Post date: Oct 03, 2015 11:52:28 PM
As our team was writing this report, we came across a lot of things we didn't like about Google Docs. Primarily, its formatting and templating options are incredibly limited. There is no way to create custom headers and styles, which makes it impossible to automate section numbering, which can become a huge hassle when you have to renumber everything after making a change to the document order. It does include an option for auto-generating the Table of Contents, but none for adding in references or citations which means the bibliography must be manually written. There is also no options for adding in captions, which means caption titles have to be entered and formatted by hand every time a figure is added in.
Knowing that Word does have all of these options and more, we converted the proposal document and tried it out. Word allows complete customization of new header and body text styles. As such, we created four new styles:
IQP Body Text
IQP Level 1
IQP Level 2
IQP Level 3
We then formatted these styles the way we wanted them, and attached them to a custom Word multi-level list. The result is a Word document where all of the annoying formatting is automated away and we can focus on simply writing the content. Another advantage is that we no longer need to go back and make sure all sections have the same format as we each write, since the styles enforce a uniform format throughout the document.
Now, whenever we type a section or sub-section title, all we have to click is the appropriate level style and not only does it format the text correctly, it adds in the section numbering automatically (e.g. 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.1) and will update any headers which occur later in the document to match the new order. Furthermore, if we ever feel like changing fonts, text size, color, anything about the headers or body text, there's no need to go through each part of the doc and change everything manually; simply edit the style and all text with that style will be formatted to match. To caption a figure, simply select the image and select Insert Caption. The text will be automatically added to match the figure's position in the document, and numbering is also automatically updated. With all this formatting done, the Table of Contents, Table of Figures, Table of Tables, and Bibliography are automatically updated to match new content as it's written.
The only draw-back, then, is the obvious advantage Google Docs has over Word: collaborative editing. However, with OneDrive and Word Online, this has become a moot point. All of the team members can still edit the same document simultaneously and have those changes reflected on everyone else's document in real-time, while staying within the Word program and not having to depend on a half-featured web app. The issue which remains is that it is true that the collaborative editing functions in Word get slow with very large documents, but this is usually resolved with a reboot of Word or waiting a bit for the changes to upload. As Microsoft continues to improve its software, this one downside should be slowly eliminated.
Alex