Creating Manuals in Word 2007

[lledford]

I am trying to work out the best option for creating specficially formated
user manuals.

I would like the format to be as follows:

Heading Name line information about the feature that might flow on
to several pages of information

Currently, I'm using tables to get the look and feel but the documents can
be as many as 300 pages and forcing page breaks to occur where I want them
and positioning the graphics can be VERY troublesome.

Would columns work better?

Any other suggestions? A different software?

Thanks for your assistance.

 

[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

Hello lleford

I am trying to work out the best option for creating specficially formated
user manuals.

I would like the format to be as follows:

Heading Name line information about the feature that might flow on
to several pages of information

I'm not _quite_ sure exactly what you mean with the above: should this
really look like a table, or do you only want a (vertical?) line
dividing the heading "area" from the rest? How wide can a heading get?
If it gets wider, do you break it on a new line?

[..]

Would columns work better?

Hardly. If there is no information other than the headings in the left
area, there are three ways to go about this that I have used in the
past, and surely a bunch more I've never even thought about.

1. You use tables (2 columns and one row per item). The dividing line is
straight forward that way. If your document gets really large, make sure
you break the table every dozen of pages or so (or every higher-order
heading, maybe), because Word tends to get slower when dealing with very
large tables.

2. You you indents: either a large positive one for your body text, or
(if you dare) a negative one on your headings (in conjunction with a
relatively wide left margin in page setup). The dividing line might be a
bit more complicated then (depending on the exact specs, you might
anchor it in the header or footer).

3. You use frames for your headings to put them into the margin. See
Suzanne Barnhill's Article for that:
http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/MarginalText.htm

But before you start, maybe take some time to think about your "wishes"
-- a vertical line as a method of laying out text might be familiar from
tables, but even there a simple table has only horizontal lines (because
generally all entries in a given row belong together). Likewise, your
headings and the accompanying text clearly belong together -- it's
probably not "good document building practice" to visible separate them
like this.

HTH
Robert