Some Simple Design Tips for Word Documents

As a former technical writer, I have a lot of experience with Microsoft Word. (I've been using Word in one form or another since version 1.0 for DOS). So using Word is pretty much an automatic process for me. But that isn't true for most people, especially those who are using Word for the first time in a professional environment. 

Word is a complex program and it can turn around and bite you at a moment's notice. You can make your life a lot easier by following some basic rules, starting with the ones outlined in this article. 

I could add a few more, but the article does a good job of covering the basics. For more tips on Word, take a look at the Microsoft Word topic on this blog, where I've posted several articles written during my tenure at the TSX to help people there cope with Word's idiosyncracies. 

Going beyond the tips in the article, I would add these two as the most important:

• Learn how to use paragraph and character styles for formatting instead of the buttons in the ribbon.
• Always, always, always paste text from another document as unformatted text. 

The first of those tips will save you vast amounts of time in the long run. The second will keep Word from messing up your formatting in unpredictable ways that are hard to correct.