3 Tips for Avoiding Formatting Hell

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

As the default word processor for most writers, Microsoft’s Word program does a lot. In point of fact, it does so much that most people only use a tiny little fraction of the available functionality. Ironically, the thing it doesn’t do, isn’t particularly good at, and often makes more difficult is preparing a manuscript for publication.

While signed authors can simply turn over a file or hard copy to their publisher, who no doubt employs someone whose sole job it is to take that formatting nightmare and turn it into something that can be printed, indie authors must do this work themselves. More often than not, it is only at the end of the process that these authors discover that all that fiddling they did with fonts, spacing, title adjustments and so forth has created a monster. So here are three tips to help you avoid formatting hell

Forget that the TAB key exists – Years ago, when I was taking a touch typing class, I was actually trained to use the TAB key to create indents for paragraphs. This training has caused me more problems than I care to mention in the formatting process. TAB does awful stuff beneath the visible layer of the document and can cause utter havoc in a PDF conversion process. If you need an indent for sanity (I do), set a left indent in the page layout tab that automatically inserts one when you hit enter.
Avoid the Styles option – Word allows you to do all kinds of neat things with Styles, like create fancy chapter headings. You will need to do this eventually for some publishing outlets, but you don’t want to be going through trying to manually change Style Options for 30 or 40 chapter headings. Trust me on this, I’ve done it.
Create Master Files – It might seem obvious, but you should have a master file. In fact, you should have 2 master files. One master file should be a copy of your original completed manuscript (for later reference) and the other should be a final version with all edits and changes in it. Once you have these two files, you should never alter them. Copy and paste the entire text into a new file to do outlet specific formatting.

While there are lots of other things you can do to avoid formatting hell, these three should save you a lot of mental anguish in the long run.