Repost From A Comment
Reposted from a comment I made in another post. Feel free to repost - this is "eat your vegetables" advice for writers...
I am constantly shocked - shocked I say! - at how many authors (and publishers, and editors) don't know how to use Word properly. For a tool that you live in, day in day, out, a professional really should know how to use Word.
You don't know how to use Word if you don't know how to:
- Use styles/stylesheets
- Paste something without formatting
- Use the document map
- Set up a table of contents
- Set up a single landscape page in the middle of a portrait document
- Use cross-references to update figures, table of contents, and index automatically
- Use the track changes feature
Also, as an indispensable tool, I strongly recommend using a PDF print-driver generator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/) for all legal documents and "final" products, in particular anything you send to a printer.
Word has built-in tutorials for all of the features above (and the 2007 version is much cleaner and easier to use). I recommend that people take an hour a day over a two week period and go through each of these features - and by the end you'll really LOVE Word.
I am constantly shocked - shocked I say! - at how many authors (and publishers, and editors) don't know how to use Word properly. For a tool that you live in, day in day, out, a professional really should know how to use Word.
You don't know how to use Word if you don't know how to:
- Use styles/stylesheets
- Paste something without formatting
- Use the document map
- Set up a table of contents
- Set up a single landscape page in the middle of a portrait document
- Use cross-references to update figures, table of contents, and index automatically
- Use the track changes feature
Also, as an indispensable tool, I strongly recommend using a PDF print-driver generator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/) for all legal documents and "final" products, in particular anything you send to a printer.
Word has built-in tutorials for all of the features above (and the 2007 version is much cleaner and easier to use). I recommend that people take an hour a day over a two week period and go through each of these features - and by the end you'll really LOVE Word.