Creating a professional-looking document could be the marginal factor that wins a contract, lands a job or maintains clients’ confidence in your brand. But too often, documents meet their intended audiences with a random appearance that can distract from the messages they contain. Common mistakes include:

• Varying typefaces and styles, particularly where text has been copied and pasted from other documents.
• Illogical heading levels, or no heading levels at all.
• The dreaded return-return-return method of starting a new page.
• Badly formatted images and captions.
• Failure to use a style setup so that all types of text block can be changed using a single rule change.
• Manually creating contents pages so the page numbers go out of sync as soon as edits are made.

It doesn’t have to be like this! Over my years as a writer and editor I’ve spent thousands of hours working with Microsoft® Word, and I’ve learnt dozens of tricks and techniques to turn raw text files into beautiful documents. By following the rules of typography and editing, I’ll create a style sheet that meets your satisfaction, then strip your document back to its bare bones and apply the styles to the whole thing.

I’ve used Microsoft Word to make documents that are ready to be converted to PDF for publishing – many of the drawbacks that Word users complain about are really just gaps in their understanding of the software, and there’s always a way to make a document look much more presentable.

Send me your document and I’ll make it look polished, professional and ready to win.