Writing A Manual With Word For Mac

OLD POST ALERT! This is an older post and although you might find some useful tips, any technical or publishing information is likely to be out of date. Please click on Start Here on the menu bar above to find links to my most useful articles, videos and podcast. Thanks and happy writing! – Joanna Penn This is a guest post from Kevin Cullis, author of How to Start a Business: Mac Version, his first book completely done in iWork Pages.

Note: I moved to a Mac last year and love it so I was really interested to read of new tools I haven't discovered yet! So you want to be a writer or a published author?

You’ve used a Windows computer most of your life and you wonder in a mostly Windows environment if can you use a Mac? While most people use Windows to write, Macs are just as capable to write books as their Windows counterparts, so let’s get to the meat of the Mac’s cool tools. While most Windows users are well aware of WordPad, the Mac’s version is TextEdit (if you enlarge the TextEdit icon, read what J. Appleseed wrote to Kate 🙂 ). Pages is quite good for formatting; however, it does not contain an html export for Amazon e-books.

However, the free TextEdit which comes with OS X is great for this. Within TextEdit go into Preferences-Open and Save-and set the document type to HTML 4.01 Strict and set styling to no CSS. Then within Pages copy all (Command-A, the Command-C), then paste it into Text Edit and save as HTML. The HTML that comes out is very clean. You’ll still need to do a manual table of contents (for non-fiction) and Kindle page breaks in the HTML though.

My professors always needed Word documents submitted, and at times, depending on the project, I lost some formatting when I exported my documents to Word from NeoOffice. I prefer using Pages, but there are probably still a lot of things I don’t know how to do. I spent most of my youth writing in an actual paper notebook, so as much I’ve come to prefer my laptop, I still feel technologically challenged at times. The Apple store that I purchased my Mac from offered basic instructional classes that I, foolishly, did not attend.

Even though I have had my Mac for over two years, I know I haven’t gotten the most I can out of it yet. This, however, is more encouraging than discouraging because I look forward to exploring it further.

Alexis, Yes, the filters used by other office documents can lose some of the formatting when using any “Save As” menu or export function. Open Office is a little better, but even between Office 2003 and 2007 there are some issues, nothing is immune. If you collaborate, then concentrate on just the text that is being sent between each person and the person that will open the document last should ensure that the formatting is correct. If you’re only sharing information, exporting to a PDF makes it very easy, and a person is allowed to annotate on each document as the PDF is an Adobe open standard. Most of the information on this site is free for you to read, watch or listen to, but The Creative Penn is also a business and my livelihood. So please expect hyperlinks to be affiliate links in many cases, when I receive a small percentage of sales if you wish to purchase. I only recommend tools, books and services that I either use or people I know personally.

Writing A Manual With Word For Macros Second Edition

Writing Words With Pictures

Integrity and authenticity continue to be of the highest importance to me. I hope you find the site useful! Thanks - Joanna.