Master your word processor

Posted on 9 Jun 2009 at 16:56

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OLE can also be used to paste Word documents into Excel spreadsheets, and works with the other applications in the Microsoft Office suite. You can paste an Excel chart into a PowerPoint presentation to ensure that it always uses the latest sales data, for example.

Working with long documents

At some stage you'll probably use Word to write a long document. This could be a report, novel or other document that is many thousands of words long and may well consist of chapters. Working with a long document such as a draft of a novel can become very unwieldy in Word, if only because loading and saving 500 pages can take some time. It makes sense to split lengthy works into more manageable chunks, but this can result in dozens of files that can be just as fiddly to keep in order. The solution lies in Word's Master Document feature. This splits a long document into separate files automatically, and these files can be edited separately and collated into one document when required.

You can convert existing documents into master documents in Word, but it's simpler to start from scratch. Either way, you must use the Outlining tools to mark up a document with headings and subheadings, and then choose which of the resulting sections and subsections you want to save as subdocuments.

Create a new document or open an existing one, then switch to Outline view by clicking on View, Document Views and Outline. The Word Ribbon will switch to the Outlining tab. You can use the Outline tools to promote and demote section or chapter headings to different heading levels. To turn a section into a subdocument, put the cursor on a line that's been formatted as a level heading (otherwise, it won't work) and click Master Document, Show Document, Create. The heading will then appear in a box to indicate that it - and any other text typed or pasted in the box - will be saved as a subdocument. Click Show Document and you'll see that the heading and any new text is contained within a section break.

Save the document in its own folder to keep the master and subdocuments together. You can edit the subdocuments separately, but don't change their name or move them out of the folder. Go to Outlining, Master Document and Collapse Subdocuments in order to see the filenames of any subdocuments within a master document. Hold the Ctrl key and click the link to open the document in a new window.

As well as making longer documents more manageable, you can also create summaries that describe the main points of longer documents. Our walkthrough below shows you how to use abstracts and summaries in Word to convey the highlights of a long document in a neat overview.

Word of advice

Hopefully now you should be able to make your word processor do some real work for you. However, we've only scratched the surface of the tools on offer, and there are countless others available that we didn't have room to cover here.One useful tool that we couldn't cover in depth makes it easy to track changes that have been made to a document by others. It allows you to accept or reject each change in turn, making Word ideal for collaborating on documents. If you want more details on how to use it, read the PDF on this month's cover disc.

For everything else that we couldn't cover, visit Microsoft's Word microsite at http://tinyurl.com/WordMicro. Its comprehensive help section explains Word's more esoteric functions; hopefully clicking through the links will turn up some surprisingly useful features.

Author: Julian Prokaza