The Power of the Word

I’m doing it right now. You’ll be doing it tomorrow. In fact, I’ll bet by the end of the week that everyone in your office will have done it—and many of them more than once.

Hang on, now. I’m talking about using a word processor. You’d be surprised how much we rely on it in our daily work and how little we really put it to use.

I once attended an office productivity seminar and, while most of it was forgettable, one point I do remember. The presenter noted that the word processor was one of, if not the most, powerful yet underutilized pieces of software/equipment used in the office.

With my recent upgrade to Office 2000 on my PC, my Macintosh running Mac Office 2001 and Office XP out as a “preview,” I’m really beginning to see what that presenter was talking about. Add what the web has to offer and you might think differently about your trusty Microsoft Word.

What we need to do first, though, is to think about how we can use our word processor beyond our everyday ordinary correspondence.

And I’m focusing on Microsoft Word because it is the word processor—whether by choice or by force—on most office computer desktops today.

Can I get that template to go?
The first place to go is Microsoft’s Office Update website located at http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/. Besides the other Office-related links, there’s one of great usefulness and importance. That’s the link to the Template Gallery.

The number of categories and template types are staggering. Besides the average form letter templates there are templates, for designingnewsletters and brochures, crafting calendars and business cards, and preparing documents from bids and proposals to wills and invoices.

And these aren’t just random Word docs that somebody saved and e-mailed to Microsoft to post. For labels and cards, it’s Avery. Letter templates are designed and prepared by writers, editors and publishers such as McGraw-Hill and Career Press.

Once you’ve finished working on your template, clip art and fonts to really add to the design are only a click and a page away.

More than just word processing
Just looking at the brochure and newsletter templates remind me that Word has become more than a simple word processor. It wasn’t much when I first started using it on my Apple IIe, but these days it is a whole lot more. Most people just don’t realize (myself included) what some of those capabilities are.

First of all, Word does an admirable job of acting as a desktop publishing tool. The templates are good examples, and with Word you can add all sorts of design elements as well as a wide variety of graphic and photo formats from the standard Bitmap and JPEG formats to TIFF and GIF, all with the ease of drag and drop. Features such as grouping and ungrouping, scaling and aligning are easy to use and menu-driven. Letters you type can have customized letterhead with ruled lines, logos, shapes and photos.

Other toolbars increase Word’s power and flexibility. The “AutoShapes” feature on the Drawing toolbar makes flowcharting a breeze. Business forms with clickable form fields are easily generated with use of the Forms toolbar. Even minor photo manipulation can be performed with the Picture toolbar.

Having said this, Word’s success and popularity is beginning to grow in the web page and online documentation arena. Whether generating HTML or a file that utilizes Microsoft’s Word reader for the web, Word is now becoming the “tool du jour” for quick and easy development of web pages.

With Word you can embed movies, use backgrounds and colors, specify fonts and font sizes, add graphics, edit and create hyperlinks and tables. When you’re done, you can save as HTML until you are ready to upload it to the web.

The other nice thing is that by using pre-defined styles, it becomes easier for developers to parse out the style tags for creating uniform style sheets. Plus, with every new version of Word, the code is getting cleaner and cleaner with less junky bits of floating <&nbsp> and

tags.

So, try designing and printing your own direct mailer. Add a new web page for a niche product. Create specialized business cards to give to hot prospects. Freshen up the look of some of your correspondence. This can all be done now with the familiarity, functionality and freedom of typing, dragging and highlighting in your trusty word processor.