Discussion on:

10 ways managers can help their staff use Microsoft Word

If tip #1 is not done, everything else is worthless. Regrettably, tip #6 is a death-trap. Since several people rarely thing alike, styles end up "getting in the way." Pity, Microsoft really botched Word with that mechanism. WordPerfect had and has a so much more intuitive way.

Styles work well if used consistently. That's the key. You provide a template that has the styles the org uses -- and that's that. If you're going to let users who don't really know what they're doing mess around with that decision, you're right -- it falls apart quickly.

I do not see how training and stern lectures can make users stop basing a new document on a similar old one, and force them to start using templates and styles. Even when you pay significant bucks to a skilled pro (with a BA attached to the team to help map organizational needs), the resulting templates and styles will still lack the useful boilerplate found in that similar document you saved last month. And it'll still be easier for users to open up that old document than to try to remember the template and style training they had a year ago.

Good post, Susan!

This isn't quite what you were getting at in Point #4, but organizations should give some thought to language when sharing documents internationally.

There is little as annoying as receiving a document that was originally set up with German as the default and then, when it is translated into English and distributed to an English-speaking community (sometimes Read-Only), every word is underlined as a mispelling.

Don't forget the need for good old basic document structure training. All users should know how to set and use tabs, tables, columns and paragraph line spacing. Too many users just use the space bar or preset tabs to try to line things up. The result can be disastrous if it gets imported to another document or printed with a different printer.

There are very, very few users where I work who understand Word like I do. Even people who get elbows deep into long, heavily structured documents still don't get intermediate-level skills and too many are in the habit of leaving empty paragraph marks scattered around. We've got templates and I've even done demos but I get a lot of "fix it" or "pretty it up" or just plain "do this for me" requests. And as much as I'd like to see a sea change in users getting adept at the concepts listed here, I don't think I will, and it'll only get worse soon because we're jumping from Office 2003 to Office 2010.