Hatrack River Writers Workshop: MS Word format for stories, novels

This is topic MS Word format for stories, novels in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by wbriggs (Member # 2267) on :

Someone posted a .dot earlier for use in MS Word (who? great idea, whoever it was); I took it a little further this evening. It now has a word count feature that's fairly easy to use.

I would like for it to be even easier -- that is, I want a shortcut on my desktop I can open and Word will know I want this short story format -- and technically this is working too, but I'd like a nicer way.

I did this because I was wanting a format for writing a whole book, which would do contents, index, etc. This was as far as I could get in one evening!

Here it is: http://youwillknow.blogspot.com (entry on MS Word format).

Other open question: can I get it to update the title on the page header slugline, from the title line itself?

Posted by HSO (Member # 2056) on :

I think that I might have been responsible for the .dot templates. Kathleen was kind enough to post a link here:

http://www.hatrack.com/forums/writers/forum/Forum6/HTML/000001.html

I did have an automatic word count thing going on, but I took it out since it was a simple matter to manually look it up in Word or calculate. And at the time, I wasn't sure which method of word counting would be best, i.e. based on Word's on word calc or on the traditional 250 words per page method, so I simply took it out to allow for author preference. But I used a section break right after the Title to allow for counting only the words in the manuscript body, which avoided writing a formula to subtract the address field and story title words.

There are several ways to automatically update the header based on the Title. One way is to use the Properties dialog under "Title" and make a field based on that. Another is to write a very simple macro that does it. And there are still more ways...

Posted by TL 601 (Member # 2730) on :

Thanks for taking the time to share you guys

Posted by wyrd1 (Member # 3366) on :

regarding word count: is that 250per page guestimate at double or single line spacing?

Posted by HSO (Member # 2056) on :

...double spacing. And it's more to do with page layout and space for magazines and books than actual word counts.