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You owe it to yourself to make better Word docs
We love to hate on Microsoft Word.
It’s a bloated, messy beast of an application that tries to be all things to all people and ends up pleasing no one — it is neither a pure word processor, nor a typesetting system, nor a page layout program.
But it does come with an intuitive graphic interface that allows you to create printed documents that look like they do on the screen, and this (plus its historic links with the market-dominant Windows OS) has helped it become widely used in the workplace.
It’s also industry standard software for the publishing industry. So even if you work mainly in Scrivener or another writing application, nearly every professional document you produce will spend at least some of its time in .docx format.
Like it or not, you need to make friends with Word.
And here’s the thesis that prompted me to write this article: Despite Word’s ubiquity and the hate heaped on it, many people don’t know how to use it effectively.
Here are six simple things to improve your experience of Word that I’ve picked up over the past 15 years as a professional .docx wrangler.
