---
layout: post
title: A new approach to word processing
tags: [ design, word ]
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.