Latest Project: Editing a 246 page book. It’s written in Word and includes dozens and dozens of photos, and end notes.

Word isn’t really a desktop publisher, isn’t designed for large documents with photos and such. We just force it to play, and sometimes it doesn’t play nice.

This is what happens to me … I zoom out to see a two page spread, and then I wait what seems like forever (literally a few minutes, and in our ‘hurry up and see it now way of thinking, it feels like forever) as my computer fan spins away at high speed because the hard drive is in high gear … as a result I get Word’s NOT RESPONDING message.

Wait. Practice patience. Eventually the hard drive stops spinning and I am able continue editing.

When I turn on the “show formatting,” I get to practice patience some more as the page’s all renumber and it updates because all the end notes show up in code.

[one-half]When THIS[/one-half][one-half last]Becomes THIS[/one-half]

[one-half][/one-half]

[one-half last][/one-half]

Just a few lines of text takes up more space when the codes are displayed?

Word can be a lot of fun, and this is fun. You just have to understand what is going on.