Word - Triage 1 How serious is the damage? MS Word templates and documents for revision come from somewhere else. Somebody created it, and now you have to work with it. You have to figure out how the document is put together, how it works, and how much effort it will take to finish the job. Where do you start? In medical triage, you start by assessing the condition of the patient - check breathing, pulse, blood pressure, head injuries, open wounds, tissue damage, bone damage. Then stabilize the patient, or move on to the next one if this one can't be saved. For Word document triage, assess structure and formatting - check paragraph style assignments, text formatting overrides, Table of Contents format, heading styles, text flow, list formatting, table formatting and structure, inserted graphics and objects, and Jer's List of Random Annoyances. Then fix and use the document if it's fixable, or get help immediately if the damage is too much for you to handle alone. Document triage takes about three hours to explain, and three minutes to do - one minute to run the assessment, and two minutes to pour a good, stiff drink and gulp the first hit from it to absorb the assessment. We'll explain the process one little step at time, and pick up some useful hints and tricks along the way. Step 1 - Turn on the Formatting Marks, all of them. Go to the top menu: Tools > Options > View > Formatting marks... click "All". Step 2 - Show boundaries and anchors. Still in Tools > Options > View, go to Print and Web Layout Options, click Drawings, Object Anchors, and Text Boundaries. Now look at the document in Normal view (menu: View > Normal). You should see the backward P symbol for paragraph markers on the page. If you don't, look for the backward P symbol to the far right end of your top-window toolbar, and click that symbol. It toggles the Formatting Marks display on and off. If you see stacks of paragraph symbols running down the left edge of the document, or little stacked pairs or single lonely markers between paragraphs, the author used empty paragraphs (hit Enter-Enter-Enter) for vertical spacing. You've got a problem. Empty paragraphs are the first clue that a document is badly formed. More clues to look for, in the next topic.