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+---
+layout: post
+title: A new approach to word processing
+tags: [ design ]
+published: true
+---
+
+Last month I came up with a college project where we had to report our work in
+a 70-90 pages technical document. I was in a five people group and we agreed
+that everyone had to write a part of it and gather it all in the end. I was
+talking to another group's colleague about the way they were gathering all the
+jigsaws of the puzzle. He said his group took about two and a half hours to
+complete the formatting and design of the whole document. After I browsed
+through their document, I took my not so good conclusions... The report was
+somehow inconsistent and compromised. Obviously the job wasn't successfully
+accomplished.
+
+Most people don't know how to process text and that's a fact. Everyone has this
+major problem and it affects any organization's productivity. I want to share
+some thoughts on this subject, namely three tips:
+
+No extra RETURN's
+-----------------
+
+We are all used to grant whitespace to each paragraph by pressing RETURN, even
+if a single time. Well, don't. Use the space-before/after-paragraph feature. It
+may sound strange when you have your text altogether at first glance but when
+you apply this feature, the results will be shiny and it will save you a lot of
+time!
+
+Default styling
+---------------
+
+You should be using this all the time for two major reasons:
+
+* You get an instant look and feel of what your document will look like. In my
+  modest opinion, the default styles on any word processor look just fine.
+* You might now know this but when you apply the default styles available, you
+  automatically build a semantic structure of your document. This means you can
+  create a table of contents or a document outline with zero effort! This is
+  extremely useful when exporting to PDF because it promotes accessibility and
+  usability.
+
+You can obviously change the style the way you want but you should change the
+style and not the paragraph using that style. If you change the style you
+ensuring that every single paragraph is affected and the document looks
+consistent.
+
+Templates
+---------
+
+It's amazing how powerful this tool can be. Just define the styles in a blank
+document - you can even put some text with the various styles to be used - and
+save it as a template. Both Microsoft Word and Apple Pages have this feature.
+This tool is absolutely power-saving when more than one person writes the same
+document.
+
+Should you use these suggestions I presented and you will have your time saved
+for sure.