A Better Title

Phew, finally I’m done with my industrial attachment (IA) report… And the report has been approved by my company supervisor, so I just need to do some final editing, get the report bound, and it’s off for submitting tomorrow! Yay!

So what does the report have to do with the title of this post?

How many of you have done reports the ‘typical man’s’ way? So you fire up Microsoft Word, type out the entire report, and while doing the first section heading you thought “oh, I want this heading to be bold, in Times New Roman at 16 point.”

A hundred sections later, it suddenly came upon you that 16 point is too large. So you scrolled all the way up, and then start changing every single of the one hundred section headings to 14 point.

After typing another fifty sections, you thought Times New Roman wasn’t so nice for a heading, so you decided to change it to Arial Black. So you went back to the top, and painstakingly replace the font of each and every section heading, only to realise that your muscle memory had changed the headings to Arial instead of Arial Black.

This problem would have been eliminated had the writer had the habit of assigning styles to his report. In MS Word 2003, this can be accomplished by going to the Format menu and then clicking Styles and Formatting. The Styles and Formatting panel should appear to the right of the window.

So when you start typing your report, just keep on applying the correct styles into your document. To apply a style to a text, select the text, and then click on the style that you want to apply on the panel. Concentrate on getting the correct styles applied. For example, a section (or chapter) heading might be assigned Heading 1, a subsection might be assigned Heading 2, and so on so forth.

If you feel like changing the style of the section heading, for example, simply click on the arrow next to the style you want to change (Heading 1), and then click Modify… There’s a myriad of formatting that you can change here, from borders to line spacing to tabs.

So let’s say if one hundred sections later you feel like changing all your section headings to Arial Black at 14 point, you can go back to the Styles and Formatting panel, click on the small arrow next to Heading 1, click Modify…, make the necessary changes in the dialog box, and click OK.

Changing styles in your document. As easy as 1, 2, 3!

Voilà! All one hundred section headings would be adjusted automatically. Not only that, all the section headings would now be consistent. Gone are the days when you assign 14 point font for one section heading, and 15 point for another!

Makes your job a hundred times easier, doesn’t it?

PS: Some of you might have known that I’ve been doing some (X)HTML/CSS designing/programming for quite some time now (though I’m still yet to build a portfolio of the websites I’ve designed). I’ve never thought that the skills obtained, in particular the separation of content and presentation, would be extremely helpful when doing reports in MS Word!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.