How much thought goes into the documents you create? If you get the feeling that some of your work products are bloated, take a look at our latest article on over-doing it when creating a document.

When you create a document, do you include a cover page? Formal header and footer? Appendices? This sounds pretty standard, right? However, do you actually need to include all of these things in EVERY document? Probably not.

I’m not advocating lowering the standards of your work products. The point I’m trying to make is that before you create a document, you should determine what you need to include based on what you are trying to accomplish. Why does it matter? What harm could a few extra pages do? Here are some of the possible consequences:

• Miss your deadline - If you get caught up too much in extra sections when you don’t need to, it is easy to miss your deadline. Before you know it, your work is due and all you have is a table of contents and a cover page.

• Your point is missed - By including unnecessary sections in your document, you may make your main point unclear to your audience. This basically defeats the purpose of writing the document in the first place.

• Forget important content - This is another pitfall; You might forget important content that you didn’t have time to focus on because of these unnecessary additions. You need to make sure all of your base content is there and then worry about the extras.

Now that we’ve established the consequences, how do you go about avoiding them? This is a tough question as the answer is very dependent on your situation. However, here are some questions to ask yourself when creating your document:

• Who is your audience? - This can be the deal breaker. Are you writing for a co-worker or for a client? In general, you want to keep it very formal when writing for a client. If it’s a co-worker, you might not have to get so formal. This isn’t always the case, but it’s definitely something to consider.

• Is it really necessary? - This is a question you should ask yourself before you include a section (such as an appendix). A good example of this would be a table of contents. If you’re writing a two page document, do you really need a table of contents? Most likely not. If you can’t answer a definitive “Yes” to this question, you’re probably better off leaving this section out.

• Does it make your point clearer? - Another big concern of yours should be to make sure that everything that you add to your document makes your point clearer. Using the table of contents example above, if you add it, will it make your document easier to navigate? If you add an appendix, does it make your information easier to understand? These are the questions you should be asking.

Remember this: How much you should have in your documents is highly situational. Sometimes you may need to put in what you think are unnecessary sections just because that’s how your company does it (if you disagree, you should suggest a change). However, when you have a choice, try to keep the above tips in mind.

Having trouble getting the number of sections in your documents right? See the newest article on sectioning your documents effectively for some tips on how to solve this problem.

Determining how to break your document into sections can be a very tough task. On the one hand, you don’t want to create too many small sections. At the same time, you don’t want to have one big run-on section. This brings us to the pivotal question: Where do you draw the line?

The following is a list of three ways that you can tell if you have too many or too few sections:

• You have a Section 1.2.3.4.5.6 - We’ve all seen documents with way too many sections in it. This makes the document very hard to read as you have to keep skipping around all the time to gather all of the information you need. In general, I never go past the fourth level when breaking down my documents (ex. Section 1.1.2.3), and I don’t even use the fourth level very often. As a rule of thumb, you will usually end up having more sections in longer documents than in shorter ones.

• You have one Section - This is the opposite of the first point. Instead of having too many sections, you have too few. Unless your document is only a few pages long, you most likely will need to break it down into more than one big section. Just like with a run-on sentence, a run-on section will quickly lose the reader in a sea of information. This doesn’t mean you have to go hog-wild (as demonstrated in the first point), but for a medium sized document you probably want to go to the second level (ex. Section 1.1).

• You get lost reading it - Huge point here. After you are finished with what you think is a solid draft of your document, you should read it the entire way through (better yet, have someone unfamiliar with the document do it). This way, you can make sure that it is both informative and easy to read. If you are having trouble reading it, think of the problems the audience will have. If you find yourself in this situation, take another look at how you’ve broken down the information in your document. You may be able to fix it by simply restructuring the number/content of some of the sections.

It’s not always easy to get a good section layout for a document. However, as long as you put some time into planning the layout, you’ll end up with a quality product.

See the new articles below:

• It’s been a little while since I’ve written an article on Microsoft Word, so I thought I would put together some tips on making table creation easy. They save me lots of time, I hope at least one or two of them help you as well.
• Today’s Tip of the Day deals with the tricky beast that is grammar check.

Inserting a table into your Microsoft Word document is pretty easy. However, getting it to look and act exactly how you want can be challenging. In light of this, I’m going to share five common practices I use to make my life easier when I’m designing tables.

• Use the TAB key - Need to insert a new row at the end of your table? Don’t bother clicking through the menus, simply press TAB in the last cell in the last row of your existing table and a new row will be added.
• Add multiple rows - Another shortcut for adding more than one row to your table, simply highlight cells in more than one row and insert a row as you normally would. This will insert a number of blank rows equal to the number of rows you highlighted. For instance, if I highlight the first cell in two rows of my table, then click Table -> Insert -> Rows Above, then two blank rows will be inserted above the first row with a highlighted cell. This will also work for columns.
• Easily make your table fit - This is a problem that I’ve run into multiple times: Making my table fit onto a page. Even if it’s landscape, I still may have a problem. I usually see this when I’m porting over tables from Excel. If you work in Print Layout View like me, then resizing this table can be difficult. However, if you just switch to Normal view, you can view the whole table and easily manipulate its size.
• Make your tables consistent - This is more of a design tip for your document. Making your tables consistent in your document adds a professional touch. Once you create a table, use it as a base for your other tables (read: cut and paste) if you can. Not only does this save you time by having the table pre-formatted, but it also saves you time because you don’t have to design a new table layout each time. By adding or subtracting a few columns, your table is quickly done.
• Use Auto-Numbers in your table - If you are creating any kind of table where each row has a unique number (like steps), then make sure to use the Auto-Number function for these cells (the little “1..2..3″ icon). This way, when you add a new row, that cell will automatically be populated for you. Also, the other numbers will adjust themselves if you make changes in the middle of your table.

I wrote an earlier Tip of the Day on the importance of using spell-check, however I’d like to go in a different direction with grammar check. These are suggestions that come up in green as opposed to the red when you have misspelled a word. Be careful with these suggestions, as I’ve found that more often than not the suggestion itself is incorrect. Make sure you read it carefully before you click “Change”.

Could you answer this question when you get up in the morning? Probably not right off the top of your head. See our updates below for some help:

• See our latest article for Microsoft Word on Using the Word Count Dialog in Microsoft Word for a great way to keep tabs on the content length of your documents.
• Today’s Tip of the Day has to do with the title of the update, check it out at Checking the Weather.

The Word Count dialog is very useful when dealing with a document that has specific length limitations. An example of this would be a document where you could only use a certain number of words. Conveniently, it is also extremely simple to use.

To open the Word Count dialog, follow the steps below:

1. Click on Tools.
2. Click on Word Count…

This dialog will then open:

The following is the breakdown for this dialog:

• Pages - This is the number of pages in your document.

• Words - This is the number of words in your document.

• Characters (no spaces) - This is the number of individual characters in the document not including “white” (blank) spaces.

• Characters (with spaces) - This is the number of individual characters in the document including “white” (blank) spaces.

• Paragraphs - This is the number of paragraphs in your document.

• Lines - This is the number of lines in your documents, which takes into account blank lines as well.

• Include footnotes and endnotes checkbox - If this is enabled, any text designated as footnotes or endnotes will be figured into the above counts.

• Show Toolbar button - This is a very handy feature. Once clicked, the following dialog will appear:

  

  This dialog allows you to have the statistics from the Word Count dialog update dynamically without having to open and close that dialog. It becomes active when you click Cancel on the main dialog.

  The drop-down allows you to select which stat you want to see. If you change something in the document, you can click on Recount and the stat will be updated. Also, if you make a change in your document and click on a different stat, all of the stats will update.

  You can customize this dialog by clicking on the down arrow in the upper right corner of the dialog. This is similar to customizing any other toolbar. Most likely, you will not need to do this.

The Word Count dialog is quick and easy to use. I find myself using the dynamic version discussed above (via the Show Toolbar button) quite a bit, which is what I recommend you use if you need to use these functions.

One new article for you and a new Tip of the Day, see below:

• See Using the Document Map View for a huge timesaver when it comes to navigating large Microsoft Word documents.
• The new Tip of the Day, Cell Phone Surprise, has some good advice on what to do with your cell phone during meetings.