Word - creating a multi-page document

A report I've co-written for The Reading Agency needs to be formatted inline with their house style and template. Whilst I format the document I will also aim to make it as accessible as possible, but may be limited by the house style. Below is a commentary of the steps I took to format the document.

Accessing the template
First I accessed the template from Basecamp, a web-based project management software where users can manage tasks and store files. Unfortunately the Fonts I needed were not on Basecamp so I couldn't download, but they were embedded into the template.

Copying the text across

• To copy the text into the template I opened the .dot template and saved as a Word document.
• Then from the original report I selected Edit > Paste Special and chose Unformatted Text to remove the formatting. However, this didn't copy all the images.
• I undid the last action and then copied the text over.
• I used the keyboard shortcut cmd A to select all the text used the dropdown menu on the Styles toolbar to Clear Formatting. This did not remove the images, but the footnotes were still in the old format.

Formatting footnotes

• I Googled 'select all footnotes in word' and found a forum where instructions were given in how to select all the footnotes at once. I realised I could search by Style, as the footnotes had the style Footnote Text.
• As I'm using a Mac, the method was slightly different to the one described, but I figured it out. I had to go to Edit > Find > Format: Style > Footnote Text > OK. Then using the Styles dropdown menu I selected the template Style Page Footer. This changed all the text, bar the hyperlinks to LuMarc Com 11 and right justified the text.
• I disliked the layout of right justified text so I selected all the text again and justified to the left.
• However, not all the text was formatted so I had to go in and individually select and apply Page Footer style.
• Also, I noticed that all the Footnote Marks were now formatted as 'normal' text so I had to select them all and change to Format > Font > Effects > Subscript.

Remove non-printing characters

• Next I needed to remove any double paragraph marks. I used Find and Replace to select Find > Special > Paragraph Mark and entered twice the paragraph mark: ^p^p.
• Rather than using Paragraph Mark if additional space between paragraphs were required, I formatted text using Format > Paragraph > Spacing > Before & After: 6pt.
• This made the document into quite a mess! So I had to go through and add in single Paragraph Marks to distinguish between paragraphs. To do this I had the original document on the left so I could see where the paragraphs were in the text. After going through a page I would then change the style by selecting the text and choosing the style from the drop-down menu.
• After a while I realised it would have been quicker just to change all the text to the Style Body Text and then format if different, so I did that for the remainder of the document.

Images

• Originally when I labelled the images I just typed in text. For this version of the document I added captions to all the images (select image, Insert > Caption), though the caption numbers always defaulted to 1 and I had to manually edit them. I couldn't figure out why this happened (even after Googling).
• The default Style for Caption text was font colour blue and size 9pt. I modified the Caption Style to black size 11pt, to fit in with the rest of the document and make easier to read.
• Some images were quite close to the text so I formatted paragraphs following images so there was more space before the paragraph started.
• I could not add alternative text as this function is not available in Word for the Mac.
• I had taken the images from screen-shots around the web and they weren't of the highest quality. I also optimised them for the document (using iPhoto) so they became degraded. Next time I go through this process, I will strive to obtain better quality images.
  
• Even though I could not change the images, I thought it would be interesting to use a colour blindness simulator to test how they'd look for users with colour blindness. The simulator showed the original and 'simulated' image and not all the images I'd selected were well defined for users with colour blindness, but the majority where:

Colour blindness simulator

Document properties
I went to File > Properties > Summary to add information about the document, to improve Search Engine Optimisation. Unfortunately, due to the non-standard Styles used for headings and sub-headings the Document contents did not show all the chapters.

Appendices
The appendixes were PDF from online surveys that were carried out for the study. I wanted to bring the separate main document and appendices into one document. I used a free online conversion tool, Zamzar to convert the PDF into a Word document, but it was unusable as the layout of questions and answers were all over the place. My only other option was to insert each page of the PDF as images into the document. This was not ideal as the images were large and in Word for a Mac there are no options to compress the image. Also, having the appendices as images is not ideal for screen reader users, but I couldn't think of any other solution. But I felt the reader would not miss out if they could not access these as they supplemented the main document.

Converting to PDF
Finally I converted the document to PDF using the inbuilt converter in Mac. Unlike Word for the PC, it does not offer any options for enabling accessibility when converted.

Difficulties

• Later I realised some of the Footnote Marks I had originally formatted I'd then changed to Body Text, so I manually changed them to Subscript as using the Select All method did not seem to work.
  
• Next I realised the italics for titles of books, games etc. had been removed from the Body Text so I again used the Find > Special function to highlight all the text in italics in the original document so I could then compare and amend in the second document.
• Because the Styles are not formatted as Heading 1, 2 etc. I was unable to automatically generate a contents list for the document. I thought this might have be an issue. Instead I had to format the existing contents list. Originally the page numbers were justified to the right of the page, but this would have made it more difficult for users with magnification on to read the text. Also, tabs had been used to format the layout so if a user amended the text size the layout of the document could be lost. I amended the layout by moving the page number next to the title of each section.
• Strangely, one of the images flipped when I pasted it into the template - very odd. I copied again from the original document and chose Paste Special and selected Picture, this stopped it happening.

Conclusion
This whole process took me at least 8 hours - very time consuming! It's quite frustrating that even after all my changes, the final document isn't as fully accessible as it could be, I've been hindered by using Word on a Mac and The Reading Agency's template.

On reflection it would be much easier to correctly format a document as it was created. Also, a correctly formatted template with comprehensive Styles would make it easier to use. Finally, next time I would use Word on a PC!

There are links to the original version of the report and final Word and PDF version.

I'll ask my peer Kathy to review my document.