A while back I told a colleague at work about a new coffee shop which had just opened close to our office.  'That place? It's been open for months', she replied.  And so it seems  with technology and computers - I am rarely a pioneer, and learn about labour saving devices and tricks long after other colleagues have integrated them into the daily practice.

I'm not that old (comments below are closed on that), but I have been using MS Word for most of my adult life, and it's so much a part of my daily life and work that I hardly ever give it a second thought.  Maybe I should.  A few years back I worked on a report with a colleague (not the same one who knew about the ancient coffee shop) who seemed to know how to do all kinds of things with MS Word, all of which were automated, accurate, and saved lots of time, but none of which I quite seemed to be able to get the hang of.  So, being brutally honest, I have carried on doing things manually when sometimes there has been an easier and better way.

A few weeks ago I was pulling together a large report, which included many tables and figures, and which needed to have a comprehensive and accurate contents page.  I realised that I probably needed to invest a small amount of time in finding out how to work with Word's headings system, and its ability to create titles for tables and headings, all of which can then automatically create (and update) tables of contents.  I wish I'd done this many years ago, and I'll always use the system from now on.  

Here are the main things I worked out how to do properly.  Many (most?) of you are probably doing this, and it is very likely that there are even better ways of doing some of the following, but here goes:

1. Use the Headings function (labelled Styles in the 'Home' view), and highlighting the heading text in your document, choose the relevant style from style box.  So for instance, 'Chapter 1' is a 'Heading 1', 'Introduction' is a 'Heading 2', and sub sections of the introductions are 'Heading 3', and so on.  
2. Doing this for each heading means that you can then create a table of contents with just a few clicks.  Under the 'References' tab click 'Table of contents'.  At any point you can ask Word to update the table, and any changes to the wording, order or page number of your heading will automatically be updated.
3. When you include a table in your document, right click on the table (with your cursor over the box in the top left of the table) and click 'Insert caption'.  Word gives the table a number, and includes it in the table 'legend' which you can add to with a description - e.g. Table 1: the proportion of dogs in Cardiff who wear glasses'.
4. You can do the same thing for figures.  And for both tables and figures, Word will always place the legend in the correct place (and you can change where this should be).
5. If you insert a new table/figure into to your document, change their order, or delete a table, Word will automatically update the table numbers in the legends.  So, for instance, if you have Tables 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and you remove Table 2, Tables 3, 4 and 5 will automatically change to 2, 3 and 4.
6. Just like for your section headings, Word can create (and, with one click, update) an index of tables, and the same for figures.  This is particularly helpful if you have a lot of tables/figures in your document.
7. If you want to refer to a table or figure in the main text of your report, you can insert a 'cross reference' to it from the 'References' option.  Say you want to include the statement 'Table 1 shows the proportion of dogs that wear glasses in Cardiff'.  Word inserts the text 'Table 1' (though you can alter what text is displayed).  Word doesn't always seem to update the table numbers in the cross references, but a tip I picked up is that if you click 'Print' and then 'Print Preview' this does make all the revisions.  Don't ask me why!
8. Right-clicking on a table and selecting 'auto fit' gives you the option to fit the table to its contents, and/or the width of the page.  I found these options good for making the tables tidier, and much better than trying to do it manually.
9. Right clicking on a table and selecting 'Table properties' allows you to choose if you want text to be able to 'wrap around' it.  For example, you may have a relatively narrow table, around which the text can continue to flow (like the photo in this blog piece).  Or you may prefer to have text, then the table, with no text by the side of it, and then more text.

I don't know why, but I always seem to write better when it rains.  How can that be? Maybe it's the rhythm of the sound of the rain falling on the roof windows in my office.  I also normally write with music on - it seems to have some background noise against which to work and think - having absolute silence is no good for me, though I know for many others it's essential.  I once met an academic who had the radio and TV on in the background when she wrote.

Yesterday was a writing day.  Writing a grant application that I've wanted to finish for many days, and which is important for me.

I wrote some good stuff yesterday.  In fact I thought the grant application was good - I'd thought long and hard about the aims of my project and managed to distill them into the space available.  I thought I'd almost finished, and that it was a good time to review the application and share it with a colleague for his advice.

But then silly me clicked 'Next', and not 'Save and Exit' and the whole day's work was lost. 

So what to do?  Pack up for the week and eat dougnuts?  Try and rescue the application and re-write what I'd already written, or start from scratch?

This episode reinforced for me the way in which writing involves so much personal investment, and as our #Acwri Twitter chats have highlighted for me, how much writing is thinking as well as typing.

My initial reaction to losing my words was that the situation was not recoverable - I didn't think I could write something as good again, especially with my new found frustration and demoralisation.  And I didn't think I could remember the exact ideas I'd lost or the exact sequence in which I'd written them, which seemed to encapsulate exactly what I wanted to say. 

In the end, and like so much in academic life (peer review, conference questions, digital recorder disasters and corrupted computers) the best way forward seems to be to accept it happened and move on.  No piece of work is perfect.  And once you have an idea, is it not always there somewhere in your mind to be recovered, reconfigured or even improved on?  You can lose words, but maybe ideas are more permanent. 

Last night our #Acwri Twitter chat took on the subject of 'writing with others'.  Thanks to all those who took part.  You can find a short summary of the chat here, or look at all the tweets here.  Our next chat is on Thursday 20th September.  Topic to be announced shortly!

Today's #acwri task is to not write.  Or more accurately, to get rid of writing, and a fair bit of it.  If writing is hard, trying not to write too much, or to reduce what you've already writte, can be even harder.  The journal article that had fitted nicely within Journal A's word limit, is now oversized for Journal B by a massive 900 words.  900 words!  How on earth do you cut that from 5900?

In getting this paper under Journal B's word limit I've learnt (or probably re-learnt) three things.  First, it can be done, even if it's difficult.  Second, yesterday's final version (which I did not feel could be improved on) can today be revised and strengthened.  And third, it is amazing how many words you can lose when you try, without affecting the core arguments of your paper.  There are always challenges, especially if using excerpts from qualitative interviews. But sometimes more is less.  Editing helps you to make choices about what's really important in your paper, where the repetition is.  And sometimes less words make a stronger argument, because you have to be direct and explicit.  As Henry James once said, "In art economy is always beauty."