Learning Conversations

Some hints and tips to help save time whenever you are using a word-processor (like MS Word or OpenOffice) or a desktop publisher (like Serif's PagePlus or Apple's Pages).

1. If your document is longer than a single page then use "styles". These are really not hard. But they will save you huge amounts of time in formatting and reformatting. Imagine you have a document with a series of headings and sub-headings. Rather than trying to make each one match up, in terms of font, size, line-spacing etc - just create a style for MainHeading and another for SubHeading. Every time you need to make a heading, type the text and then click on the appropriate style.
2. Use the built-in outline Heading and Normal styles (formatted according to your design). Most word-processors have simple key strokes (examples of Word keyboard shortcuts) that allow you to assign those styles quickly.
3. Make rapid changes to your document look & feel by changing the formatting of the styles. This will then automatically change any text tagged with a particular style.
4. Use the Document Map (Word only, I think) to quickly navigate around large documents. It creates a menu from any text tagged with the outline styles of Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 etc
5. Never, ever, use carriage returns to make spaces between paragraphs. Use the function that adds space above and below paragraphs. Even better if this is used as part of a style, as it will keep your paragraphs consistently spaced automatically.
6. Use styles and paragraph formatting to control page breaks automatically where ever possible (Word example). If you put in a manual page break, you will only find yourself having to remove it later if you edit the document.
7. If you find yourself using the same styles and document structure over and over again, save a bare-bones copy of the document as a template.
8. Try to avoid manually adding any repeated formatting to text or to paragraphs that may appear more than once (eg. an italic emphasis to certain words) - unless you can guarantee that you will never want to change that formatting. It's far easier to create a style. That way you can easily change every piece of text with that style.
9. If you find yourself trying to lay out images and frames on a page, consider using a Desk Top Publisher application instead.

For more information see this guide on using styles in word-processing.

Basically - if you are going to use a Word-processor to do anything more than the odd letter to the bank, you must learn how to use styles.

If there was one thing that I would insist on including in any school ICT curriculum, it would be styles. It then leads into thinking about content reuse, the benefits of ICT, web-design, database design and normalisation and so on.