What's the best way to use MS Word to write a 60 page technical document

Question

I'm revising an existing 60 page PDF document for a new product. I have to use MS-Word. Is there a good reference on the best practices for using Word? For instance, I've heard that it's best to keep everything in "sections". I'll be doing a TOC, lots of illustrations, multiple columns, etc. It's just going to be me revising it, so version control is not a major issue. Thanks!

Answer 1

Uninstallation is supposed to work fine. Followed by installing a LaTeX package, such as Lyx (to get started)

Edit: just saw you have to use word. Well, make sure you work with styles as much as possible, don't go around randomly formatting parts of text. Make sure you do backups. Try to find a job where you can use the best tools.

Answer 2

The number one suggestion I give to people writing a technical document in Word is this:

DO NOT FORMAT UNTIL YOU ARE DONE. Write your entire document in the "normal" style. Once you are done, format section and subsection headers using the "Heading 1", "Heading 2" etc. styles. This is because Word uses these styles to generate the TOC.

One other thing... Don't do multiple columns in a Word document. Multicolumns are better for large format printing, and if you're just going to dump your doc on 8.5x11 paper or distribute it electronically its not worth it. It's better, IMHO, to increase your margins than to try to cram two columns on a page.

Answer 3

So You Want to Write a Book with MS Word?

The title of this article refers to “books,” but these are principles that apply to many types of long documents. Word has been known to handle 10,000 pages in a single file, and these approaches probably start being extremely useful at about 30 pages. This article is designed to redirect you to some of the most useful pages on the web that elucidate the necessary concepts in detail, although there is also a fair amount of introductory overview on this page. This page is also designed as a gateway so that you only have to bookmark or share one link that will direct you to many useful references.

And even more here: Word MVP.

Answer 4

What ever you do -- don't use subdocuments on versions earlier than office 2007. The master document or child documents will get corrupted and you will have a huge mess. It may be fixed in 2007 but I haven't tried yet.

Answer 5

Use styling instead of regular formatting as much as possible.

Give your section titles the style-defined Title 1, Title 2... and customize them if you prefer. As said above, it will create your TOC, and on top of that it will be immensely easier to keep a consistent look overall.

Answer 6

Link to external images, don't embed them in the document.