Microsoft Word for Writers: How to make a document template for your writing

Love your laptop. Turn the lights low,
open some wine, put on some music...

This post series is the techie tricks to make your writing life so much easier, with all the nifty little things you can do on Word. You can read the first post here.

Once you've learnt how to set up the Styles for your writing, you realise you don't want to faddle about with that every time you start a new story. There must be an easier way. The whole history of computing boils down to "How can I make the computer do this for me?" And there is! Templates! You're going to open a new document, set up the styles and some other useful settings, and then save it as a template. Then every time you start typing up a new story, you create a new document from that template, and everything is already set up.

How to create a writing template

1. Open a new document
2. Set up your Normal and Normal_new styles - if you can't remember how, or haven't read the previous post, here's how. More practice!
3. You could head Straight to Go, Collect £200 now, but how about a few other useful settings? Add some page numbers. On the Insert tab, click Page Number and then Bottom of Page, Center. (That's standard, you can put it wherever you want.)
   
   
4. Good margins are always useful. Narrower text is easier to read plus agents and publishers want proper margins, none of this 2cm on each side malarkey. I recommend the original defaults: Top & Bottom margins of 2.54cm, Left and Right margins of 3.17cm. To set your margins, click the Menus tab,then the Page Setup button, and then select Margins from the dropdown list.
   
   
   
   
5. If there's anything else you're always doing to your writing documents, now's the moment to do it! Once you're fully skilled up in my smartypants ways, you'll be adding field codes and macros and all sorts. But don't worry about those for now, you can always add them later.
6. Save the document as a template: click the Office button, move down to Save As, and choose Word Template.
   
   
7. The dialogue box will open for you to name and save your template. It should automatically save the template in the right place, with all the other templates. (We'll check in a moment that it has; if not, I'll tell you how to move it to the right place.) Give it a nice name and click "Save".

You've made your first template! Now you can go crazy and make templates for everything you do a lot - letters, poetry, recipes, whatever.

How to create a new document from your template

1. Click on File, then choose New.
2. In the options that appear, click on My templates. (In older versions of Word, the options will appear on the right hand side, and you need to click on On my computer... Also, for some versions, you might need to choose the option Personal templates.)
3. A dialogue box will open of your templates - click on the one you want. In this case, Novel.
   
4. A new document will open based on your template - so it has all the settings and the styles you created in your template. Result!

If it's all worked, you can scroll on down to tweaking your template's styles. If you can't find it, here's how to sort that out:

How do I find my template?

Your template should have automatically been saved in the right place. If it wasn't, then we need to find the right place and put it there. Every version of Windows / Mac, and apparently every version of Word, keeps the template in slightly different places, so the easiest way is just to search for it. These are instructions for PC users - any Mac users, feel free to shout instructions in the comments and I'll add them.

You're going to search for where templates live on your computer and open that folder, then search for your template and open that folder, then drag your template to the the proper template home.

1. Open Windows Explorer.
2. On the left, click on the C: drive (to search the whole computer)
3. In the Search Box (top right, picture of a magnifying glass) type the name of the normal template and its extension: Normal.dotx (or for old versions of Word, Normal.dot) and press Enter. Wait while it peruses all your files. This may take some time, so maybe make a cup of tea while you wait. (Normal is the standard Blank document template, so we know that'll be in the right place.)
4. Once it's found it, click on it, right-click, and select Open file location. That'll open a new Windows Explorer window in the folder where it's stored. You should be able to see on the left and along the top where it's stored. Mine is in C:/Users/Megan Kerr/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Templates.
5. Open a new Windows Explorer window, and search for your template - eg Novel.dotx. Again, once it's found it, click on it, right-click, and select Open file location.
6. If your two windows are full-screen, click on the Restore-down button in the top right, next to the close button. Restore-down is the middle button:
   
7. You should be able to see both your windows now. Drag your template from wherever it's hiding into the same window as the Normal template.

Your template's in the right place now, so you can scroll back up to create a new document from your template.

How to change styles and add new styles in your template

We already set up the styles in your template, but as time passes, your tastes might change - you want more line spacing, or a different heading font - or you might develop new styles you want in all your writing. Then you find you're modifying your styles every time you use your template... Noooo! That's what we wanted to leave behind! But we CAN leave it behind. There's another little trick, which consists simply of a tick:

1. Add a new style or modify your style as usual. If you can't remember how, here's how.
2. In the Modify Style window, once you've made your changes, look at the bottom left. You'll see a tick box for Add to template. Tick it.
   
   
3. Click OK.
4. When you save your document, it will ask you if you want to save the changes to the template as well:
   
   Click Yes.

You're done! It's so easy! This is just for styles, though - if you want to make changes to margins or anything else, you need to open your template.

How to change your template

First you need to find your template in Windows Explorer, so if you don't know how, scroll back up to How do I find my template? I've added my template folder to my libraries, so I can find them easily. (Once you've found it, right-click on the Template folder and choose Include in library.) Then...

1. In Windows Explorer, right-click on your template.
2. The right-click options will open up:
   
3. Choose Open not New. New is in bold: that means it's the default option, so if you double-click on the file, it will create a New document based on that template. By right-clicking, you've brought up the Open option.
4. The template itself will open. You can then make any changes you want to. When you're done, just click Save and close it.

Done! You're a template guru!

Microsoft Word for Writers: Set up your styles to lay out your writing properly

Love your laptop and customise it!

This post series is the techie tricks to make your writing life so much easier, with all the nifty little things you can do on Word. You can read the first post here.

Once you've put proper headings in your document, you're already using the Styles and Formatting - and it has a ton of brilliant uses besides the headings and the document map. You can customise it so your headings look exactly how you want, and you can also set it so it does proper layout for you, without you having to press tab all the time. If you're not sure what story layout should look like, compare these two documents:

If your story or book looks like the one on the right, hurrah! You're using sections and paragraphs like a pro! If it looks like the one on the left, every paragraph flush with the margin and white space above it, you need to shoot off and read this post on layout, and spend some quality time flipping through the books on your shelves, saying "Ohhhh..."

Proper layout does all sorts of useful story-things, but all those indents mean a lot of enter-tab, enter-tab, when you'd rather be concentrating on the writing. So you set up your styles to do it for you! And you do that by customising your styles.

We'll start with customising your headings, to cover the basics, and then go through setting up proper layout. As before, if you feel nervous, use another document to play around.

The golden rule of Styles and Formatting

This is the golden rule of Styles and Formatting: except for italics within the writing, never make formatting changes to the text itself: change the Style instead. It's so important I'll put a box around it:

Change the Style not the text formatting.

Want a pretty font for your headings? Don't select the heading and change the font - change the heading style! Want your writing in Times New Roman instead of Cambria? Don't select the text and change the font - change the Normal style! Want indents and a special font for the text messages your characters send each other? Don't just change the formatting for that bit - create a new style!

Why? For a short story, doing formatting by hand doesn't cause you problems - it's only a few pages. And for the first 10,000 words of your novel, you won't notice any issues either, probably. By the time you finish your novel, though, it's probably at least 80,000 words. And then you've written it in Calibri point 11, because that's what you like, but the agent says "Times New Roman or Cambria only not Calibri, point 12" because they hate Calibri and want good-sized text. And then you have to change everything. But you can't just select everything and say "Times New Roman, point 12" because you also have those text messages, remember? And the headings. And that innovative stuff you did in the middle, to mimic Google search results. And then you're trawling through your whole document trying to fix it and change it, and it's not just a few pages, it's over 200. But if you're using Styles instead, you make a few quick clicks and - voilà!

How to customise your headings

The in-built headings are often ugly, a bit corporate, or just look too much like the documents you see at work. Make them your own!

1. On the Home tab, right-click the style you want to change and choose Modify.
2. A box will spring up in the middle
   
3. Click Format to change the settings.
4. Choose Font to change the heading's font, colour, size, whether it's underlined, small caps, all caps, etc:
    
   Then click OK to get back to the Modify Style box.
5. Choose Paragraph to change the alignment, and the space above and below it. Don't use extra Enters to create space - use the Styles:
   
6. On the second tab of the Paragraph box, you can tell it to start a new page automatically. If you want each chapter on a new page. Click Page break before.
    
   Then click OK to get back to the Modify Style box.
7. Click OK in the Modify Style box.

Done! You can play around with your heading settings to your heart's content, use colour, have a font that matches your novel, anything you like. (And then before you submit it to a publisher, you can change it back to a sensible font by changing the style again.)

If you fancy losing yourself down a font rabbit hole, have a look at Dafont's collection. Most of them are free for personal use and you can just download them. Once they're downloaded, open the zip file, drag them onto your desktop, then drag them into C:/Windows/Fonts to install them. Hours of fabulous WAB! (Writing-Avoidance Behaviour.) Be careful with sites you don't know, though - I've had viruses bundled into font downloads before. Dafont is safe.

How to create your story layout styles

You're going to do the exact same thing, but with a few extra settings, for your story layout styles. You need two styles: Normal will be your paragraph style, indented, with no white space above. Normal_new will be for the start of a new section, not indented, with white space above.

Just like you did for the heading, modify the Normal style:

1. On the Home tab, right-click the Normal style and choose Modify.
2. A box will spring up in the middle
3. Click Paragraph and change the Indentation to First Line - 0.63cm.
   
4. I also change the Line spacing to Multiple - 1.15. I find that's easier on the eye than single-line spacing, but you still get a good amount of text on the screen.
5. Click OK to get back to the Modify Style box.
6. You can also change the font settings if you want, and when you're done, click OK all the way out.

NOTE: This might make all your headings indent as well! That's because all your styles are based on the Normal style. That's fine - just go into any headings you're using, modify their style, and set their indent to None. Yay! More practice!

Now you're going to create the Normal_new style, for new sections:

1. On the Home tab, right-click the Normal style and choose New Style.
2. The box will spring up in the middle:
   
3. In the Name box, type Normal_new. (You can call it whatever you like.)
4. Underneath the sample text, you'll see it says "Normal +". That means it's based on the Normal font, so has all those settings, plus whatever you're going to choose now.
5. In Style for following paragraph, click the down arrow and choose Normal.
   
   This is genius. It means when you start a new section, and then press Enter, the next paragraph will automatically be the right style - a nice indented paragraph!
6. Click on Format then Paragraph to open the paragraph settings. Change the Indentation to None and the Space Before to 12 pt:
   
7. Click OK to confirm.
8. In the Modify Styles box, look below the Preview section and you can see that your new style's settings are Normal + First line: 0cm; Space before 12pt. That means any other changes you make to Normal, except those two extra things, will also apply to this Style. So if you change Normal's font, this one's font will change too. Brilliant! That's because the style is based on Normal (as it says in the box).
   
   
9. Click OK.

You now have your two headings set up! Whenever you start a new section, you click the style Normal_new, and it automatically adds the white space above it and goes flush with the margin. When you press enter at the end of that paragraph, the next paragraph will automatically be Normal, so it will be indented with no white space.

That's the essentials! If this has been a steep learning curve, I suggest you go away and play with this a bunch, then come back later once you feel it's properly under your belt. If you fancy delving a little more, read on...

Go wild with your styles!

Any time you need particular formatting, you can add a style to do that for you. You don't need to make a style for italics in the text, like this, but for most other stuff it's useful. For example, in my novel, I have two separate story strands with two separate fonts, so things set in the other world have the styles Otherworld and Otherworld_new. I also have styles for text messages, which are heavily indented, use a smaller point size, and use MS Sans Serif font. I have fonts for newspaper headings, because the novel has a bunch of those. You own your computer, you tell it what to do, you create your wonderful repertoire of styles however you want.

How to create character styles

Most styles you create will be Paragraph styles - ie they apply to the whole paragraph. Sometimes, though, you have a bit of text inside a paragraph that needs a special setting - so you want to change just those particular letters. ("Characters" means letters, here, not your imaginary people.) In Rope of Words, I had the "titles" the woman thought her story would have plus the words that had a physical existence in the story:

If I created a paragraph style, it would change the whole paragraph, not just those words. So you create a character style:

1. On the Home tab, right-click the Normal style and choose New Style.
2. The box will spring up in the middle.
3. In the Style Type box, click the down arrow and select Character:
   
4. Now, if you click Format, you only get options that apply to the characters, not the paragraph:
   
5. Make any font settings you want. I made my "physical" words Book Antiqua, 12 pt, bold, with a shadow. Click OK all the way out.

Of course when you start your next book, you'll want some of the same styles, at least the Normal and Normal_new already set up. And if you're writing lots of short stories, then you'll be wanting new documents with those set up all the time. So we should probably look at templates, next! In the meantime, have a play with this, have fun, make things silly colours and crazy fonts, OWN the machine! Love your laptop! And when you've had a good play, here's the next post on how to make your own templates.

Microsoft Word for Writers: How to manage your whole novel in one document

Love your laptop.

You absolutely don't need a specialist programme to write a novel. Word can do everything you need, it's almost infinitely customisable, you probably already have it, and at the end your document is in the format publishers and agents want it. They always want a .doc or .docx. Plus Word has a host of nifty little features and tricks perfectly suited to writing. Often, these aren't remotely complicated - you just need to know they exist and why they're useful for writers. So the next rash of posts will be some computery how-to on all the nifty things you can do, to make life and writing easier, so you love your laptop to bits instaed of fighting with the machine, and we're starting with the most absolutely crucial and basic thing:

Keep your novel in one single document

Every time I see a thesis or a novel in multiple documents, one for each chapter, I want to weep - not for me, but for the poor soul who's trying to work like that. There is zero reason to have separate documents for each chapter: text files are incredibly light. To put it into perspective: a single photo from your mobile is about 1000kb. (1 MB) An 80,000-word novel is about 750kb. Your entire novel uses less computer memory than one picture of your coffee. So trust me: put it all in one document. Your computer can cope.

The other reason people keep their novel chapters in separate docs is that they don't know about the document map / navigation pane. This lets you jump around your novel from chapter to chapter incredibly easily, plus you have a nifty overview of your chapter titles. If you've never used this, prepare... to be... amazed! More on how to use that below.

And here's why you should be keeping your novel in one document:

• you can scroll / jump back up easily, to check minor details - eg a cameo character's name
• you can change the font / formatting of the whole thing
• you can do find-and-replace to the whole thing at once - if, for example, you change a character's name from Kristoff to Xavier, you don't need to open 20 documents to do it
• you can spell-check the whole thing at once
• you can manage different versions of the document much more easily
• you can back it up to multiple places much more easily - it's just one file
• you can print it out with proper page numbering and headers running through the whole thing
• you can send it to the agent as a single file (and not look like a massive amateur by sending a file for each chapter!)
• you can check for repetitions of particular words across the whole novel

To manage your novel in one doc easily, you need to know three things:

1. How to Insert > File (if you already have a bunch of separate documents)
2. How to use Styles & Formatting (to get your headings set up)
3. How to use the Document Map / Navigation Pane (so you can jump around the doc easily)

If you're nervy with computers, I suggest you play around with some other documents to start with, so you don't feel like you're learning something new and handling your precious beloved novel at the same time. The more playful and game-like you can make the learning bit, the better!

1. How to Insert > File (if you already have a bunch of separate documents)

You could open each document in turn, then copy-and-paste it into a new document, but there's an easier way.

1. Open a new document
2. Click on the Insert tab
3. In the Text group, click the arrow next to Object.
4. Click Text from file.
   
5. In the dialogue box that opens, navigate to the first chapter, and double-click that. It will be inserted into your document.
6. Press Enter to start a new line (in case your doc didn't) and repeat from #2 with all the chapters, in order.

Ta-da! Your whole novel's in one document! I suggest you save it as Your Novel's Name v1. (v1 = version 1, useful thing to add for managing versions.) Next, we want to get your headings set up properly so you can use the Document Map / Navigation Pane to jump around easily.

2. How to use Styles & Formatting (to get your headings set up)

Styles and formatting are one of Word's superpowers and have a fabulous range of uses for writing - plus you can customise the styles however you want. Right now, though, we're just going to stick to headings and we'll use the default settings. The next blog post will look at how to customise them to your taste.

All text is “Normal” by default – that’s body text.

1. Click within the paragraph or line you want to change, then choose the style from the Home tab. In this case, click on your chapter title and then click Heading 2. (If you want to save Heading 1 for the novel title.) You don't have to select the title: just put your cursor on that line, blinking away.
   
   
   
   You can repeat that for each chapter title. You can also copy the format instead:
   
2. To copy a format from one paragraph to another, put your cursor in the paragraph whose formatting you want, and click the Format Painter button: 
   
   The next paragraph / line you click will get the same formatting.
   To paste the formatting in more than once place, double-click the Format Painter button. When you're finished, click it again to "put it down".

All your chapter headings are now set as Heading 2 - so now we can do the magic bit!

3. How to use the Document Map / Navigation Pane (so you can jump around the doc easily)

Once you have headings and sub-headings, you can use the navigation pane, also called the document map in some versions.

1. Go to View and tick Navigation pane.  (Some versions might call it Document map.) The navigation pane appears on the left-hand side, showing all your document's headings. Now you have an overview of your whole novel, with all your chapter titles! Here's the navigation pane for my original document on how to do this:
   
   
   
2. Click on any heading to jump to that place in the document. You can now leap from chapter to chapter in your novel at just a click, hurrah!

Some added handy features...

• You can use headings lower down the hierarchy - Heading 3, Heading 4, Heading 5, etc - to mark key sections in your novel, especially ones you want to jump back to often. This is especially useful for pivotal scenes you want to refer back to a lot. Before you submit the novel, you can easily take out those extra headings. 
• Each level of heading appears nested below its parent - in the example above, "Styles and formatting" is Heading 1, and the ones beneath it are Heading 2, indented. You can click the little arrow to show or hide those subheadings.
• Whichever section you're in shows as selected in the navigation pane - usually as that warm yellow highlight. That's incredibly handy for some of the more avant-garde stuff we'll cover, like jumping through a document checking for repetitions.

Once you've got these basics of styles and formatting, you can start bending them to your will - changing the Heading font to something splendid and spiffy that suits your novel's theme, getting the paragraph settings all nicely done for how a novel should be laid out, and so forth, all of which we'll cover in the next post.