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Old 08-07-2019, 04:33 AM
Erwin Opalla Erwin Opalla is offline Windows 10 Office 2016
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Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Munich / Germany
Posts: 1
Erwin Opalla is on a distinguished road
Exclamation Publishing a text-book with Word Office 365

I would like to share with you my experience writing long documents with Word Office 365 to encourage others to share their views as well. Sometimes you get the impression that publishing long documents with Word is not a good idea. Reading this thread it becomes clear why Word Office 365 is a great tool for long documents!

BE AWARE THAT I DO NOT HAVE ANY LINKS TO MICROSOFT!

1. The book I published at Amazon.com has 470 pp format 6 by 9 inch. ISBN 9781093572650. Available as text book and kindle format. If you like search Amazon for "Erwin Opalla".
2. My knowledge of Word - compared to the publishers in this forum - is average at best.
3. I failed using Word's sub- and master document features. It was a nightmare, because I got unpredictable results (formatting and changing sub-documents). As said before my knowledge of Word is average at best.
4. To remedy the failures from point 3 I appended each file getting a long document. From the very beginning each chapter was included into a separate file and after appending them to a long document I had to slightly change the numbering of chapters and page numbers ( continue from previous!). Total size of file only around 4 MB compared to the theoretical max from Word of 32 MB.
5. Adding a table of content and a bibliography was pretty simple in the appended document.
6. Simple drawings were prepared in Excel and copied to Word. Not well published but you can draw Bezier-curves in Excel as well! The reason why I did copying was that each time I re-opened the Word-document the size of linked pictures was sometimes lost; e.g. instead of 70% reduction I got different sizes. No clue what has happened. Copying "show as printed" fixed this. A more sophisticated way to prepare drawings would be using Inkscape, copy them and paste them into Word in Inkscape format. Another tool to use would be Adobe's Illustrator, the most sophisticated tool on the market ( Maybe an overkill for the type of drawings I used!).
7. For the formulas I used MathType 6.9d from Design Science. They provided a simple Word macro.
8. In my experience the tool feature of Word is very versatile. Easy to change formatting and content afterwards.
9. Last but not least saving the Word document as pdf is now an easy task. Make sure that you do not included too many lines with the Enter-key. The pdf-format will rearrange chapters and paragraphs. Use page-breaks instead!

Cutting a long story short it is possible to create long documents in Word also if the publisher has only average knowledge of Word as I do.
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