Formatting

I’ve learned some tips and tricks over the past few years when it comes to formatting my books. And I’m still learning new things that would’ve made life better in previous iterations. I use MS Word for writing and yes, I know there are apps better suited for writers, but I’ve used this program for decades and I really don’t want to learn something new. Maybe when I retire and have time. Until then, I’ve gotten adept at Word’s foibles. For example, it took me way too long to figure out page numbering. I don’t know why, because know that I know how to do it, it seems easy. The big problem I had was keeping numbers off pages that shouldn’t be numbered, like title and copyright, and then starting the count at Page 1 on the first page of the actual story. Formatting the book into sections is easy, and the key to my problem was a little button titled “Link to Previous.” Unclick that and you’re in business. This last time I solved another issue: my chapter headings and subheadings in the paperback version didn’t look quite right. Come to find out, I’d selected all the text and applied the regular paragraph formatting to it, then gone through the manuscript and centered the headings, which didn’t look actually centered. Upon further examination, that paragraph style indented the first line by .3”, which resulted in my headings being off-center. Easy to fix and another lesson learned. All of this to say there are likely easier ways to do many of these formatting things, but for now I’m going to stick with what works for me.