Upon general request, here’s my guide to proper use of MS Word:
- Never ever use direct formatting.
- That means: never ever click on any of the buttons in the formatting toolbar
- . . . which means that you might as well disable that toolbar altogether (right-click in the toolbar area and uncheck “Formatting”)
- You are allowed to keep it there for two reasons:
- To control what is going on in the document, and
- to click on the “Styles” button (the one with the two “A”s), which opens the “Styles” sidebar, . . .
- . . . which should always be visible, and which is the only acceptable way to format the text.
- Create styles for the types of text that you are going to use, and/or modify the existing styles to suit your desires.
- These desires should under no circumstance include using Times New Roman or Arial, which are Microsoft’s rip-offs of slightly more acceptable typefaces; but which in themselves are objectively ugly; and which give a discerning reader the impression that you don’t care how your document looks. Good alternatives are Garamond (which, in Microsoft’s version, is not a Garamond at all but a Jannon, but it comes close enough), Gentium, a nice, free unicode font (a combination of three huge advantages which are rarely seen together), or for that matter Book Antiqua, which is also a rip-off, but of a nice typeface: Hermann Zapf’s Palatino
- Use templates:
- In an empty document, set up all the different styles that you think you will be using (plain text, indented text, blockquotes, headings, etc.), and save the document, not as a Word Document, but a Word Template (choose it in the drop-down list below the field for the file name).
- Choose New document from template from the Files menu and select your template.
- Lo and behold! All your styles are there.
- You can apply your new template to any document through the Functions > Templates menu. Check the box with “update styles automatically”.