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Re: Something About Formatting Word Docs Feels Wrong For Whatever Reason

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From: Philip Kiff
Date: Apr 23, 2019 7:30AM

I don't think you are alone in obsessing about this! In my opinion,
Microsoft Word's default built-in heading structure is poorly suited for
conversion to either PDF or HTML.

I usually adjust the headings in Word documents so that main sections
use Heading 2 style instead of Heading 1. I make the Title style match
exactly the Heading 1 style including being marked with Outline level 1.
And I instruct editors only to use either of those styles once, and only
once, for the document title only. Finally, I customize the table of
contents to remove Title and Heading 1 from the Table of Contents, and
to make Heading 2 appear as a level 1 TOC, Heading 3 as level 2 TOC, and
if needed, Heading 4 as level 3.

I also create an additional style based on Heading 2 that I name
"Heading 2 - Non-TOC". And I remove that style from the custom table of
contents.

Finally, I further discourage the use of Title and Heading 1 by removing
both of them from the "Styles Gallery".

However, my experience has been that it is very, very difficult to get
general users to properly follow instructions on using these adjusted
template styles without providing training combined with top-down
directives from management. So one should carefully consider effort vs
efficiency in work flows before trying to implement such a system across
an entire organization.

Phil.

Philip Kiff
D4K Communications

On 2019-04-23 09:10, Jim Homme wrote:
> Hi,
> I've been formatting my Word documents like this:
>
>
> * Title of document using Title style
> * Optional subtitle using Subtitle style
> * Main sections with Heading 1 style
>
> I've done this to keep the document title out of the table of contents, if it has one.
>
> This feels wrong to me, because if the same document were a web document or a PDF document, I might have the document title duplicated as a heading 1, with document sections at heading 2. For documents I want to convert to PDF, I don't want to keep changing styles.
>
> I'm keeping this simple just to illustrate what I'm saying.
>
> Does this seem like I'm obsessing too much about this to you, or just how do you do this?
>
>
> ==========
> Jim Hommegood plan?
>
>
> Digital Accessibility
> Bender Consulting Services
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