Office 2011 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Chapter 6. Working with Long Documents

Longer documents present bigger challenges to writers. The more pages there are, the more you have to plan, the more details you have to keep track of, and the tougher it is to navigate. Word can be a lot of help with your bigger projects. This chapter offers some tips on all these issues. It starts off with outlining, which is a big help when it comes to planning your project. Then it focuses on navigation, showing you how to jump quickly to different parts of your document. Voluminous documents also often require extras like tables of contents, indexes, hyperlinks, bookmarks, cross-references, footnotes, and bibliographic citations. Word has tools to make all these jobs easier and moderately less painful, and this chapter shows you how to use all of them.

Word offers a special feature—the master document—for very long documents, like books with multiple chapters. Master documents have a reputation for going bad, but this chapter shows you how to avoid problems. To wrap it all up, this chapter provides some good tips on moving around longer documents using tools like the Document Map and Thumbnails.

Switching to Outline View

If your teachers kept hammering you about how important outlining is and made you do elaborate outlines before you tackled writing assignments, forgive them. They were right. Nothing beats an outline for the planning stages of a document. When you’re facing writer’s block, you can start listing your main topics in a Word ...