Make Use Of provides blog posts that show, in straightforward steps, how to do things. It’s worth knowing about for its own sake and also because it has some excellent examples of straightforward job aids. They have sections on…
- PC & Mobile (including Macs & Linux)
- Lifestyle (including productivity, among other things)
- Hardware (including products, buying guides, and a DIY section)
For example, the other day I was reviewing a report that had clearly started out some time ago as an innocent new document. In the meantime, and it had been “saved as” over and over again, and it had acquired a frightening number of mostly irrelevant styles along the way.
Adding text was an adventure. Strange things happened to margins and fonts for no apparent reason.
If only some of the many people who had fussed with this document had taken a little time to view Make Use Of’s How to Use Styles in Microsoft Word and Save Time, by Kayla Matthews (2017).
There they would find out what styles are and how to use them in Word (with screenshots that have red boxes and arrows to show you the way).
The article even includes a section on how to Apply Styles to Sections of Poorly Formatted Documents, just in case—and more.
Sometimes, we limp along, trying to work with kludged up workarounds when just a few minutes with a site that’s a quick Google search away would make life so much easier (and boost our performance, too).
Make Use Of has an excellent approach, and it’s worth remembering that it’s there.
P.S.
By the way, if you’re using a Mac and you want to know more about using styles, you can find a number of articles, maybe starting with Customize Styles in Word for Mac on the Microsoft support site.
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