Formatting a Chapbook On Microsoft Office 2016 - WTF?

June 15, 2020 1:01 PM

I am in the process of formatting a chapbook. I've downloaded some ready-to-go templates and have watched numerous how-to's on You Tube. Both are confusing. On the downloads I am unable to enter text. On the You-Tube videos, the Word page image on-screen they use to walk me through my process is different than on my MacBook. I do get to the end and I am still unable to enter text.

I did the same formatting on a PC in the early "Ought's". My writing teacher gave me step by step instructions to get me through the process. The only difference then was I had to do a mock-up in advance to get the page numbers orderly and correct and reprint again a second time for the actual sellable copies. In the downloads this is preset.

I am using a 2011 MacBook Pro.

I am wondering if this a MacBook issue, a Word issue, or a template issue. Is there an easier way to go through this process?

posted by goalyeehah to Writing & Language (3 answers total)

This sounds like an issue with the templates. If I were you, I'd start with a template from Microsoft. Download one of theirs and see if you can edit it. Microsoft may be a better source of reliable templates.

Even if the downloaded template doesn't match your needs, it's a way to figure out whether the problem lies in the template or the hardware or software. But I don't really understand how this could be attributable to your computer itself, or even how your version of Word affects it, unless the template is very new and your Office version can't open it. My guess is that it's an odd template that was set up poorly, or maybe it's locked in a way that you're not able to figure out how to 'unlock' the items on the pages?
posted by hydra77 at 1:39 PM on June 15, 2020

In docx files, there are basically two versions:

• new ones that are compatible with Office 365;
• old ones that are compatible with Word up to early versions of Office 2016.

There are a group of Word releases circa 2013-2016 that will utterly mangle a docx file. Similarly, the templates you are downloading may be from that version. If your document has anything beyond simple paragraphs (sections, tables, references) you may have editing and display errors. Worse still, if a document was edited in these versions, saved, and then used in later versions, it may start doing bad things. I was working in legal document management at the time, and it was very unpleasant.

Using LibreOffice may avoid the problem if you version of Word is old. It may introduce minor issues of its own, though.
posted by scruss at 6:00 AM on June 16, 2020

To go a totally different direction, I set up Google slides to do something similar.

You can use page setup to set the page size in inches.

From there you can copy and paste slides and rearrange them easily.

Doesn't make sense for a format where paragraphs need to spill from page to page, but would be great for a chapbook of poems that needs to be rearranged here and there.
posted by jander03 at 7:45 PM on June 17, 2020