The Productive Scholar: Janet Temos on Using Word Effectively

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Janet Temos, the direc­tor of the Edu­ca­tional Tech­nolo­gies Cen­ter at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity, spoke to a Pro­duc­tive Scholar audi­ence about Word 2011 to share some of its less obvi­ous fea­tures, such as styles, tem­plates, themes, and inter­op­er­abil­ity fea­tures in Microsoft Office applications.

Temos started by talk­ing about Pow­er­point, and demon­strated how most users are famil­iar with choos­ing themes to style their pre­sen­ta­tions. She used this famil­iar­ity to show sim­i­lar fea­tures in Word. She gave the exam­ple of a user writ­ing a report, and get­ting feed­back on a draft that all chap­ter head­ings be cen­tered, not right aligned. If a user applies styles to the text, such as chap­ter head­ings being styled as “Head­ing 1″, as they write, this change becomes a quick and easy two-click change by sim­ply chang­ing the set­tings of the “Head­ing 1″ style which then car­ries those changes to all text styled as such. By turn­ing on “Nav­i­ga­tion” under the View rib­bon,  you can see the out­lined struc­ture of the doc­u­ment as you apply styles, and quickly go to those areas of your doc­u­ment with a click.

Themes are col­lec­tions of styles, col­ors, fonts, siz­ing, and other design aspects of doc­u­ments pack­aged as a sin­gle applic­a­ble choice. You can quickly take a well-styled doc­u­ment, where titles, chap­ters, and body con­tent are prop­erly tagged with styles, and quickly apply dif­fer­ent themes in order to add new fla­vor and vari­ety to documents.

Tem­plates are start­ing points for doc­u­ments that are always sim­i­larly styled. If you find your­self writ­ing a lot of reports, it makes sense to either find and down­load an exist­ing Word Doc­u­ment tem­plate for reports that you can cus­tomize, or cre­ate your own and start with it each time, so that you need not spend any time re-styling or re-theming your new reports.

Because Microsoft Office comes as a suite, many users have the ben­e­fit of more than one Office appli­ca­tion installed such as the abil­ity to use charted data in Excel to inform and update a chart in Word. You can also apply the theme that you are using in Word to the chart so that the visual intro­duc­tion of the data becomes seam­less in your document.

When you added an image to Word doc­u­ments in the past, you had to open a sep­a­rate image edit­ing appli­ca­tion to make changes to the image. Word 2011 has many pow­er­ful image edit­ing capa­bil­i­ties built-in,  such as the abil­ity to crop, re-size, and affect the bright­ness & con­trast of an image.

Some related resources that Temos shared include:

Tech­Smith Jing, for cre­at­ing advanced screen cap­tures and anno­ta­tions. http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html

Tem­plates from End­note. http://endnote.com/downloads/templates

Temos cre­ated a list of resources at http://bit.ly/stylesheets that includes a Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Dis­ser­ta­tion template.

Her pre­sen­ta­tion from this ses­sion is avail­able here:

Using Word Effec­tively by Janet Temos

Here is a screen­cast of the ses­sion for you to watch and hear every­thing that she did dur­ing the session.

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