Word Processing

This is something that irks me continuously. People who have a perfectly good, very powerful word processor, that insist on using spaces to indent, manually doing outlines/numbering, that sort of thing. This is all well and good, until you try to print on different sized paper, or make a change (like adding a new line, or more words), which will almost definitely cause everything to break. This forces you to redo all the formatting, which takes forever. This is why word processors have these features! to take some of the load off you. Even the post interface for this blog has most of these basic features.
So, some basic tips (these can and should be extended to other word processing tasks, but these are the ones I most commonly see):

1. People who tab with spaces. There is a key for this, for some odd reason, labeled "tab". In many word processors there is also an indent option. The size of the indent/tab can usually be controlled in the options (if you can't find it, look in the help file).
2. People who outline by hand. Rather than trying to number lists/outlines by typing every number, try the outline function. Its usually found in the tools or formatting menu, just click it. Depending on your word processor, you may even be able to choose what symbols/numbers/roman numerals, etc to use. Otherwise when you add a new line in the middle of a list, you have to fix all the numbers, if you use the outline tools, the word processor will deal with this for you.
3. People who don't use spell check. If you are an English professor this is acceptable, but if not use spell check. It usually makes your writing more readable. Just be sure you know what word you are picking, and it is the one you want. If your not sure, go look it up. Dictionary.com has a good online dictionary (and thesaurus for that matter)

There is also no reason not to have a word processor (no wordpad doesn't count). There are two great, fully featured, free word processors available (actually there are a lot more but these are the best).

1. Abiword which can be found at http://www.abisource.org/
2. Openoffice.org which can be found at (no surprise) http://www.openoffice.org/. Openoffice is actually an entire office suite, with equivalents to powerpoint (presentation) and excel (spreadsheet). It needs a bit faster a computer than abiword, but should still run on most computers. I recommend getting the 2.0 version. When asked, it doesn't matter which mirror you choose, but in the US I find that "pair" is pretty fast.
   

Hope this helps some of you.