I could play with it.

Of course, there are writers who claim to be perfectly comfortable with a chewed-up #2 pencil and a student’s composition book. (Granted, it has to be a Blackwing 602 pencil and the composition books are imported from a stationer in France.…) But writers as a whole are especially prone to fetishizing our instruments, and with good reason: the way we write, the look and feel and smell and atmosphere of the experience of writing itself, affects the outcome of our writing.

Gertrude Stein wrote on scraps of paper on the dashboard of her Ford (which she called “Godiva”). Neil Gaiman writes with a fountain pen, in a Moleskine notebook. Lillian Jackson Braun, the author of the “The Cat Who…” mysteries, writes only on a typewriter. Speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison is also a typewriter fanatic, whose devotion to his Olivia is well-known. Jonathan Lethem has given up his typewriter but remains committed to “the eternal Selectric of the mind” (as he told Slate in 2007) — he only writes in 12-point Courier, double-spaced of course.

And on and on. Some writers pick a specific tool for a specific book, like a musician who chooses just the right guitar for each song. Neal Stephenson wrote his epic Baroque Trilogy, which is several thousand pages in published form, in longhand with a fountain pen on cotton paper. Stephen King wrote Dreamcatcher with a fountain pen, too, saying it forced him to slow down and get into the story.

It might be irrational to find inspiration in our tools, to bind ourselves to the way a specific pen or pencil looks or feels. After all, the words, the tone, the rhythm, the meaning — these all come up from within, right? And yet we writers are irrational creatures by our very natures. Why else choose to spend long hours locked away alone as our preferred method of communicating with people?

Rational or not, investing our tools with the power to draw forth meaning from the depths of our beings is a very human, and very writerly, thing to do. It pleases us to use good tools, especially when we use them well. It’s all well and good to meditate on how we spin the raw stuff of everyday life into complexly woven tales rich with insight into the human condition, but we shouldn’t forget the less exciting but no less essential tools we use to relate those tales to the rest of the world.

They are, after all, tools of inspiration.

OpenOffice has been the de facto leader in Linux-based word processing (at least, according to the most recent Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards). It’s installed by default on most mainstream, modern Linux distributions. So, if you are a writer working on a Linux platform, you are likely to come across it. Let’s look at some improvements in the newly-released version 3.0, as well as some of the useful extensions that you can select to enhance it for your writing. Note that the newest version 3.0 is not installed on some distributions yet, notably the recent release of Ubuntu 8.10, the Intrepid Ibex. You can always install the latest OpenOffice using the binary installer on the web site, or, if available, packages for your distribution.

Notes

The concept behind the notes feature in OpenOffice is identical to the one in Microsoft Office. The main difference is: in OpenOffice (version 2.4.2 and below), the feature is all but unusable. Adding a note from the menu item (Insert -> Note) calls up a dialog box (as shown in the image below).

This dialog box is a nuisance to begin with, not least of the reasons being: 1) the text won’t wrap, so when you enter it it continues on one long line and scrolls to the right, and 2) there is no way to close it without using the mouse (the Enter key inserts a carriage return). Additionally, the note itself appears as a small yellow highlight that you must either mouse-over or double-click to view.

In general, I’m a fan of putting notes into what I’m writing (such as questions to answer or research to perform later), but I couldn’t stand using the feature, much less looking at it when it was finished.

But this feature now mirrors the notes feature in Office 2007, in that the notes are colored and displayed to the right of the right-hand margin. In other words, the notes feature now works great (see illustration below).

Enhanced PDF

A feature that many will find useful is the enhanced PDF options available from the “File -> Export as PDF.” Some of the more useful ones for writers are:

• Hybrid PDF: OpenOffice supports the “PDF/A-1″ standard, which generates for a “modifiable” PDF. When opened by someone who has a compatible program, the document can be edited. When received by anyone else, however, they can always view it as a “normal” PDF.
• Security: The dialog contains a “Security” tab, which allows the user to restrict printing, copying text/images, and/or making changes. Useful for making e-books and other documents like reports that should be read but not disseminated.

Other enhancements

Some other miscellaneous enhancements include the following:

• Mac OS X Support: ‘Nuff said. This time with a native (Aqua) interface–no need for X11. Although I’ve been pushing Linux, we like Mac as well.
• OpenXML (a.k.a. Microsoft Office 2007 format: ‘Nuff said. Now you can work with all of those “.docx” files (not to mention “.xlsx” and “.pptx”). I’ve tested this, and can attest that it works much better (but not perfect) in OpenOffice 3.0.
• New view controls: Also like Office 2007, the new OpenOffice.org features a slide control for zoom, which I’ve become very accustomed to using. You are able to view more than one page at a time while editing.

Extensions

In addition to built-in functionality, one of the great things about OpenOffice is that you can add “extensions” for additional features. There are a number of these specifically targeted at or useful for writers, as follows:

• OpenOffice.org2GoggleDocs: This great extension does exactly what the name implies. It’s worked great for me, as I’ve drafted some of my fiction in Google Docs, and later opened (and saved) directly from OpenOffice Writer.
• txt2tags Extension: There is also an extension for using txt2tags mark-up within OOo Writer.
• Writers Tools” Extension: Dmitri Popov’s Writer’s Tools have been reviewed and profiled a number of times.

All in all, the new version 3.0 of OpenOffice closes a lot of the holes from the previous versions. It’s powerful, available on all platforms, and best of all, free. So download it and try it out–you literally have nothing to lose.

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.

Job Profiles’ list contains several pieces of software I use on a daily basis, quite a few I’ve written about or plan to write about here, and more than a couple I’d never heard of before like the WordIt word processor and the Graviax Grammar Checker. Definitely worth checking out.