AVERIL ROBERTSON

Yes, you read that correctly. I love something about Microsoft Word. Don’t worry, it’s not the image features, or working with tables. It’s templates!

One of the joys of the world of entering writing competitions and submitting manuscripts is that no two organisations have the same formatting requirements. Double line-spacing here, 2.78 cm margins there. This typeface, that point size. So much writer time can be sunk into reformatting work into whatever is required. There is a lot I love in this world, but I hate the inefficiency of manually reformatting.

Word templates wield tremendous power to ease those formatting woes. You can look across the range of formatting requirements you typically see, then set up styles that capture the vast majority of requirements. With those styles in place, you can then assign KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS. My favourite. I LOVE a good keyboard shortcut. No more swiping to highlight then manually clicking twelve things to apply the formatting. You can just hit the keyboard shortcut and those twelve things are all done in a single keystroke.  

My generic competition Word template has styles for Flush Left (the opening line of a section, which doesn’t take an indent), Body Text (first line indent), repeated for multiple line spacings (single, 1.5 and double). From that base template, if a new variation comes up, I just duplicate the existing styles, rename them to reflect the new variation, and update them to include the style variations. The template I built for my novel is a little more complex, because I needed a couple of very specific text styles, but the principle is the same. As I begin to submit, I will include more styles to reflect the variations that come up. Another approach can be to make a copy of the template for each publisher or agent, so you can reuse it for future manuscript submissions. I love the simple efficiency of working like this.

There are two ways of applying Word templates. You can open a blank document each time based on the template, which brings in any content elements on the page, for example a running footer. The other option, if you just need the styles, is to attach the template through Add-ins (documentation on the Microsoft site). This means the master template is attached to your file, so any style changes you make in the master template automatically flow through to every document with the template attached. AMAZING! Even better, you can create a Templates button on your Quick Access Toolbar, so instead of going through the long path of clicks to attach, you can click straight to the Templates dialogue. LOVE IT.

Finally, the other thing I love about Word templates is that you can build out macros to run find–replaces on your document. This is especially useful if you are trying to update a manuscript to adhere to a particular publisher’s style, or trying to target certain phrases. If you’re not macro-confident, the manual find–replace feature allows for quite complex searches too. This can be very helpful if you need to do global changes such as replacing single quotes with doubles (which means you need to first target quotes within quotes). You can even search for non-alphabet characters and sequences. For example, you could search for any number range to replace the spaced hyphen with a closed en dash. Whatever you do, don’t click ‘Replace All’ until you are absolutely certain you’ve accounted for every possible version of the search term. I once had a manuscript returned that had the phrases ‘such asly’ and ‘suchaslihood’ – some poor person had let the global find–replace go to their head, searching ‘like’ for ‘such as’ without ensuring the search phrase had that all-important space after it.

So, don’t hate on Word too much. There is so much to love as well.