2009 Practice Management Annual Conference

Perfecting Your HotDocs Templates in Microsoft Word

Barron K. Henley, Esq. HMU Consulting, Inc. [email protected] 2009 Practice Management Annual Conference Rea lities o f MS Wor d • Word is complicated

• Most users have no idea how it works

• YtYour templ lthldates should compensa tfte for user ignorance 2009 Practice Management Annual Conference Word’ s Forma tting T ypes

• FONT: Font name, style (regular, italic, bold, bold italic), size (measured in points), color, underline style, character spacing, effects (strikethrough, double strikethrough, superscript, subscript, shadow, outline, emboss, engrave, small caps, all caps, hidden) & case

• PARAGRAPH: Indents and spacing (alignment, outline level, indentation, spacing); line and page breaks including widow/orphan control, keep lines together , keep with next & hyphenation; tabs; borders and bullets and paragraph numbering

• SECTION: ClColumns, marg ins, paper s ize, or ien ttitation (por tra it or landscape), paper source (set which paper tray your printer pulls from), line numbering, & headers and footers (includes page numbering) 2009 Practice Management Annual Conference Styl es •A style is a set of formatting characteristics that you can apply to text, tables, and lists in your document to quickly change their appearance (fix them)

• Styles control font and paragraph formatting

• It is the most important feature in Word 2009 Practice Management Annual Conference WdBtPtiWord Best Practices • You should be using Word 2007 – Better formatting & style control options – Separate numbering list styles – TOC with linked styles • Never use: – «PN1» for paragraph numbering – Paragraph numbering without styles controlling – Fields for paragraph numbering 2009 Practice Management Annual Conference WdBtPtiWord Best Practices • For paragraph cross references, use bookmarks, not “numbered items”

• If a paragraph could be 2 different levels in the outline numbering, use ListNum fields

with “none” as the list name (Taft – AAA) 2009 Practice Management Annual Conference WdBtPtiWord Best Practices • For outline paragraph numbering: – Either use Headings 1 – 9 (chapter.page) or – Make up your own styles

• Create a “base style” – based uppgon nothing - don’t use Normal 2009 Practice Management Annual Conference WdBtPtiWord Best Practices • Inserted templates need same style set

• ¶ get deleted if following IF, END IF, etc. – Add pipe: «END IF |» – Add space afterwards: «END IF»_ – Code it differently: 2009 Practice Management Annual Conference WdBtPtiWord Best Practices • DOT v RTF – Numbering becomes disconnected in RTF – Post assembly macros easier in DOT – Corruption issues with RTF – However, RTFs assemble faster 2009 Practice Management Annual Conference WdBtPtiWord Best Practices Logic on separate lines 2009 Practice Management Annual Conference WdBtPtiWord Best Practices Color code (don’t select chevrons) 2009 Practice Management Annual Conference WdBtPtiWord Best Practices Clean up the Styles window 2009 Practice Management Annual Conference WdBtPtiWord Best Practices • Tables of Contents – In Word 2003 – use Style Separators if necessary – In Word 2007 – use Linked Styles

• Let Word do the paragraph spacing – NO EXTRA hard returns between paragraphs

• If using Normal as default style, get it right! 2009 Practice Management Annual Conference WdBtPtiWord Best Practices Make sure your templates are set to update