Word - Triage 5 Go with the (Text) Flow You won't find anything in Word's Help files on "text flow", probably because the Word programmers are more concerned over appearances than with content structure and flow. Look at the raft of icons and mystery buttons across the top and bottom of the Word editing window. See anything that helps with content flow? By flow, I mean "goes in a connected fashion from start to end." A turbulent document, with internal interruptions and detours, has poor flow. And turbulence means trouble, right here in River City.... In a document with good flow, you can insert a paragraph, or a heading, or a handful of copied and pasted paragraphs and headings, and the document will swallow the additions and smoothly adjust the flow — headings renumber, paragraphs realign, pages repaginate, TOC updates with a single click. All you have to do is add, delete, and edit your working text, without doing anything to the rest of the document to rebuild dikes and levees and channels to contain the flow. A turbulent document knocks you around from page to TOC and back, fighting the current to keep your simple edit going downstream with its head(ings) above water. The rocks in the stream are tables and text boxes, and the boulders are manually-inserted page breaks. All are great when used for stepping stones. But if you have a big pile of them in a document, with pages of text arranged in a series of tables or poked into text boxes, and every page set with a manual break, the effect is like dumping a pile of stepping stones into a stream — you now have a dam. Remove or add a stone, and the whole structure has to be adjusted and tumbled around, stone by stone. Textbox- or table-dammed documents (sometimes referred to simply as "damned documents") are good candidates for redesign, especially if they are expected to be revised extensively during the life cycle of a product. Where do we go from here? So far we've seen lots of ways documents can go wrong, causing hours of extra work and effort for repairs and revisions. My analysis shows that 10% of the time people spend working with MS Office products is devoted to coping with inappropriate structure and formatting, and another 15% is spent creating inappropriate structure and formatting for someone else to cope with. That's a very serious productivity hit which is entirely unnecessary and 95% avoidable. The next series of topics will move from triage to proper care and feeding, or dealing with problems by avoiding them in the first place.