Hey that was great! Maybe I'm a bit sad but I even quite enjoyed it. But have come away with the horrible feeling that I use a mixture of the two...eurgh. :(

That was amazingly useful and I shall start using it forthwith. However, as I'm currently on chapter 8 of my WIP, I need lesson 3 ASAP.

Pretty please?

btw - what a lovely voice you have. So very English.

I have to agree with all of the above including the voice. Could we have more please? EM

That's brilliant, Emma. Thank you!

Dee

Brilliant. Thanks so much, Emma. Very helpful.

I'm on a personal mission to get all writers to use styles - life gets so much easier!
Once you have some heading styles you can use document map to navigate through your novel - it's a cinch!
BTW - What software do you use to make the videos -or would that be telling?
Cheers!
Alison

Yes Alison, you're quite right! And should the world ever move to digitised texts - not PDF, but code-based, like on a webpage - the process of turning a backlist into something useable will be so much quicker if the styles are there waiting to be mapped to tags (a pretty automatic process in InDesign). Otherwise you'd have to start from scratch.

The software is called CamStudio. There are loads of different options - just google 'free screen capture software'.

Brill. I have downloaded it. Eventually I may work out what to do next!

Alison

This is great and I've learnt a lot. I still don't really understand the need for it, though... sorry! If you use the 'italic' button in the normal way, instead of using Styles, you wouldn't have to make all the font changes manually. You'd just use the 'Format' button in the Find and Replace, go to 'Font' and select 'Italic' from the Font Style list. That makes it sounds complicated, but it isn't, honestly.

You can use it to make all Find and Replace automatic changes, including changing from using a Font Style to using the Styles as shown above.

I hope that makes sense! But you should never have to go through manually as you showed in the first slide.

Hi A Reader -

The thing is, you're looking at it from the point of view of managing a document within Word, and Word alone. P&C styles come into their own when you export the content from Word and reuse it in another application or structure: two of the obvious alternatives are InDesign, for professional typesetting and XML, for web publishing.

If a document isn't properly tagged up, it has no structure that is universally understood by other applications. Without this structure, it's impossible to take the content and use it in other applications and remain sure that every piece of formatting is preserved.

There's a further aspect, too. Remember Betamax videos? 8-tracks? Floppy discs for your BBC Micro? Cartridges for your Amstrad? Try playing any of these formats now and you'll have a problem. Unless you can find the relevant, obsolete hardware, the content on those obsolete formats, unless exported and upgraded into current technology, is lost forever. This is something we have to be aware of now: MS Word 2007 format should be safe for the next decade, but what about in thirty, or fifty, or a hundred years? By tagging up content and ensuring that it has a robust structure, it's made future proof.

That's why local formatting is bad.

Hi Emma,

I knew that styles existed, but hadn't twigged why they are so important. Penny's dropped now. Thanks.

I've been tempted with self publishing as a way to rapidly get a new project published, however they want you to submit in PDF, I know there's software to convert from word to pdf, but am puzzled on how do you control where the page breaks occur, is there an easy way to do this?

Cheers

Mickey