Microsoft Word

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Technology

John Henry was hammering on the right side,
The big steam drill on the left,
Before that steam drill could beat him down,
He hammered his fool self to death.

American folk song "John Henry" pits man against machine in drilling a tunnel for the railroad. John Henry wins the contest, but the effort costs him his life.

You probably won't see that song on Billboard's Top 40 list, but its theme is still with us, as shown in the recent rematch between chess master Gary Kasparov and IBM's Deep Junior chess program. The Associated Press article for February 9 described the final moments:

"Kasparov played himself into a superior position but offered a draw on the 23rd move, surprising chess experts at the New York Athletic Club. Deep Junior turned down the offer but presented its own draw five moves later, and Kasparov readily accepted to boos from the crowd.

"Kasparov said he played better than Deep Junior in the deciding game and would have pressed for a win in a similar position against a human opponent. But, he said, he feared even a tiny mistake would have been severely punished by the computer."

Do you view technology as an opponent? For many editors, the answer is yes. Editors, indexers, and other publishing professionals seem extremely conservative about technology--perhaps with good reason. Their job is to ensure accuracy, clarity, and even beauty--and that requires a human mind. Editors are right to resist anything that gets in the way of those goals. And managers who believe that a spell check is as good as an edit or that a machine-generated concordance can take the place of an index need to be educated about the realities of the marketplace--realities that will surely come back to bite them if ignored.

It is also true, however, that editors who ignore the need to use technology do so at their peril. The field of publishing is changing rapidly, and editors have got to keep up. If they don't, they'll be replaced--not by machines but by other editors who know how to use machines to their advantage.

I'm tempted here to give my lecture about how the lowly plow made civilization possible, with a recapitulation of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and the overwhelming role of technology in human progress. But I won't. Instead, I will ask you: What have you learned this week about using your computer to help you do your job more efficiently? If your answer is "Nothing," may I encourage you to check out our newsletter archive, where you'll find a wealth of information about editing in Microsoft Word.

I especially encourage you to read the articles on wildcard searching and replacing, which may be the most important tool you can acquire. If that's not enough, pay a visit to the Word MVP site, where you'll find tips and techniques aplenty.

Finally, ask yourself: "What one thing could I do with my computer that would dramatically increase my effectiveness?" Then find out how to do it.

Michael Dertouzos, late director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, had a slogan that I like: "Doing more by doing less." And Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, said, "I believe that . . . a person today who is computer literate is twenty times more valuable than someone who is not because they're facilitated. It's like they have three robots working for them."

The truth is, you don't have to beat the machine; all you have to do is put it to work.

To learn more about John Henry:

http://www.ibiblio.org/john_henry/index.html

To learn more about the Kasparov matches:

http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/home/html/b.html

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,57607,00.html

To read Wealth of Nations:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html

To learn about the history of civilization:

http://www.humberc.on.ca/~warrick/0hist.html

For a lighter look at that history:

http://www.csc.twu.ca/rsbook2/Ch1/Ch1.S.html

For a Seybold seminar on the future of publishing:

http://seminars.seyboldreports.com/1999_boston/conferences/13/13_transcript.html

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Shifting Styles, Part 3

You're working away, editing a client's document, and decide to modify the Heading 1 style to use a Goudy typeface. Whoa! Now the Heading 2 and Heading 3 styles are in Goudy as well. What's going on here?

What's going on is that your client has made the Heading 2 and Heading 3 styles "based on" the Heading 1 style. If you don't know how this works, you'll be scratching your head over the changing formats. If you *do* know how it works, you can use it to ensure consistent formatting throughout a document.

Let's say you want all of your headings to be set in Baskerville. It's true that you could go through and set Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, Heading 5, Heading 6, Heading 7, Heading 8, and Heading 9 (whew!) all to use that font (in varying point sizes, say). But now what if you want to switch to Palatino? Do you really have to go through and modify all of those styles again? Not if you originally based them all on Heading 1. If you did that, all you have to do is change the font for Heading 1, and all of your other heading styles will change as well. Pretty neat! Here's how to do it:

  1. Click the "Format" menu.
  2. Click "Style."
  3. In the Styles list, click the style (Heading 2, for example) that you want to base on another style (such as Heading 1).
  4. Click the "Modify" button.
  5. In the "Based on" dropdown list, click the style on which you want to base the current style.
  6. Click the "OK" button.
  7. Click the "Close" button.

Now, whenever you modify the "parent" style (Heading 1), the "child" style (Heading 2) will be modified automatically.

Please note, however, that any changes you make to the "child" style will override the attributes of the "parent" style. For example, if Heading 1 is set to 18 points, you can still modify Heading 2 (based on Heading 1) as 14 points. If you do that, though, you may wonder how to get rid of the override if you need to. Here's the secret: change the attribute in Heading 2 back to the way it's set in Heading 1 (14 points back to 18 points). The "child" style will simply pick up its attributes from the "parent style" once again.

This "based on" feature is extremely useful. You can use it to set up whole families of styles that are based on a "parent" style. For example, you might want to set up a family of heading styles, a family of body text styles, and a family of list styles, and then store them all in a special template. Just be sure to use a naming convention that makes it easy to remember which styles are the "parents." The easiest way to do this may be to use "1" to designate "parent" styles: Heading 1, Body Text 1, List 1, and so on. Then you can use other numbers (2, 3, 4) to indicate "child" styles.

Now, when your styles start shifting, you'll be happy rather than sad.

READERS WRITE

Last week's newsletter discussed Word's "Automatically update" feature for styles. In the newsletter, I suggested turning on the feature while designing a document but turning off the feature while writing or editing. If you've got lots of styles, however, this can get pretty tedious. Gary Frieder, a Microsoft Word MVP at Woody's Lounge (http://www.wopr.com) created a macro to turn off updating for all styles, and Bill Rubidge edited the macro to turn on updating. Thanks to Bill for sending the macros, and thanks to Gary for giving permission to use them. Enjoy!

'MACRO THAT CRAWLS ALL THE STYLES AND TURNS AUTO-UPDATE ON
Public Sub TurnOnAutomaticallyUpdate()
' TurnOnAutomaticallyUpdate Macro
' Created by Gary Frieder, edited by Bill Rubidge to turn on, not off
Dim aSty As Style
For Each aSty In ActiveDocument.Styles
   If aSty.Type = wdStyleTypeParagraph Then
   aSty.AutomaticallyUpdate = True
   End If
Next aSty
End Sub
 'MACRO THAT CRAWLS ALL THE STYLES AND TURNS AUTO-UPDATE OFF
Public Sub RemoveAutomaticallyUpdate()
' RemoveAutomaticallyUpdate Macro
' Created by Gary Frieder
Dim aSty As Style
For Each aSty In ActiveDocument.Styles
   If aSty.Type = wdStyleTypeParagraph Then
   aSty.AutomaticallyUpdate = False
   End If
Next aSty
End Sub

RESOURCES

Microsoft Product Support Services is actually one of my favorite places to find information about using Microsoft Word:

http://support.microsoft.com/

I just use the dropdown list on the left to select the version of Word I want to learn about (Word 2000, for example). Then I type some key words in the box just below that ("modify styles," for example), and click "Search now." The site has a lot of information, although you may have to dig to find just what you need.