Microsoft Word: Living a Beast

Word Bugs
Introduction
Microsoft Word is a beast [1]. Word is an evolved creation, the bastard offspring of
marketing, some original thoughts on how to create a word processor, and generations of
Ziff-Davis (PC Magazine) induced rapid mutation to fit someone's distorted checklist. It
is to software as the Irish Elk was to mammals. It is an inherently incurable mass of
contradictory impulses, which are fully evident in Word's formatting model. It is the
single most miserable piece of software that I absolutely must use.
This web page contains my personal notes on attempting to live with the beast.
This document borrows extensive from the material listed in Links. Over time it will be
all my own writing, but at this point some is cut and pasted from the real experts who are
acknowledged in the Links section. It began with this usenet article.
I must add that despite my personal dislike of Microsoft Word I am grateful to the experts
who've responded to my questions on microsoft.public.word.formatting.longdocs. They
fight a noble war with the Beast. Lastly, I'm interested in suggestions on alternative word
processors.

Recommendations
What I do (Aug, 2003)
I tried following the expert (tech writers) recommendations for some time, but I gave up.
It was too hard to make Word behave. As noted above you can't safely mix Word's
convenient "formatting" widgets and the style sheet models. So, having given up on the
right way to do things, I switched over to the built in formatting tools and I ignore the
style sheets completely.
I use built in Word bullets and numbering, I leave the styles as "normal", I work with
normal.dot .. and .... I use macros to set formatting for 3 levels of header. The macros
aren't perfect (I'm no guru), but they structure my document headings quickly and
consistently. They assign headings outline levels, so I can collapse/expand in outline view
and navigate using the document Map feature. (The macros won't work, however, in
outline view. Word is like that.)

alt-0: clear outline level and remove all formatting

alt-1: outline level one, larger size text
alt-2: outline level two, medium sized text
alt-3: outline level three, italics.

That's all I do. It turns out to be enough to make my documents navigable and consistent.

If you know a bit about Word macros, you can view my macros and copy and paste them
into the word macro editor.

What the Experts Recommend (but I don't do)

1. Word's "outliner" (not what most of us understand as an Outliner) view is
indispensable. As horrid as it is, essentially every document must use it. Work in
the Outline view. Define heading styles appropriately.
2. Word's styles and templates cannot be avoided, but you cannot use any that
Microsoft provides - especially not the Normal.dot standard template. (You
cannot control the contents of the Normal template, on your computer or on
anyone else's.) Create a template (.DOT) that is empty. Use the style organizer to
put styles, shortcuts and anything else one would want into it. Put it in a safe place
away from Word. Keep backups. Consider write protecting it. Use this as the
source of truth and copy things from it using the Style Organizer to document
templates.
o Learn to use a different template for each document type.
o Do not have anything in your form documents formatted as
"Normal." If you want to change paragraph formatting, create a new style
for the new format. In talking about form documents here, Im talking
about templates, as well as Word "forms." A fine look at styles is in
Microsoft's Legal Users Guide to Microsoft Word..
o create all your headings use Word's built-in Heading Styles (which you
can redefine to look the way you want) using Heading 1 for your
Chapter headings, Heading 2 for subheadings and so on.
o [jf note: Documents attached to the Normal template may (I'm not
positive) reformat themselves each time they are opened or passed to a
different machine if the user of the new machine has changed their Normal
template. I think whether this occurs depends on Word's settings with
respect to template updating.]
3. Remove all of Word's bullet and numbering and sizing and direct formatting tools.
Avoid Word's List Numbering (under Format | Bullets and numbering) unless
you're sure you know what you're doing. Manual numbering works; so do SEQ
fields. But Word's automated list numbering contains more bugs than a compost
heap. All must be done via styles. This is terrible but true.

What Everyone Agrees On

1. Make sure Allow fast saves is switched off (under Tools | Options | Save).
2. Never use Master Documents, Versions, or the Document Map. Outline View is
safe to use.
3. Select Tools | AutoCorrect, and on the Autoformat as you type and
Autoformat tabs, de-select most of the options.
4. Tools:Options:Save: check prompt to save template. If you leave this unchecked
then the Normal Template will be altered without warning every time you save
and document, potentially altering every future document you view or work on.
5. Tools:Templates and AddIns: Make sure "Automatically update document styles"
is unchecked. The only known way to use this safely is to create a macro that
toggles this setting, and manually activate it only when you want to update styles

in a document to match those in the document template. The Style Organizer is

another way to do this. See this discussion.
6. Be wary of Section Breaks. In some mysterious way Word keeps a lot of
formatting for a document section in the section break that follows it. Likewise
Word keeps a lot of formatting information in paragraph breaks.
7. In Options:View set style width to 1", this will let you quickly see what style
applies to a paragraph.
8. In Options:Edit disable "click and type".
9. Never save to a floppy; this is also a very frequent cause of file corruptions. If you
must use a floppy, copy the file to it using Windows Explorer or select Send
to, which you can do even from Word's File | Open and File | Save dialogs
rather than using File | Save As. And perform a full format on the floppy first.
When you save a Word file, a large temporary file is created, and if this is too
large to fit on the floppy a corruption is likely to result. See MSKB article
Q89247, How Word for Windows Uses Temporary Files, for more information
on this.
10. If you paste text and and see odd things happen try:
o paste as plain text or
o insert a section break first, then paste. Styles are bound up with section
breaks, you can use them to keep things straight.

Document Model
HTML editors and most word processors see a document as a stream of text that you do
things to. You turn on Bold and everything from then on is Bold until you turn it off.
Likewise with changing margins or tabs. Word Perfect inserts unseen codes (like printer
codes in ASCII text files of old) to turn things on and off. You can see these codes by
selecting "reveal codes." Word sees documents as built up of compartments, one inside of
the other.
Characters fit into paragraphs which fit into sections which fit into documents.
Formatting changes change only the compartment to which they are applied. If you
change the tab settings on one paragraph, the paragraphs that follow aren't changed (if
those paragraphs exist when you make the change). Changes made in one paragraph will
carry through in subsequent paragraphs which are created from that paragraph.
Word keeps most of its formatting in the pilcrows (paragraph marks). This is why it is
recommended that you switch your viewing options in page layout view and normal view
to "view paragraph marks."

Formatting
To reveal the formatting of a part of a document, press Shift-F1 (or select What's This? on
the Help menu). This will give you a large arrow pointer with a question mark. Point it at
the part of the text that is giving you trouble and it will tell you what style formatting is
applied and what direct formatting is applied to that text. To see margins and tab settings,
display the ruler.