(This is a Quora question I answered. Link at the bottom.) After posting it, Sarah (a competent Word user herself) commented: “Russ, you explained this so well. I edit books and doctoral dissertations, and my secret weapon is my ability to create unique styles, and then create a document template with those styles and attach […]
All posts by Russ
How precise is Microsoft Word?
Is Microsoft Word precise or is it just a fallacy? InDesign is primarily design software; whereas Microsoft Word is, at its core, a word-processing tool. As such, it’s almost like comparing apples and oranges but with some overlap. If I was going for a one-off design that needed on-page elements positioned to the nth degree, […]
Conditional Formatting with Microsoft Word
(You can download this template below.) If you’ve ever managed 2 versions of a similar document (especially in SaaS organizations), then you know how creating multiple versions of the same document for different audiences is a pain. One classic example is a user guide and an admin guide. Another is a public, external facing document […]
Working For Free
“Welcome ladies and gentlemen to tonight’s heavyweight championship fight… In the blue corner we have “those who say you should never work for free……and in the red corner we have…” Make no bones about it, working for ‘free’ is an emotive subject (and you’ll get zero arguments about it from me). And whatever your take […]
06 – Assign Shortcut Key
Now we add a new toolbar and add the macros as buttons (so we 1-click run them). That’s the end of this little series of improving Microsoft Word’s ‘Save As’ workflow. I hope you’ve enjoyed the series and if you have questions, feel free to ask. Thanks, Russ Go back to video 1 – Intro […]
05 – Add to Toolbar
Now we add a new toolbar and add the macros as buttons (so we 1-click run them). In the next video, video 6, we’ll look at how to up the game and efficiency by assigning this macro to a shortcut key. Templates File Path The filepath to your templates folder is: C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates Where {username} is […]
04 – Developer’s Tab
Word hides the developer’s tab by default, so we need to know how to view it, to setup our environment, and to add and compile the code. Depending on how your pc’s setup, you also might need to save your Normal.dotm with another name and go in and delete the existing Normal template. I show […]
03 – Code with Blank Document
In this video, we walkthrough the code line-by-line. Word macros have a bad rep because of all the nasties that have occurred in the past, but as we’ll see, when you look at the code itself (and follow along) there’s nothing to be concerned about. You may or may not have to watch this several […]
02 – Code Walkthrough
In this video, we walkthrough the code line-by-line. Word macros have a bad rep because of all the nasties that have occurred in the past, but as we’ll see, when you look at the code itself (and follow along) there’s nothing to be concerned about. You may or may not have to watch this several […]
Improving Word’s ‘Save As’ Function and Improving Your Workflow – 01 Introduction
As a technical copywriter who uses Word on a daily basis, I have often found myself wishing I’d saved more iterations of my document. Especially when working on longer or more complex documents. One method that I used to use was to append a, b, c, to the filename and then this would stack up […]