A Word with a View

I just ran into this: Poll : does anyone use Microsoft Word’s outline view simultaneously with another view ? on a Twitter side-trail. It made me think for a few seconds, always a good thing to do, gets a little circulation to the gray cells.

It appears to me that most MS Word users don’t even know that there are differrent views. If they do, many probably don’t have the sense to use a decent reading font in Draft View, so it doesn’t do them any good to have it.

I do. Use it, and use a sensible sans-serif font for it. Makes writing (and reading) chores in Word halfway bearable. But why use two separate views? I don’t know about the older versions, but in the 2007/2010 I am using, I find Draft plus navigation pane the best way to go for getting around quickly in a complex doc.

That said, how many of those poor, ignorant Word users use any outline formatting anyway? Not a lot, if the examples I’ve seen are typical. Or it’s not used consistently.

I don’t write in Word! But when I put my manuscript into word, my chapter titles are proper headings, and make a very tidy showing in the navigation pane or outline view. If I have to do any post-insertion editing in Word, it’s not that hard to get where I’m going.

If you don’t work in draft view, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to see your work with new eyes. Get into the options and change the draft font to whatever you like and enable line wrapping. Zoom in as much as you want or need, the lines will wrap to the window and be totally readable. No eyestrain, no horrorzontal scrollbar.