You’ve probably spent hours in Word fighting with headers, columns and other elements which just seem to have a mind of their own. It’s not until you use a professional tool like Framemaker or Indesign that you realize just how poor Word is for laying out content.
One thing Adobe has gotten right is its use of Frames – basically boxes which define precisely where content goes and more importantly, where it will stay. The reason this works so well is that it isolates each chunk of content so that changes made to one do not affect the others. And since these applications don’t distinguish what the frames represent (ie: header, footer etc), there is only 1 set of operations and tasks for laying these frames.
So how can you get this in Word? Well, we’ve become partial to using hidden tables on any page which requires precise positioning of elements. What we do is layout the page using a table, and then hide the table once we’re happy with the layout. Word still forces the use of its footers and headers, but we also embed hidden tables into these sections when there are multiple items that require precise positioning (ie: page numbers and document titles).
By using tables, we can isolate and control each chunk of text. And any images which must be positioned in relation to the text, are also easy to place. If you’ve let Word control image placement in the past, you will appreciate the new found control you have with this method.
This use of tables as frames in Word of course isn’t always appropriate. One downside is that you cannot control the flow of text in a table. For example if you want to have two columns of text, you will have to manually place the text into the corresponding table cells. If this is an issue than you will have to decide if using a table is appropriate for that particular page. However, for cases such as user guides or policy and procedure manuals where you often have a fixed page layout, hidden tables tend to work quite well.
For additional tips on Word check out our past article here.