Software Reference

I have recently been writing a series of articles for a website. This has involved spending hours every day typing.

Here are a few tips if you are going to be spending a long time at the keyboard:

1. Use a body font that looks good on the screen and won't tire your eyes – I've been using 14-point Constantia with kerning turned on. Yes, it's big, but that's good. You can always make it smaller later, but you want it nice and chunky so you don't have to squint at it.
2. Change the page colour. I've set mine to a nice pastel green. The default black on white colour scheme has been described as like watching "ants on a lightbulb". By the way, the text on this website might look black, but it isn't (it's dark grey)!
3. You can use Alt+Shift+Up and Alt+Shift+Down to move the current paragraph up or down amongst the surrounding ones. This works in all views, not just in Outline. This can be useful for getting your thoughts in order.
4. If you're easily distracted, consider turning off the inline spelling and grammar checking (the squiggly underlines). You might find your writing flows better if you write it all first and then run a manual spell-check at the end instead of correcting each minor error as it occurs.

Please comment on this post if you have any other tips and suggestions for how to use Word 2007 to improve writing quality. It's always good to find out how other people do these things.