I Passed!!! I have a Credential!!!

It's official! I am a Microsoft Certified Word Expert! Check out the logo, which I can officially add to my email signature (which I won't):

The test was difficult, probing into all the little nitpicky corners of Word. I got a 906 out of 1000, with 630 needed to pass. The cool part is I googled "Microsoft Word Expert" and came up with all these help wanted posts for people looking for certified Word experts to design courses, fly out and train people. Cool! Maybe I can quit my day job!

The best part about this is it is a credential. Credentials are critical when writing nonfiction. A while back, I thought about self-publishing my Word for the Novelist articles. Well, now I can conceivably put together a proposal package and sell the idea to a publisher like . . . maybe Writer's Digest Books? I'm thinking it can't hurt to try?

On Friday, I take my test for Microsoft Access. It is for a specialist-level test, because that's all they offer. The only other expert-level exam they offer is for Excel, and I don't think I have that much expertise in Excel. But if obtaining such a credential might help me eventually change careers into Instructional Design, then I might just start studying.

Word for the Novelist - Master Documents

Do you, when you are writing, typically have a bunch of files open, and you're constantly switching back and forth between files? Well, with the Master Document approach, you can greatly speed up how you get things done.

This article assumes a couple of things:

• That you have Word 2003 installed on your computer. I'm told that my instructions translate easily to 2007.
  
• That you have a manuscript split into many segment files, probably chapter files. It does not assume that you are beginning a manuscript from scratch (although you could easily do so).

Setting Up the Master Document

First, create a new document with all the basic formatting you usually use. Set up the header and footer as per whatever guidelines you follow. Set up your address block, title and byline. Then, position the cursor at the top of the page where your first chapter should start.

Put the document in outlining mode by clicking View, and then Outline on the menu bar. The Outlining toolbar should appear. If no toolbar appeared, right-click the toolbar and click Outlining.

Yes, the document is now ugly. Don't worry about that. None of that formatting stuff will print, and none of your subdocuments will be uglified.

Inserting Your Chapter Files

Toward the right end of the Outlining toolbar, look for this button. If the toolbar is cut off at the right end, simply click that little tiny down arrow at the blue end of the toolbar, and you should find the button in there.

Click the button. Browse to your first chapter file and click OK.

Your first chapter will appear. It will be uglified. Don't panic. Trust me. Your original document is not affected. It only looks that way in the Outline mode. Your first chapter will now appear where you positioned your cursor. If you had any blank lines at the beginning of your first chapter, they will appear as well. Everything in that first chapter file will appear at the point where you inserted it.

"What a mess!" you may be thinking. "This is the worst 'feature' I've ever seen! Guess I won't be reading THIS blog, anymore."

We're not done yet, so stay with me.

Look for and click this magic little button on the Outlining toolbar.

Behold! A hyperlink!

Go ahead! Click it! You know you want to!

(Ooops! Word complains that you need to hold the control key down while clicking. Well, go ahead.)

Your original file pops open, in all its original glory. Aren't you glad you trusted me? How would you like an entire document set up like this, with all 40 of your chapter files just a click away? Better yet, the headers and footers you set up for the master document will work for the whole shebang, including all 40 files! When you print it, it magically acts like one document. No more combining files! No more fiddling with headers so they all look the same! In fact, don't even bother creating headers for your subdocuments. The master document ignores them, anyway.

Goofing Around With Subdocuments

But what are all these funky little symbols in the Outline view? Let's examine them one by one.

If you double-click the top ugly little thing in the left corner, your document will again pop open. That's the subdocument icon.

The little padlock lock indicates just that—that the hyperlink is locked to editing.

In the meantime, the Collapse Subdocuments button has become Expand Subdocuments. If you click the Expand Subdocuments button, you will get your uglified document back. Here's a screenshot of one of mine:

Sorry about the poor quality image; Blogger insisted on shrinking it. We should be able to work with it. Notice the lock is gone. You can now edit your document. But what's with the dots next to some of the lines? Each dot indicates a paragraph. Click a dot, and the entire paragraph is selected.

What about the broken lines down the sides of the pages? I'll admit it—I don't know. But I do know that there is meant to be a box around the entire subdocument. Maybe it's a tad buggy.

If you turn on the Show/Hide ¶ button,

you will see that your subdocument is enclosed by section breaks. The end of one document and the beginning of another will look like this:

The Master Document Portion of the Outlining Toolbar

Let's explore the rest of the master document portion of the Outlining toolbar.

To create a subdocument, click this button:

An empty subdocument frame will appear. Simply put your cursor in the frame and begin typing. Word will automatically name the file when you save, based on your first sentence or line. So if the first line is "Chapter 6", that will be the name of the file.

This is a great way of creating your chapter files automatically as you write your manuscript.

To remove a subdocument from the master document, click this button:

If you click it, it will remove the subdocument link, but all the text from the subdocument will remain. So you'll have to delete that text manually.

This may seem useless, but if you just want a time stamp of what your all your files looked like at a certain moment in time, simply remove all the subdocuments and save it as a different filename. Your original master document will be as before you started.

To merge two subdocuments, click the subdocument icon in the upper left corners of each subdocument that you wish to merge together. Then, click the Merge Subdocuments icon on the toolbar:

When you save the file, the file behind the top document will now contain the contents of both files. The file that was merged into the first will remain unchanged.

To split a subdocument, position your cursor at the position where you want the split to occur. Click the Split Subdocument button:

A new subdocument will appear immediately below the one you are working in. When you save it, it will name the document based on the first line or sentence.

Lastly, you can lock a subdocument:

Click it, and edits will no longer be allowed in the subdocument that you locked, and a little padlock will again appear below the subdocument icon. If you collapse the subdocuments and open them up again, the lock will be gone, and you will be able to edit once again.

~*~

I first did this way back when in about '95, and things really haven't changed much since then. I'm curious about whether Microsoft has prettied things up in Word 2007. The very first time I tried to use a subdocument all those years ago, I was so alarmed by how different my document looked that I panicked and exited without saving. Once backed up my work, I was able to calm down and play around. I used this method for my first novel, but when I started on my second novel, I switched to the Document Map approach, which I still prefer.

Please let me know if you think any of these instructions need clarifying, and if you were able to successfully put these instructions to use.

Status Report

Sickness is good for writing. I wrote a bit of everything last week; Starcaster II, Christian thriller and time travel fantasy. The Christian thriller went into a direction I didn't expect, and then came to another screeching halt. I wrote an opening scene for Starcaster II, then fizzled because I don't have a plot. I have a plot for a later book in the series, not the second book. And my time travel fantasy is still very much in the idea stage.

So I'm doing a lot of writing, but getting very little done. This is typical for me while I am querying. The querying is going well--better than the last time--but no representation yet.

Since I'm neck-deep in trying to prepare for my Word Expert certification exam, I started thinking about my Word for the Novelist series. Would you guys be interested in an article on Master Documents? I know some of you use separate files for each chapter. Well, a master document allows you to jump to each file in the master document by way of a hyperlink. It's very cool and would be a very viable alternative to the Document Map method I already detailed in this article. I used the Master Document Method for my trunk novel, Oath of the Songsmith.

Let me know and I'll get writing!

Word for the Novelist - Revisions, Part 2

It's been an embarrassingly long time since my last Word for the Novelist installment, and now that I have some new readers, I decided I should make time for this.

Before we begin, you might want to review Revisions, Part 1. It discussed setting up a document for reviewing (which is really quite easy) and what all the menu items are (a bit more complex). This article discusses reviewing revisions by others, and making revisions yourself.

These instructions are for Word 2003. I'm told it's not too difficult to apply these instructions to 2007.

Protecting a Document before Distribution
You can protect your document and force any reviewers to make any changes as revisions.

• Click Tools, and then Protect Document. The Protect Document pane will appear.
• Under Editing Restrictions, pull down the menu and select Tracked Changes.
• Click Start Enforcement and enter a password.

Unfortunately, you can only restrict editing to either tracked changes or comments. You cannot have both in a protected document.

A more friendly method of encouraging your reviewers to track any changes is to click the Track Changes button before saving and distributing your document for review.

Reviewing Revisions by Others

To review changes to a document, use these buttons on the Reviewing Toolbar:

The buttons with arrows let you jump back and forth among the change markups. The Accept button is the button with the checkmark, and it accepts the change. The Reject button is the button with the X, and it rejects the change.

The Accept and Reject button each has a dropdown menu with the following options:

• To accept or reject all changes in a block of text, highlight the text and click the Accept or Reject button.
• To accept all changes in the document, pull down the menu next to the Accept button and select Accept All Changes in Document.
• To reject all changes in the document, pull down the menu next to the Reject button and select Reject All Changes in Document.
• To delete all comments in the document, pull down the Reject menu and select Delete All Comments in Document.

The dropdown menus also contain options to accept, reject or delete all changes and comments shown. If you had chosen to hide any changes, choosing this option will let you accept or reject all comments that currently appear in the document. Any hidden revisions will remain in the document.

Selecting Reviewers

If more than one person made changes to your document, it will appear less cluttered if you only look at one reviewer's revisions at a time.

To look at a specific reviewer's comments, point to Reviewers. The names of all reviewers will appear.

Place a checkmark next to a reviewer's name. Word will hide all other comments and changes.

Remember to go back and unhide everyone's revisions by selecting All Reviewers.


Final Clean-Up

When you think you are finished, do a final check for revisions.

• Ensure your document view is Final Showing Markup (see previous article if you don't know how to find this).
• Ensure you have all options checked in the image above.
• Click the right arrow button. If you see this box, you know that your document is clean.

Reviewing a Document
To Track Revisions

To review a document and track any changes that you make, click the Track Changes button, which is the highlighted one, below.

The button turns orange while Track Changes is on.

If you are viewing the document in Print Layout view (which shows your page as it would appear after printing, including headers/footers), your deletions will appear either as strikeout text or in balloons to the right of the page. Insertions will appear in color within the text. In Normal view, it looks like a legal document, with strikeouts and insertions. (To change your document view use the View menu.)

You can turn the Reviewing Pane on and off with the button next to the Track Changes button. The revision pane will show the complete text of all your revisions and comments.

Use the button that looks like a sticky note to insert a comment. Comments will appear as balloons to the right of the text, or in the Reviewing Pane, depending on your options.

In previous versions of Word, Word prevented you from accepting your own changes. This is no longer the case unless the author has protected the document.

Tips

If you have many changes in a small amount of text, such as capitalizing or converting the tense of a phrase, just delete the original and re-enter the text with your new wording. It is easier for the author to review.

When Word's grammar or spelling checker replaces text, it automatically replaces the whole word. To avoid this, you may want to enter the change yourself.

If you have the Show Formatting option turned off (which is off by default), you may see some apparently empty balloons. These balloons contain any spaces that you have deleted. You can see them if you turn the Show Formatting option on.

~*~

To read the rest of my Word for the Novelist series, click here. Previous articles include instructions on making a manuscript template, grasping Word styles, and making excerpts for emails and the web.

MS Word for the Novelist - Revisions, Part One

This is a document that I originally wrote for my co-workers. Since it's so long, I'm going to tackle it in at least two parts. This first part introduces revisioning in general.

~*~

As writers, we often take part in online critique groups, where we swap documents back and forth and provide helpful comments and suggestions. If both you and your reviewer have Microsoft Word, you can save a lot of time by using the Reviewing toolbar. With the Reviewing toolbar, you can automatically apply or reject a reviewer's suggested changes to your document.

By using these features, you save time both as author and as reviewer. As a reviewer, you save time because you are entering your comments and changes directly into the document rather than juggling another document or printing it out. As the author, you save time because you are free to accept or reject any changes with the click of a button.

Reviewing Toolbar

Regardless of whether you are the author or reviewer, you will need to use the Reviewing toolbar. To bring up the Reviewing toolbar, right-click the toolbar and select Reviewing from the dropdown menu. Here is a segment of what that menu looks like:

Once the Reviewing toolbar is up, it looks like this:

Turning on the "Track Changes" option is quite easy. Just push the second button from the right. It will turn orange, like this:

And you're done. The document is now ready to send off to your reviewer. The reviewer--as long as he doesn't tamper with this button--can make all the changes he wishes, and once you get it back, it will contain both his revisions and your original text.

The rest of the Reviewing toolbar is discussed in the rest of this article and my next installment.

Revisions Displayed

The first dropdown in the reviewing toolbar contains options that control how a reviewed document will appear. "Markup" is Microsoft's words for revisions. When someone makes a change to your document, the changes are considered "markup".

• Original - This shows how the document appeared before any changes, hiding all revision markups. This is handy if you want to print your original document and retain all revisions.
  
• Original Showing Markup - This shows how the document originally appeared, along with revision markups showing all changes made since then.
• Final - This shows how the document will appear if you accept all current changes. It hides all revision markups. This is handy if you want to print the final doc, yet retain all revisions.
  
• Final Showing Markup - This shows how the document will appear if you accept all current changes, but it also shows everything that changed within the document.

If you select either Original or Final, Word will hide all revisions from you. However, they are still present in the document! These features have made national news when a sender inadvertently distributed a document with hidden—and embarrassing—revisions. Also, if you think you lost your revisions, check this dropdown and make sure you have selected an option that shows the markup.

To avoid sending out documents with embedded revisions that you do not know about, always keep "Final Showing Markup" selected.

Revision Markup Options

Other options control how the markup in the revised document appears. You can use either the Balloon method or the Reviewing pane method.

Balloon Method

By default, Word shows deletions and comments in balloons off to the right, and insertions within the text. When the right margin no longer has any room for new balloons, Word will open the Reviewing pane.

If the Balloon method is not already set up, you can set it up by selecting the following options from the Show dropdown on the Reviewing toolbar.

• Place checkmarks next to Final, Comments, Ink Annotations, Insertions and Deletions, and Formatting
• Click Balloons, then place a checkmark next to Always.
• Click Options and select "Always" from Use Balloons (Print and Web Layout).
• Then, click OK.

When you click a balloon, Word will highlight the text to which the balloon applies, or it will attempt to point to the deletion point. If there are many deletions, they will become difficult to locate.

Word constantly adjusts the size and positions of the balloons as the reviewer adds revisions. There is no way to move the balloons manually. When the balloons take up all the space along the right margin, Word will compress the balloons and open a Reviewing Pane along the bottom of the page. It will also attempt to merge the contents of several balloons into one, using ellipsis (…) between revisions. Click on the balloon and the Revision pane will display the complete text.

For these reasons, the Balloon method is only useful if you have occasional changes here and there. For sweeping changes, use the Reviewing Pane.

Reviewing Pane Method

Older versions of Word used the Reviewing Pane rather than balloons. The Balloon method is the friendliest and easiest method to use. However, when the document has many revisions, the Reviewing Pane becomes more useful.

The Reviewing Pane sorts revisions according to their position in the document. Most of the time, your revisions will show up in the Main Document area.

To turn off the bubbles and turn on the Reviewing Pane, bring up the Track Changes option box and select "Never" in the Use Balloons (Print and Web Layout) option.

Deletions will now show up as strikeouts and comments will appear in the reviewing pane. The text that the reviewer commented upon will appear highlighted and labeled. If you move your mouse over the highlighted text, the comment will appear in a bubble.

The image below has examples of how a line of text appears with insertions, deletions and comments.

The Reviewing Pane automatically comes on when reviewing changes in the Normal layout.

Hybrid Methods

The Track Changes option box gives you complete control over how tracked changes will appear on your computer. You can italicize your changes, make them bold, or format them in any manner.

However, no matter what method you use, keep the following important fact in mind:

Track Changes options do not save with the document!

The options that you choose apply to every document with revisions that you open on your computer. However, if your reviewer were to open the same document on another computer, it will appear according to the options that the reviewer chose.

Don't let all this daunt you. Ordinarily, you don't need to do anything to set up revisioning. The default settings work wonderfully.

~*~

That's all for this installment. Open up a document and play around with revisions. As usual, I'm ready to answer questions in the comments. The next installment will cover how to actually make revisions or insert comments.

MS Word for the Novelist - Creating Excerpts for Web Pages and Email

This installment is by request.

We all have to do it--we must paste the first three chapters, first chapter, or first five pages in either an email message or on a web page for critiques or submissions. And every time we do so, we lose our indents due to the way web pages work. Therefore, we must find our paragraph breaks and put an extra space between each paragraph

Drag!

Well, here's a way to do it. All you have to do is search and replace for paragraph marks. Already know how to search and replace for regular text? Well, you're halfway there!

• First, highlight the text you want to enwebben (to coin a word) and copy it into a new document. Five pages, three chapters, whatever. Get it in a new document. Don't do this with your official manuscript
  
• In the new document, bring up the Find box (Click Edit on the Word 2003 menu bar, then Find).
• Click the Replace tab.
• Click the More button at the bottom of the form.
• Make sure the cursor is in the "Find what:" box.
• Click the Special button at the bottom of the form. Heres a helpful image of what the form should look like at this point:

(Click to embiggen)

• Select the first option, which is Paragraph Mark. Do not select Paragraph Character, which is further down. That's just an image. You want Paragraph Mark.
• You'll see this code appear in the Find what: box:
  

^p

• You could have just typed in the ^p, but the Special dropdown menu will always give you the proper codes so you don't have to remember. In the Replace with: box, just go ahead and type:

^p^p
(Or you can select it from the Special menu twice, if you prefer.)

• Click Replace All. Spaces will magically appear between all your paragraph marks.
• Press Ctrl-A to select all of the text again, copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl-C) and paste it (Ctrl-V) into the email or the web page.

And you're done. These instructions assume you are using normal paragraph breaks, but don't worry; you'd have to try to get anything other than ordinary paragraph breaks, so you're probably ok.

MS Word for the Novelist - The Magical Document Map

Now that you have a nicely-behaved document template for your manuscript (if you don't, see my first installment of this series), it's time to delve into Word Styles. Why would you want to learn Word Styles, you ask? Because (1) they are so powerful and (2) they allow you to navigate huge manuscripts with ease. Allow me to illustrate.

Right now, I'm loading up my manuscript for FORGING A LEGEND. Aah, here it is, all 457 pages of it. No, I don't divide the manuscript up into chapters and no, it isn't a pain in the tush at all to have to navigate such a huge manuscript. If I need to tweak Chapter Thirteen, I'm there with one click. Here's a picture to prove it. All of the text is clickable.

This little wonder is called the Document Map. It's aways up there on the left side of my manuscript. In order to use the document map, you really need to master Word Styles. No, it's not easy. But it's worth it. These instructions work for Word 2003. They work for 2007 too, but you'll have to find the equivalent menus. My husband assures me that it's not hard to adjust, so I'm going to assume you'll be able to do this in Word 2007 as well.

First, start a new document based on your Manuscript template. Right-click your toolbar (which is the strip toward the top with all the icons) and make sure the Formatting toolbar is highlighted. It's the second one down on the list. On the Formatting toolbar, click the icon on the far left that looks like a double A.

The Styles and Formatting menu will appear on the right side of the screen.

Now back on your document page, enter some text and make it look the way you want your chapter title text to appear. If you're like me, it's simply centered. Now, highlight the entire line, not just the word.
Notice how it looks like there's a space after the last word when you highlight the entire line. There's an invisible paragraph mark there, and you want to make sure you include that. An awful lot of formatting is packed into that invisible paragraph mark.

Now, on your Styles and Formatting menu, click the New Style . . . button. Name it Chapter and select the following options from the dropdowns:

• Style Type: Paragraph
• Style Based On: Normal
• Style for Following Paragraph: Normal
• Click the Add to template checkbox in the lower left corner.

Don't click OK yet.

• Click the Format button at the bottom of the page.
• Click Paragraph . . .
• On the first tab, in the upper right corner, click Outline Level and select Level 1.

If you have set up your document template according to my last post, then everything else should be all set. Click OK.

Close your document. If it prompts you to save your template, click OK or Yes.

Open Word back up again and load a document based on your Manuscript template. To make your document map appear, click View and then Document Map. You may need to click the little circle on the bottom of the menu in order for the entire menu to appear. Or, you can click this button near the right end of the Standard (top) toolbar:

In the above example, the Document Map button is light orange and has a box around it.

Now, enter a chapter title and click the Styles and Formatting button again. Select Chapter. Not only will it format your chapter the way you specified earlier, but the text you entered should appear in your document map. Cool, huh? When you click enter, your text should no longer be centered.

I have three additional styles set up as follows:

• Name: Chapter Title
• Style Type: Paragraph
• Style based on: Chapter
• Style for Following Paragraph: Normal
• Centered
• Outline Level: Level 2
• Add to template checked
  

I name my chapter titles, so if you don't name chapters, don't bother setting the above.

• Name: Scene
• Style Type: Paragraph
• Style based on: Normal
• Style for following paragraph: Normal
• Centered
• Outline Level: Level 3
• Add to template checked

This is a temporary style, which I only use while actually writing my novel. Since I generally have 3 or 4 scenes per chapter, it's helpful to name them, because you can home in on exactly the scene you want to work on. I even name all my scenes ahead of time, based on my novel outline. It's like plotting out my entire novel ahead of time on the document map. I always delete all scene names when I'm finished with the manuscript.

• Name: ToDo Item
• Style Type: Paragraph
• Style based on: Normal
• Style for following paragraph: Normal
• Left justified
• Italic
• Outline Level: Level 4
• Add to template checked

Since Word's Bookmark feature sucks so badly, I created this style to use as a bookmark. These stand out because they are italic, and italics are no-nos in final manuscripts. They also show up as italic in the document map. No ToDos will remain in the final document.

I realize these instructions are complicated. Play around with word styles until you are comfortable with them. Feel free to leave questions in the comments. If worse comes to worse, I could email you my template, but keep in mind that templates can be tricky to install.

Microsoft Word is a complicated piece of software, but it really becomes a wonderful tool when you take the time to learn to use it.

MSWord for the Novelist - Manuscript Templates

I'm starting a new series today, one that I hope you will find useful. I am a power-user of Microsoft Word, and I have long used a custom-designed manuscript template that suppresses all the more writer-unfriendly features of Word.

How would you like a document template that never forces the issue with "smart quotes," never auto-hyphenates and never mucks with your lines-per-page count? How would you like to be able to start up a fresh document all ready with your font of choice, be it Times or Courier, set up to 12 point, with 1 inch margins (not 1 1/4!), and even double-spaced? Well, here it goes!

These instructions assume Word 2003, which is the version I use both at work and at home. If I have enough demand for it, I'll rewrite the instructions for 2007. It may seem like a lot of steps, but you only have to do this once. I advise you to print this post for easier reference.

• First things first. Bring up Tools, then Options. On the View tab, in the Show box, clear the Smart Tags checkmark. You may also want to check Vertical Ruler under Print and Layout Options.
• Click Tools, Language, then Hypenation. Make sure the "Automatically Hyphenate Document" is unchecked.
  
• Click Tools, then AutoCorrect. Click AutoFormat. Clear the boxes that begin with Straight Quotes, Ordinals, Fractions and Hyphens. Click AutoFormat As You Type. Uncheck everything. From now on, you will have to hit the Tab key at the beginning of each paragraph. This is useful for sending document chunks (such as via email when sending partials and fulls). You will not have to re-tab everything if the tabs are already gone.
  
• Bring up Format, then Font. Select the font and size of your choice (12 point Times New Roman or Courier New).
  
• Click Format, then Paragraph. Under Spacing, select Double. Click Line and Page Breaks. Unclick everything here except Don't Hyphenate. This stuff is only important for business and legal documents when you have headings that you want to stay with the text that they go with. And you don't want automatic hypenation.
• Click File, then Page Setup. Adjust your margins to 1 inch all the way around. On the Layout tab, click Different first page. This will allow you to have a title page without headers and footers. Click the Default button and then click Yes.
  

Ok, by this point, you will have a nicely-behaved document. But you're not done yet. When you move on to the next document, you will have to do this all over again . . . unless you convert the document to a template.

• To do so, click File, then Save as . . .
• Drop down the Save as type box, and select "Document Template (*.dot)".
• Name it Manuscript (or something meaningful to you) and click Save. Word will automatically append the ".dot" to the end and save it in the Templates folder.

Ta da! You now have a Manuscript template.

To use the template, click File, then New. Over on the right side, the New Document taskbar will appear. Click On my computer . . . and the Manuscript template should appear in the General tab, which is the first tab. Double-click your template and it will load.

You're done. Begin writing. The beauty of this approach is that it has absolutely no affect on your default template.

Next installment: Custom Word Styles for the Novelist. Believe me, Word Styles are worth taking the trouble to learn.

I'd love to know if you were able to use these instructions with success.