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Old 08-07-2019, 04:33 AM
Erwin Opalla Erwin Opalla is offline Publishing a text-book with Word Office 365 Windows 10 Publishing a text-book with Word Office 365 Office 2016
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Publishing a text-book with Word Office 365
 
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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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Old 08-08-2019, 07:10 AM
Charles Kenyon Charles Kenyon is offline Publishing a text-book with Word Office 365 Windows 10 Publishing a text-book with Word Office 365 Office 2016
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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.
***
The Master Documents "Feature" has a very long history of causing problems. It has never really worked as advertised.

It is hard to figure whether a document is within the maximum because the maximums do not include images but only text. It is hard to write a Word document that exceeds the maximums.

Quote:
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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!
***

Use Styles. Use Styles. Use Styles.
Importance of Styles in Word
I cannot over-emphasize this!


Where page breaks are desired, format the paragraph that is to start the new page with the formatting "Page Break Before." This can and should be part of the style definition for a heading style.
The heading styles can be a real help.
Why use Microsoft Word’s built-in heading styles? by Shauna Kelly
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Old 08-10-2019, 02:04 AM
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Lugh Lugh is offline Publishing a text-book with Word Office 365 Windows 10 Publishing a text-book with Word Office 365 Office 2016
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I gave up on Master Docs after about a month of testing them around 10-15 years ago. Too many problems, and I've never seen anyone say that they've improved since.

As Charles says, use Styles. They will make your life so much easier.

Quote:
5. Adding a table of content and a bibliography was pretty simple in the appended document.
You know how the Headings Styles will automatically create an auto-updating ToC for you? Marry that with showing the Nav Pane for a simple way of getting around your doc.

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6. Simple drawings were prepared in Excel
I have to guess that a simple drawing program would be better.
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each time I re-opened the Word-document the size of linked pictures was sometimes lost
Did you save the pictures as separate files and use Insert to put them in the doc? Sounds like maybe not…

Quote:
the tool feature of Word is very versatile. Easy to change formatting and content afterwards
Not sure what you're referring to with 'tool feature', but don't use the toolbar buttons for formatting—that road leads to the insane asylum Use Styles.
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Make sure that you do not included too many lines with the Enter-key
Do NOT use the Enter key anywhere in your document other than to create a new paragraph for content. Never for blank lines.

Btw blank lines do not work to provide breaks in ebooks—most reading devices discard them. You need a paragraph with some symbol like an asterisk for the break to show.
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Old 08-15-2019, 12:08 PM
jthomas666 jthomas666 is offline Publishing a text-book with Word Office 365 Windows 10 Publishing a text-book with Word Office 365 Office 2016
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The ONLY time I have ever had success with Master Files was when i was taking my MOUS certification test back in 1998.
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