I now have a massive messy file. What shall I do with it?

1. I need to make sure all the entries are included:
   1. Open the file where I stored my list of entries.
   2. Search for each entry in turn in the big messy file.
   3. Select the line containing title and author name, and select style-header 3.
   4. Repeat until all the headers have been set.
2. If anything was missing:
   1. Try searching for the first lines of the submission. It turned out I’d mis-spelled a couple of names and titles when putting them in the big file.
   2. If that failed, I would have typed in a header at the appropriate place, then cut and pasted the submission, changing its style to “normal.” Luckily I hadn’t missed anything, so I was spared that pain.
3. Of course, “style-normal” may not look how I want it to look. Life will be much easier for me if I can see indented paragraphs, with a nice half-line space below each. So:
   1. Open “style manager.” A pane appears on the right hand side of my Word document.
   2. Select “normal.”
   3. Click on “edit style,” “modify.”
   4. I choose Calibri 11, left-justified, as my default font. Then slick on “format – paragraph.”
   5. I choose a 0.25 indentation for first lines, 6 point space after paragraphs, and 1.15 line spacing.
   6. Save, save, save.
4. Select “view-navigation pane” on the master file. A side-bar in Word now shows all the headings for all the entries.
5. Go through my big ugly file and make it organizable:
   1. First set the style of the title “Writers’ Mill Journal…” to “style-header 1.” It appears in the sidebar. Hurray!
   2. Set the style of the section name to “style-header 2.”
   3. Set the style of the first header to “style-header 3.” This appears in the sidebar too, with all the entry titles indented below it.
   4. I don’t like the way these headers appear in the document, but it’s easy to change them:
      1. Open style manager and edit styles again.
      2. Note, if I choose to center something that’s based on normal (keep everything based on normal – it makes life easier), I’ll have to change the “format – paragraph” and remove that 0.25 indentation – not good for centered text.
      3. I choose my own before and after paragraph spacings too – basically just any number that makes it easy for me to see what I’m doing.
   5. Now I’ll be able to move sections around and move pieces around within sections (all controlled by clicking and dragging in that “navigation pane”). I resist the temptation. It’s way toooo soooon!
6. Go through my big ugly file and make it readable:
   1. The first piece I come to is a poem, with an “author’s note.” So I create two more new styles:
   2. In the style manager, click on “add new style” and type in a label, “poem.”
      1. For simplicity and quick readability, I’m going to center lines of poetry, and space them just like lines of text. The style is based on “normal,” but it’s centered, and I change the paragraph style, removing the indentation and changing the “space after” to zero.
   3. Then I add another style, called “note.”
      1. Again, this is not a final decision. All these things can be easily changed later. But for now, notes are indented from the left and right, and are written in italics. Then have a zero “space after” too.
   4. The poem looks readable, but it’s missing all those nicely bolded lines the author gave me. So I open the original file, put the bolding back in, and heave a great sigh of relief. We’re off!
7. For the rest, see Step 4