Advanced Microsoft® Office Documents 2007 Edition Inside Out

Content Planning

Deciding how any document should look ultimately begins, of course, with what information that document needs to contain. Once you know what you want to convey to the recipient, you can better utilize design and layout choices to help that information hit its mark.

Making Choices About Content

The secret to being boring is to tell everything.

—Voltaire

Here we arrive at the subject that demands my other favorite quotation for discussing effective documents. Voltaire is a hero of mine, and so I quote him often on just about any topic. Still, I don’t believe there’s a better way to simply say that making choices makes for more effective documents.

For example, everyone knows the one-page resume rule, but people often ignore it. You might ...