MS Word – Tip on headers

Estimated reading time at 200 wpm: 3 minutes

Loads of people don’t know much about how to use a ‘word processor’. Hmmm.. the words ‘word processor‘ now seem so strange. Formatting documents is a most important activity.

Why? A well presented letter or report starts off at an advantage of being well received and easier to read. The reader is put in the frame of mind that, ‘This person is no fool‘. Headers are important because they are meant to say something about the document.

First page headers will normally give the senders address and contact details. But you don’t want to appear to be a dimwit to repeat all of that on every page. The video below will show a very simple technique, how to have a different header on pages subsequent to the first page. You might think, “That’s elementary. Everybody knows that!” Well no – over 90% of secretaries in health services don’t know how to do that. So – if you do, then you’re better than 90% of a lot of so-called professional people.

As ‘some people’ think I don’t know what I am talking about, look below  at part of an anonymised report. You can see that ‘some secretary’ or ‘some professional’ doesn’t know how to alter headers and footers for pages subsequent to the first. Or if you want  jump to their defence, with the usual ‘to be fair’ comment, you could argue that they were told what to do – and their jobs depended on doing as told.

Conclusion

I share my knowledge in small bites, to a select few people. Nobody is obliged to do anything different.

People bang on about quality document production. What they do is rather different.