"I would have saved myself so much time and effort. I would have stopped going grey and pulling my hair out".

I've had a number of requests and conversations lately, all stangely enough relating to the use of certain office applications in business. I have come across a lot of business owners that end up starting a business after having come from working in a job where they would never have needed to or wanted to use certain software and suddenly find themselves having to use all sorts of applications in their new business. Now this may be because they are the only person in their business as a lot of start ups are or they are not at the stage in their business yet where they can afford to have someone do particular tasks for them.

For instance a lot of business owners are being encouraged to become the key person in their particular niche, which means they are highly likely to want to author a book. So not only have they got to think about writing the content, but then what tool do they use, highly likely to be Microsoft Word. If you have never used Word before, you'll find it very easy to get the text on the page, that's the simple bit, you don't even really need to think about setting the margins as "Word" does so much for you already. It may be realatively easy to set up a Header and Footer so that all the pages are the same, a page number as well,  it's not so difficult to insert, BUT……

The Author will realise that they may need to have different Headers and Footers on different pages, they will have to put in a Table of Contents, which to the unknown user they would do this by typing each of the titles or headings of each of the chapters on a separate page and on doing that find that it would be quite nice to have a TITLE page and then follow that on with a Foreword and a Copyright page. All of these things, would then mean that your page numbering would need to be changed so that you do not show the page number on the TITLE, Foreword and Copyright page. So you then need to use Section Breaks, which most people would not have heard of, but these are used to ensure that you can separate individual sections of a book in order to either not have page numbers or have a different lay out to a page, to name but a few.

Maybe the Autor has a number of Graphics or Tables that need to be labelled and  numbered and again listed at the beginning or end of a book, or perhaps you have some references that need to be made to other publications, in which case you would need perhaps footnotes and endnotes. Then the Author may like to have Chapter Headings with the book, or maybe like to change the formatting, but found they have 500 pages to work through to change it. Finally Indexing, don't even get me started on how long this could take the untrained person.

Having been teaching Business Owners, individuals, IT Trainers, Solicitors, Secretaries and many others for 20 years on how to structure long documents quickly and easily and also formatted, personally, white papers, books, e-books, contracts for organisations I fast became an expert and love teaching people how to structure a document at the outset that will save so much time. How to leave all the page numbering and the Table of Contents until the very end, how to format headings once and if you need to change them everything will change. How to create tempates for these documents that have ALL the formatting in them already so that you don't have to re-invent the wheel each time. I get such a huge amount of pleasure in hearing the words "If Only I Had Known That Before, You've saved me so much time".

So if you are struggling with your lengthy documents in Word or you are writing a book, let me know by emailing me what your biggest problems are and I'll tell you EXACTLY how to fix it.