Bend Word to Your Will
Word Document: Zip 
1 mb
Template: Zip 185 kb
This article was last updated in September 2007. Since Clive updates it more than once a year, you may wish to come back!
You can download "Bend Word to Your Will" in Word document format (as a compressed Zip file) from the links above.
By clicking here on Table of Contents, you can see what's in the document before you decide whether to download it. For the most part it's structured like a dictionary with self-contained articles, so even though it's about 200 pages long, it isn't difficult to find information – just as with a dictionary! It's intended to be used on-screen rather than to be printed out, because the articles have clickable hyperlinks for instant access to related topics.
Clive has been continually improving these notes since 2001 to increase his speed and efficiency, especially in working on long and/or complex documents – although the notes are equally useful for shorter documents. He's particularly interested in reducing the chances of corruption in his documents because in Clive's professional work they are distributed back and forwards between many people, on PCs and Macs. His emphasis is on configuring Word to make it suit your unique needs, but without making the documents themselves very complex.
From the top of this page you can also download a template (a compressed Zip file) that's related to the main “Bend Word to Your Will” document. If you are not too experienced yet with Word, you will probably not need to download the template – you can always come back later for it. It contains all the styles used in the main document (but so does the main document itself), plus some of the formatting tools, a skeleton for a long document you can create using those tools, and some notes that Clive sends to colleagues when he attaches toolbars to a document to make it easier for others to format it. (The template does not yet include the most recent formatting changes made in the "Bend Word to Your Will" document.)
Please note: If you download the template and install it in the appropriate place and attach a document to it, the template will change the behaviour of Word a little: that's the whole purpose of it. If you want to avoid this, simply keep the template in a different folder from the Microsoft Office “Templates” or “My Templates” folders until you have read the part of “Bend Word to Your Will” which explains how templates are used. If you only want to use a few of the template’s features, it’s easy to do so by transferring them across using Word’s Organizer; you don’t have to install the template to do this.
Finally, this article contains the author's recommendations for working with Word based on his particular experience. Everyone is different, and although most of this material is totally consistent with the Word:Mac MVPs' ideas of good working practice, some of the techniques represent the most suitable approach for the work that Clive does, just as other articles represent other contributors' method of working. If you want to find out about alternative approaches to a topic, we (including Clive) will welcome your questions or comments in the newsgroup news:msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.mac.office.word
This is an example of an article submitted by someone who was not a Microsoft MVP at the time it was published (he is now!). We are very keen to receive such contributions, and we invite you to make one, no matter how small!
You should also be aware that Clive retains Copyright for this article, although he has placed no restrictions on non-commercial use. Clive also has his own Disclaimer. Both statements impose terms in addition to the standard Terms of Use and Disclaimer used on this website and are to be read together.