Weasel Boy's Journal: Effective Word

"MS Word forces you to deal with presentation issues at all times."

Naturally, you want to compose the structure and content of your document first, and worry about presentation later. I can hardly imagine any sensible writer doing otherwise. In Word, this is trivially easy.

The key is to write your document in Outline View. For all of its warts, Word has the best outline editor I've ever used. Use the outline view to create your sections and subsections; fill in body text blocks; and rearrange to your heart's content. Use change bars to track your changes if that's important to you.

Once the content is in place, note that the different levels of headers are associated with styles -- very convenient! All you have to do is define your styles, and *poof!* the presentation aspect of your document is done. Better yet, define your styles ahead of time and save them in a temlpate. Note also that your table of contents is trivially generated from your outline headers.

If you don't want to be annoyed by the instant spelling and grammar checkers, just turn them off. I do.

While I detest the anticompetitive business practices of MS as much as the next mustelid, I have yet to encounter a better application for most writing tasks than MS Word. It's not perfect, but it's better than the competition. Its cross-referencing capabilities are a bit weak for academic or scientific publishing, but for general technical writing it is excellent.