How to save time when styling a Word document
December 30th
Daniel Pataki
Productivity
Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word
3 comments already, the latest by Daniel Pataki, why not join the discussion?
This will be a fairly obvious tip, but actually no one I know does this, and they spend hours formatting a document, when they could save at least half, if not more, of that time. Around 90% of the time people who write a Word document will format as they go along. This is probably the biggest mistake you can make when creating any document, here’s why, and how to stop doing it.
Purely productivity-wise this is a no-no because each time you get to a point you have to format you loose focus and concentrate on formatting, rather than writing, which might mean your quality deteriorates, but at the very least, you will tire more easily. Second of all, 40 pages into the doc, will you still remember the exact heading type you used for each purpose? Going back to check is a waste of time, not checking means you will make an error eventually, so let’s get out of this situation once and for all.
Now here’s the magic many know but few follow, do not format a document as you are writing it. Format it when the whole thing is done, and I mean the whole thing, not when you’re just done for the day! This will help you in so many ways and will probably save you the frustration of printing something, then realizing a heading is all wrong. The biggest advantage this gives you is consistency, because you gain the ability of thinking in terms of a document, not in terms of a section or a page. Now that you have a uniform document you can also change styles with one click, by updating the look of a heading, or choosing a new style, which will change the look of the whole doc.
Not having to go back and forth between sections, finding why the table of contents is missing an entry, why a section heading is so small and so on is well worth the pain of writing a non-formatted doc. If you really hate that 12pt Times New Roman look, change the base font to something fancy while you write, you can just update that one when done as needed.
I’m sorry but I have to disagree with you.
I find it helpful to format my documents while writing them. It makes me “feel” them and have them better built.
As for remembering headings formats – all you have to do is press CTRL + ALT + 1/2/3 to format text as first/second/third level heading, respectively. That way, you get to see your documents structure more clearly with zero effort.
It is a basic role of writing – go from the whole to its parts. First you need to decide the structure of you documents, then chapters, paragraphs and so on… forming along the way will help you do that.
Eyal.
Hi Eyal!
There is indeed truth in what you say, I guess we all work differently
On another note, I am a very quick writer, so while I am well capable of writing a 50-80 page paper on economics in a day, I am very bad at writing consistently, so I will spend another day formatting. For me it is very difficult to format consistently because I just get tangled in my own mess.
Anyways, you might want to restructure which is much easier if you don’t have any formatting at all yet, and anyway, you may have much more than 3 headings, I use many styles like emphasis, my own custom styles for some stuff and so on.
We all have different working methods, whatever works for you is what you should do