Microsoft Word 2010 for Medical and Technical Writers, Second Edition

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Chapter 1

SETTING WORD OPTIONS TO AVOID PROBLEMS

Word has a huge assortment of options that control the way the program works. Unfortunately, some of these options can cause problems or interfere with your workflow when you are creating or editing a large, complex document—or any document, for that matter. The first step that a writer should undertake is to set Word’s options to minimize such problems and maximize efficiency.

WORD OPTIONS —WHY THEY MATTER

Word is a very powerful and flexible program. It has been designed to meet every conceivable word processing need. Whether it meets this goal is, of course, open to debate, but there is no doubt that it is loaded with features that are designed to make the user’s job easier. This sounds great in theory, but in practice it can lead to unexpected problems. These problems fall into two areas:

• Some Word options do things to your document automatically, such as applying formatting or correcting certain kinds of typos. Since a medical or technical writer needs full control over the document, we find that these options are usually better turned off. Even if you want to use some of these automatic features—and some of them can indeed be useful—you need to be aware of precisely what they do and when they do it if you want to avoid unpleasant surprises.

• Other options can have unexpected consequences, which in most cases are simply the result of the way the option is supposed to work. These consequences are, however, potentially problematic for complex technical documents. In a few cases they are, we believe, a Word bug. In either case, you need to be aware of how to set these options to minimize or avoid problems.

We do not propose that you set your options precisely as we suggest in this chapter, although that would be a reasonable starting point. You will eventually develop your own option settings that suit your working habits and the types of documents you create. First, however, you need to know which options you need to be concerned with.

ACCESSING WORD’S OPTIONS

Word’s options—and there are a lot of them—are all accessed in the Options dialog box. To display this dialog box, first click the File tab and then click Options in the list of commands on the left side of the File tab. The Options dialog box is shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1. The Word Options dialog box.

To set an option, first select the appropriate category and then set the desired options. For some categories, you’ll have to scroll down in the dialog box to see them all. Then, click OK to save your new settings or Cancel to discard them.

AUTOCORRECT OPTIONS

Several more-or-less related Word features are grouped together under the rubric AutoCorrect Options. You access these options by selecting the Proofing category in the Options dialog box and then click the AutoCorrect Options button. This will display the AutoCorrect dialog box, which contains several tabs corresponding to the various options that are described in the following sections.

AUTOCORRECT

The AutoCorrect tab in the AutoCorrect dialog box, shown in Figure 1-2, controls several options that determine how and if Word automatically corrects certain errors in your document. For example, if you often hold down the Shift key for too long while typing, you can have Word automatically correct words that start with two capital letters (for example, automatically change PArameter to Parameter).

The first option, Show AutoCorrect Options Button, determines whether Word displays a button at each word that has been corrected or changed by AutoCorrect. This button displays when the mouse cursor is near the word, initially as a blue bar under the start of the word (see the upper part of Figure 1-3). Rest the cursor on the bar and click to display the menu shown in the lower part of Figure 1-3. Here you can reverse the correction, stop making this correction, or open the AutoCorrect options dialog box.

The next five AutoCorrect options have to do with automatic correction of capitalization errors and should be self-explanatory. You can click the Exceptions button to define exceptions to the rules. For example, in medical writing the abbreviation AEs is used for adverse events and you can specify that this not be corrected to Aes when the Correct Two Initial Capitals option is active.

The final option in this dialog box, Replace Text as You Type, tells Word to automatically replace certain character sequences with others. When you end a word by typing a space, period, or other word-boundary character, Word checks the list of words to replace and, if your word is found, replaces it with the specified text (or in some cases with a symbol, such as replacing --> with an arrow symbol). The primary use for this option is to correct common misspellings, such as abuot for about and yuo for you. You can modify the list of defined corrections as follows:

• To add a correction, enter the text to be replaced in the Replace box, enter the replacement text in the With box, then click Add.

• To delete a correction, locate it in the list and select it by clicking on it, then click Delete.

Figure 1-2. Setting AutoCorrect options.

Figure 1-3. Using the AutoCorrect button.

Our

Recommendations for AutoCorrect: Turn off all of the capitalization options, with the possible exception of the Capitalize Names of Days option. Even with attention paid to defining exceptions, these options are still likely to make unexpected and unwanted changes in your documents. Turn on the Replace Text as You Type option. This option corrects only blatant misspellings and is very unlikely to change your document in an inappropriate manner. If there are easily misspelled technical terms that you use a lot, you may want to add them to the list. Delete the symbol replacements; we see no place for them in technical writing.

Note that Word’s AutoText tool is another way to quickly enter often-used words or phrases into your document. We feel, however, that for single words or short phrases, Replace Text as You Type is easier to use.

AUTOFORMAT AS YOU TYPE

AutoFormat as You Type is a tool that examines text as you type and makes formatting changes according to the options you have set. For example, a word typed inside asterisks, like *this*, can be automatically bolded, like this. This is of definite concern to us because these changes are applied automatically as you type in your document and do not require you to issue any explicit command. They are also mostly turned on by default (as shown in Figure 1-4) and, for users who are unaware of them, can make you think that there’s a poltergeist in your computer.

Most of the options in this dialog box are self-explanatory, but some options may require some explanation.

• Automatic Bulleted Lists: Paragraphs that start with an asterisk and a space followed by text will be converted to bulleted list items.

Figure 1-4. Setting AutoFormat As You Type options.

• Automatic Numbered Lists: Paragraphs that start with a number, a period, and a space followed by text will be converted to numbered list items.

• Border Lines: Three or more hyphens followed by pressing Enter will convert to a thin border. Use underscores instead of hyphens for a thick border, or equal signs for a double border.

• Tables: Plus signs separated by hyphens (e.g., +----+----+) will convert to a table with one column for each pair of plus signs.

• Built-in Heading Styles: Enter some text then press Enter twice to convert the text to Heading 1 style. This does not always work as it should, in our experience, and is of dubious use even when it does work.

• Format Beginning of List: In a bulleted or numbered list, the first word of a list item will automatically be formatted (bold or italics, for example) the same as the first word of the previous list item.

• Set Left- and First-Indent: The left indent of the current paragraph is changed when you press Tab (increase indent) or Backspace (decrease indent).

• Define Styles Based on Your Formatting: If you manually change the formatting of a paragraph, Word will automatically create a new style based on that formatting and add it to the styles list. This is one of Word’s most troublesome options and should always be turned off.

Our Recommendations for AutoFormat as You Type: The Replace as You Type options are fairly innocuous and cannot do any real harm as long as you know they are in effect. In particular, the option for replacing a pair of hyphens with an em dash can be useful because it saves you the trouble of opening the Symbol dialog box each time you want to insert an em dash—and every technical writer should know the different usages of the hyphen, em dash, and en dash! Note that you can also insert an em dash by pressing Ctrl+Alt+hyphen (it must be the hyphen on the numeric keypad).

However, if your document will be processed by an e-publishing system you may want to turn all the Replace as You Type options off. This is because some e-publishing software is very fussy about the characters in a document. For example, the em dash character from a normal font looks just like the em dash from the symbol font, but may be treated differently by the e-publishing program.

The other options, those in the Apply as You Type and Automatically as You Type sections are, in our opinion, pure evil. Perhaps someone, somewhere, has found these useful, but we recommend that you turn ‘em off, leave ‘em off, and forget about ‘em—particularly the Define Styles Based on Your Formatting option.

AUTOFORMAT OPTIONS

You may have noticed an AutoFormat tab in the AutoCorrect dialog box. This tab is shown in Figure 1-5.

Figure 1-5. AutoFormat options.

These options look a lot like the AutoFormat As You Type options. The difference is that these options are not applied automatically as you type, but to the entire document when you issue the AutoFormat command. The mystery is that there is no AutoFormat command, or else it’s very well hidden. Older versions of Word had this command, and it could be that this dialog box was overlooked when the Microsoft programmers decided to do away with the command. Bottom line, you can ignore the AutoFormat tab.

DISPLAY RELATED OPTIONS

Word has a number of options that control how your document is displayed on the screen. None of these options change the document, so they are not problematic in the way that some other options are—you can set them as you prefer. However, a few of them are potentially very useful for the medical and technical writer, so we explain them here.

FIELD SHADING

Fields are covered in depth in Chapter 4: Working with Fields and TOCs. In brief, a field is a code that you insert in your document to display certain data such as the current date or a sequential number. Fields are extremely useful, but you can run into problems if you lose track of where you are using them in your document. To prevent this, we recommend setting the Field Shading option to Always rather than to Never or When Selected. The result is that all fields in your document are always displayed with a gray background so you will never mistake a field for regular text. Field shading does not appear in printouts.

Field shading (along with the other View options discussed below) is found under the Advanced category in the Options dialog box. Scroll down until you find the Field Shading option, as shown in Figure 1-6, and select Always from the list.

PICTURE PLACEHOLDERS

Displaying graphics in a document takes extra processing power, and if your document contains a lot of graphics it can slow down operations such as scrolling and updating the formatting. Some writers find graphics to be distracting when they want to focus on the text. If you select the Show Picture Placeholders option, Word does not display the images but only a box indicating each image’s size and position. This can speed things up a lot for some documents. Displaying graphics is rarely a problem with today’s powerful computers, and we recommend leaving this option off.

The Show Picture Placeholders option is located with the other advanced options a few lines above the Field Shading option (please refer to Figure 1-6).

Figure 1-6. Setting when field shading is displayed.

STYLE AREA WIDTH

Styles, covered in Chapter 2: Working with Styles and Formatting, give you great power and flexibility when it comes to formatting paragraphs, tables, and text. If you have the Styles pane open (click the arrow at the lower right of the Styles section on the Home tab), Word displays a list of styles and highlights the name of the style assigned to the current paragraph, as shown in Figure 1-7. Unfortunately, Word does not automatically scroll the list to bring the current style into view, so it’s not that useful for seeing the assigned style. For this, we prefer to use the Style Area, covered next, or to put the Style Box on the Quick Access toolbar, as covered in Chapter 8: Additional Topics.

Figure 1-7. The current style is indicated in the Styles pane.

Sometimes, however, it can be useful to have the names of all paragraph styles displayed (those styles that are used in the document). This lets you instantly see what style is assigned to which paragraphs; wrong style assignments are the source of many formatting problems. You can view all used styles by setting the Style Area Width option to a value greater than 0. Word