Transcription
[Music]
Hi, I'm Stephanie and I'm Zach, and this is episode 540 of the Lawyer's Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, I talk with Baron Henley of Affinity Consulting about how you can become an actual power user of Microsoft Word, and the answer may surprise you.
Yeah, I think a lot of people think they know how to use Word because we're lawyers and that's what we use to do our drafting. Yeah, and I, I know, I know Styles. I've changed Styles. I know how to turn on the, you know, the paragraph, um, you know, button, so I can, I can do a carriage return versus a, a page break or a, you know, I know that that's not power user. And some people may be saying, "I don't know that. What's, what is that, me?" Right? And just because you can, you know, Redline a document and, you know, share it or make sure that you're making comments, that's great. That is really, really good. We need to be using everything that Microsoft Word is, but not, we don't need to be using it as, as Baron says, like a typewriter. Exactly. And I think the good test is, if you go up and change the font or the use that B or I or U little button, then you're probably messing up your document, you don't realize it. So he's going to teach you the better way to do that.
Yeah, well, so, so this one is probably going to be a little bit more effective if you watch the video. Uh, Baron shares his screen; we, we do our best to try to tell you what's going on. So I, I think a lot of people that use Word day-to-day will, will be able to follow us in audio, but, um, we have this up in video format on Spotify and we have it up in video format on our YouTube channel, which is, uh, you, Stephanie, we started pushing that a couple months ago and it's really starting to take off. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. And so obviously this episode lends itself nicely to that because it is cool sometimes, though, to be able to show people what you're talking about, and, and, and this is one of those tools. We, I mean, we said it before: if you're a lawyer, you're probably using Word daily, hourly. Yeah, yeah. So you really do need to know how to use it, and Baron's going to show you these amazing tips to actually use it much more effectively.
So, yeah, and I, I, I will say like, I actually recorded this with Baron twice because I had a, a mess up with my audio the first time, and the first time we did it I wasn't super familiar with what he was doing. When he told me what he was going to be able to do, I literally, I, I was like, "Baron, like, no way. There's no way on God's green earth that you can make a bulletproof document that that the formatting will not have any problems." And happily, I was proven wrong. Yeah, I know this is Baron in his finest, um, yeah. And he gets pretty fired up. I mean, there's probably no one in, in the world more excited about crafting legal documents in Word than Baron. So, yeah, I think our, your our listeners are in for a treat, and even more so if you go and watch the videos. Um, like Zach said, uh, check it out, learn a few things. I think you will. Yeah. Well, now here is my conversation with Baron.
Hi, I'm Barron Henley. I am a recovering lawyer and founding, one of the founding partners of Affinity Consulting. Um, let's see, my responsibilities include directing our, our educational efforts. Uh, I do a tremendous amount of core production tool, we call it, uh, training, which is Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Acrobat, that kind of stuff. Yeah, uh, and I'm also an automation geek, so I still do quite a bit of document automation projects using a platform called HotDocs. And that's prett, much it. I, I mean, that's, I guess that's pretty much it for our introduction here. There's a lot of stuff we could, we could say about you, Baron. Thanks for being with me. I, I always appreciate, uh, chatting with you. Um, obviously we, we're here talking about, you know, kind of your experience with automating documents in Microsoft Word and the pain in the blank that comes along with, with trying to, to get those things automated. And, and, but before we start, I'm going to have you share your screen with us to kind of show us what's going on. Um, as we go, and for those of you who are listening to us in just the audio version, you can catch the shared screen on our YouTube channel or on Spotify. Um, they also have a video version of this, um, and that should be helpful. But I, I think this type of thing, the pains that Microsoft Word, uh, has, is, is pretty common. I, I think people will be able to follow along anyway. So, um, yeah, Baron, we've talked about this a couple times and you've told me that you can, you can set up a document from the get-go, um, that is not going to have those hiccups that, that happen with automation. You know, and I think everybody's felt them: like those something goes to the next page, something, you know, your, your formatting doesn't follow, all this crap. And we just, I've gotten used to just going through my documents and, and kind of knowing where they are, but I, I don't have to do that. You don't. You don't. So, so Microsoft Word unfortunately conceals what users need to know in order to set up documents so they work properly, uh, which is generally why everyone is perpetually frustrated with it. Because you can use it for years and years and years and not stumble upon all of these little hidden Easter eggs and features that have always been present in Word but, uh, are well hidden, or simply there are no buttons for many of the features that you would need to use in order to control a document. Um, so, you know, through many years of experimentation, mostly through the document automation stuff because, you know, if you build a, a 400-page template that produces a 40-page document, um, when 360 pages of irrelevant language are discarded during the assembly process, if you haven't set it up exactly right, you're going to have so many formatting issues on the back end that you'll want to just throw your computer out the window. So, you know, when we encountered that, we kind of had to figure out, well, there's got to be some way to do this. And there was zero help generally on the internet. So it was kind of an experimentation as to how you get a document to do what you want and make it behave, you know, in perpetuity going forward, so you don't have to keep revisiting the same issues over and over again. Right.
Um, you know, and a good example of one of those would be, I, I'll just share my screen real quick. Um, let's see, entire screen, and we'll just, I'll share the one that we're, we're looking at right now, and we'll just get a Word document over here and I'll show you what I'm talking about. So, for example, um, let's say that, just to give you an example of some of the features that are kind of hidden in Word, um, this is a very common kind of problem you would run into in Word where you've got a title that's sitting by itself at the bottom of a page, and obviously you'd want it at the top of page three. Um, most people are going to solve that by, you know, adding a couple of hard returns and say, "There, fixed it." Or, or actually even worse, is to put in a page break, um, which temporarily, and that's the important thing, it temporarily solves the problem. Uh-huh. Uh, by doing these things, I've created a gap, and if, for example, this paragraph were to become a little bit longer and trickle onto the next page, then I end up with an entire blank page in my document, and I'm going to have to go find the page break that I previously added because it, I felt it was necessary, and take it back out again, so I don't have this big blank spot in the middle of my document.
Yeah, well, okay, let, let me, let me, uh, take a pause real quick. So we're, we're looking at a, um, at a template for, um, setting up a company LLC template, it looks like, real quick. And so obviously we've got 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, all of those things. And for those of you who aren't, aren't seeing it, we've got a title on a, on a separate page from the rest of, of the paragraph that's going in there. Um, you know, Baron, I think that a lot of our listeners would probably consider themselves power users of Microsoft Word, and I, you know, looking at the example that you just did, I would think that because they can do that, that's why they would consider themselves power users. Like, I like, for me, I, yeah, I'd put a page break in there and then I would know that it would break if it went weird like that. That is an extremely common issue that I've, I've come across, and that's, I mean, as, as your templates are variable or are dynamic, that's going to happen. You know, I almost look at it like, that's going to happen. So, yeah, let's keep going. I'm curious to see how the hell we get past that.
Yeah, so, so this is, there's a feature in Word that allows you to effectively glue stuff together, and, and there is no button for it on any ribbon. So, and, and what you pointed out is very true: people believe that there's a correlation between how long I've been using Word and how good I am at Word. Yeah, um, but the reality is, most people are using Word like a typewriter, more or less, and they really haven't, they haven't found or learned to exploit the really powerful features built into it that would make all of their editing faster, easier, better. And this is a good example of one of those things. So if you wanted to take the title at the bottom of one page and attach it to the paragraph at the top of the next page, you, you actually simply right-click the paragraph you want to attach to the next one. In other words, you don't care about the subsequent paragraph, only the one above it. And if you, if you right-click it, you get this little list of options, and you can go down and choose "Paragraph" out of that dialogue that appears. Okay, that's familiar. And once the paragraph dialogue appears, there's two tabs at the top, one of which is called "Line and Page Breaks." And if you click on that, there's a little series of checkboxes, one of which says "Keep with next." And if I click on "Keep with next," that will permanently adhere whatever paragraph I right-clicked to the next paragraph, without, very importantly, creating a gap between that title and the proceeding paragraph. So if I add, if the proceeding paragraph gets longer and it trickles over onto the next page, there's never going to be extra hard returns or page breaks to take out; they weren't required in the first place, and there's none to take out now. It's just simply going to do what I want. Um, and that's a, it's kind of a set-it-and-forget-it. Like once you do that, this, that particular paragraph is never going to be an issue again. And, and that's what we encourage people to do when they're, when they're going through documents. Think about most people are aware of like, "This is likely to be an issue at some point," and the point is, there's many cases where you can simply apply these otherwise hidden features and cause your document to simply not ever generate the error that you're expecting. As we say in, in automation, you know, it's better to avoid the crash than to have survived it. And Word is exactly the same way. I'm trying to avoid the crash, and, and, and I don't want to have to like deal with it. And people are so oriented toward, "This always happens and then I have to fix it, and then it happens and I have to fix it," and, and it never really occurs to people, in my experience, that that could have been avoided in the first place, and you wouldn't have to figure out why or how to fix it because it, it never occurred. And that's what we're, that's what we try to get people to, so they understand that you can build templates that will, they will not give you those kind of formatting glitches, as long as you set it up correctly in the first place. And showing somebody how to use a template properly constructed is literally a five-minute exercise, even somebody who doesn't know anything about Word. You know, they've never drafted their own documents; they've always relied on, it on relied on support staff, for example. But I can give them a complex template and in five minutes of instruction they're going to produce perfect documents with, you know, the cross-references are right, the paragraph numbers are right, the spacing is right, there's no awkward page breaks anywhere. Yeah, everything sticks together the way it's supposed to. And even, even if they copy and paste into the document from somewhere else, and we've all experienced that: you paste in, it comes in, you're like, "Oh my God, what just happened?" Um, but you know, if you, if you have styles set up properly in your Word documents, which is another very well hidden, mysterious feature of Word. Mm-hmm. It's literally, you know, it's two, it's two clicks to fix any particular paragraph. Like if I clicked in this paragraph and let's say I pasted it in and it looked like that. Uh-huh. You know, it's, it's, it's way too small, wrong font, wrong point size, wrong everything, no paragraph number, and you're like, "Oh my God, here we go again." It's as simple as: you don't even need to select the paragraph, you can just put your cursor in the paragraph and then click on a style that provides the format you want, and it fixes literally everything. Like there's, I, there's not even a "sometimes it doesn't work." Like no, it works like that every single time. It's, you put your cursor in the paragraph, you click on the name of the style that you set up, and formatting does exactly what you want, and it will remain doing exactly what you want as you edit the document.
Okay, so, so yeah, like I, I've, we've gotten a taste of, of some of the hit, I mean, how the hell was I supposed to find that "Keep with next" thing first thing? And so that's kind of, yeah, that's kind of a taste of, of what we have here. Um, but you, you've also said, you know, with these styles, you can set this stuff up, you know, from the beginning. You can set up this, this, uh, document from the beginning to where, you know, I, I do a new paragraph, I put this style with it, and it's going to, it's going to have this, the numbering. Yeah, so numbering, table of contents, table authorities. The paragraph numbering is also very mysterious in Word. Um, you know, they give you three buttons up at the top of the screen to set it up. There's a bullet button, there's a one-two-three button, there's a one-A-I button, which is the multi-level list button. The first two buttons, I mean, I don't even know why they're here; they're completely useless. And we encourage people to not ever click them for any reason whatsoever, literally in any document. Okay. The only one, one should ever use is the multi-level list, because the multi-level list gives you total control over the numbering. You can do bullets, numbers, letters; it's up to nine levels deep. If you only need one level, okay. If you ever need a sublevel, okay. There's a bunch to choose from. And, and getting that to, you basically, I can take the paragraph numbers I set up in a multi-level list and attach them to particular styles. So in the document that's on my screen right now, that's exactly what we did. That's why if I go to the end of a paragraph and I hit Enter, I will 100% of the time get another number- or lettered paragraph in the appropriate order. I will get the appropriate spacing, font, point size, paragraph alignment, and everything else, because all of that is, every single formatting attribute that one can apply in Word can be built into a style. So it doesn't matter what you want it to look like; you can say, "I want this to be a one-inch first-line indent with lowercase alphabetic lettering with parentheses surrounding it. I want an extra blank line after each one. I want it to be Times New Roman 12 point, justified paragraph alignment," whatever it is you want. Yeah, put that all in this style, and it will do all of that. Now, if you want to change levels, like if I wanted this, these two paragraphs to be sublevels under A, I just click on the sublevel style that does that. And if I change my mind, I can switch it back. It's literally that easy. It's, in fact, when I explain this for somebody who's not seeing my screen right now, yeah, they'll probably, they're probably in a state of disbelief that that's even possible. Because people, I, I explain that you can do this, and, and typically people say, "I've never seen Word behave like that." No, and I have to show it to them to prove it to, to them, and they're like, "What?" Yeah, well, is this some trick? No, no trick. What's the magic? You're setting up.
So, okay, so like, start me off with how I, how I set that up. Like, okay, we know what styles are. We know that we have kind of a heading one, a heading two, a heading three, a heading four, and then potentially a body or a paragraph something like, like that. Like, how do I set that up to where it can, and, and hell, where do I go?
Well, you first of all, you got to know, you got to open up your Styles pane. If you're Word for Mac, there's actually a button that says "Styles pane," so it's pretty easy to find it. Okay, it's on the Home ribbon. And Word for Windows, for some reason, they're, they're not, they don't give you that button. Um, instead you have to click this little arrow that I'm hovering over in the bottom right-hand corner of the Styles group on the Home ribbon, which doesn't even look like a button but is. Or you have to memorize one of the, you know, tons of speed keys that Word provides, uh, which is Alt+Control+Shift+S. Easy enough, right? Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, no problem. I mean, most people in, in Word for Windows anyway, they've, they don't even know how to open up the Styles pane because there's not a button for it. Again, no button for it. But anyway, once you get the Styles pane open, every Word document comes with 247 styles before you do anything. Okay, um, that's 246 more than most people use. Yes. And, and Word is watching over your shoulder in a creepy way, and it, it looks where you are in the document and it applies a style without telling you that it's doing that. And that's the way Word has always worked. So because every paragraph in every Word document and every version of Word has always had a style applied to it, you either learn to control them, or, or they work against you. And, and unfortunately, there's very little gray area in between. Okay. If you don't learn to control styles, you, then you simply can't control Word, because you can't turn off styles. Even if you say, "I hate them and I never want to use them," every paragraph in every document you create is going to have one. And you, those are, you know, you can argue that that is really a, a silly construct, and I'm not going to defend it. Sure. But if you want to control it, you have to just say, "Okay, those are the cards I'm dealt. I got to learn how to get these things to do what I want, or else Word's going to fight me at every turn." And that's exactly what it does. So all I do is, I, I first customize the styles. All you have to do is right-click one and your first option is "Modify." It doesn't matter if you're Word for Windows or Word for Mac. And then there's a little "Format" button at the bottom. And you can see, I can control everything: font, paragraph, tabs, border, language, frame, numbering. All of that is controllable in one thing. Now, to be, now notice, when I click Format, there is a numbering option. Yeah. And unfortunately, that numbering option is 100% useless. You cannot set up paragraph numbering with that numbering option. And this is total, Word, right? Right. Any logical person will look at my screen right now and go, "That's what I click on." And I'm, I'm here to tell you, no, no, no, it's not. Okay. Okay. Instead, instead you have to do this: you go to the multi-level list button, and then you go down to, you don't, and here's another thing, another little rule of Word: you will pick a, a sample from a drop-down list at your peril. And we, we actually encourage people to never pick any sample from any drop-down list anywhere on any button in Word. You're always better off creating your own whatever it is: table of contents, numbering scheme, doesn't matter, headers, footers. So I go down to "Define new list style," I call it "Numbering," and then I go "Format numbering" at the bottom. And now what I do is this: you can see up here it says I got nine levels of numbering. Yep. I click on the first level, and here's the special sauce: "Link level to style." And I simply click the down arrow and link that first level of numbering, uh-huh, in this case to Heading 1. I click on level 2 and I link it to Heading 2, or whatever styles you, holy crap, connect them to. Yeah, but this, and, and here's the other thing: see this little "Less" button? This is how the dialogue normally looks. Uh-huh. You can't even see the ability to link a level of numbering to a style. You have to click this button before you even know that's an option. Typical Microsoft design; they, they're hiding things from you even within a dialogue you manage to find. There's still hidden stuff inside that dialogue. It's really ridiculous. Yeah, yeah. And that's why I will never run out of work training people, and I, to use this program, because it does such an amazing job of hiding everything. So basically you go through and you connect 1:1, 2 to 2, 3 to 3, 4 to 4, however many levels you got. And then when you're done, and then at each one of those levels, down here you can decide: do I get a one, two, three? Roman numerals? Romanets? ABC? Uppercase, lowercase? First, second? One, two, one, one? Bullets? Diamonds? Squares? Circles? Whatever you could possibly want. Uh-huh. I can attach, and I can, and, and they're automatically going to number, letter, whatever it is that you chose. And once that's set up, it, it is really bulletproof. And I, some of the steps necessary to get there, I can't even explain why; I just know that if you do it this way, it will work every single time. And if you skip any of those little weird steps that I don't necessarily have a reason for, it won't work. Yeah. It's like when you're making a recipe, you're like, "That's a weird ingredient; I wonder if I leave it out if it'll be the same?" No, it will not. So put it in there, you know, even if it's a disgusting ingredient like fish sauce, which if you've ever smelled fish sauce, you're like, "That is the most wretched smelling thing I could possibly imagine." Okay, make a Thai recipe and leave it out, and it won't taste the same. Won't taste like it's supposed to, even though that ingredient by itself is, is wretched. If you leave it, if you omit it, it ain't going to work. Word is the same way. Weirdly, I'm using cooking analogies because I'm, I also am a, a cook. So, yeah.
Uh, okay, this, this feels like you're telling me rules to a game that I didn't know existed. Weirdly, funny enough, that's how I actually explain when I'm explaining styles. I literally in the slide deck say, "Rules of styles." And then I've, I've actually, because they're so hard to explain, yeah, I think it's easier to understand in terms of like a rule book. Like, they, the rules, I didn't make up the rules; I'm just explaining the rules. If you abide by the rules, you can control it. And you can't necessarily intuit it your way through it. No, you've got to, you've got to know these rules. So the, the other thing, you know, I, I think of these as like big things that we run into. Um, when, when you set up the, the styles this way and you connect them to the numbering this way, when I delete or add a paragraph, my, I don't have to go and add numbers and, and things. No. Um, so part of style, so as soon as, if you, if you as soon as you apply the style that has numbering, it will, it will format the paragraph the way the style tells it to and apply the numbering and the spacing and every other formatting attribute you might want. It's, well, so you've also got these things in there, and maybe going a little bit too deep here, you got, if people are viewing, um, the video here, they can see places where like 4.1b is, is highlighted automatically updating cross-references. Yeah, talk me through those. Those are cross-references where, so if I delete or put something else in 4.1b or, or something like that, that's going to update. Let's add a new 4.1 and, and a new 4.2. Now that will, that will make all of these references change, and all you have to do is select the document, right-click, and update fields. And as you can see, they now say 4.3 instead of 4.1, yep, and 4.4 instead of whatever it was before. Um, and that's, and it's, it's astonishingly easy to do that. Yeah. As long as the document set, what like, let's say this one right here was, was typed 2.3 and I wanted to make that an automatically updating cross-reference. Watch how it's really easy if the document's already set up right, like most things in Word. I simply go to Insert and I click on the cross-reference button, and it outlines literally the entire document is outlined here. And all I do is pick on 2.3, click Insert, close, and that's it. And now that is obviously a field which will update if I add or delete stuff in between. Now, if I hadn't used automatic paragraph numbering and I clicked on Insert cross-reference, there'd be nothing to link it to. Right. So you, it, it's predicated on you used automatic paragraph numbering, and if so, cross-references that automatically update could not be easier. It is literally click on cross-reference, pick your paragraph, click okay. That's it. Three clicks.
So what this leads to is the, is the, the Big Daddy of all the crap that we run into, I think, um, in formatting: table of contents, table of authorities. Yeah, and, and setting that up. I, in law school, had a document that had a table of authorities in it, and I just would go grab that document every single time I needed the table of authorities. And I, I think I might have set one up new once, but I got that table authorities from my professor and, and it's, it's a pain in the butt, and you can't get the, the periods to go correctly, and then when you change something, so this makes that almost child's play. Yeah, it is. And actually, a table of contents is derived from the styles in the document. So if you know, if I open up a document that, that doesn't have a table of contents but I want to add one, all I have to do is identify which styles or, I guess, what the text looking at this document: I got articles, right? Heading 1 is controlling those. So I want to pull into my table of contents all the text to which Heading 1 is applied, because those are the articles. I also created a style to handle the titles for all the level twos, called "Heading 2 Title." And so I want to pull, I want to create a table of contents comprised of any text to which Heading 1 and Heading 2 Title are applied. With that information, I can simply go to the location where I want to put the table of contents, click on References, and again you get all these choices for tables of contents. These drop-downs, these should never be clicked on, literally never. Okay. Go down to "Custom table of contents," and then you tell it which styles. This is just a list of all the styles in the document, and all I do is I tell it which ones I want to pull into the table of contents, and I put little numbers adjacent to them corresponding to the hierarchy of the table of contents, and I just click "Okay." Okay. And I get a table of contents. Oh my God. I mean, it's, I mean, if I wasn't exp talking while I was doing that, would have taken like less than 10 seconds. Right. And I've got a complete table of contents that also automatically updates if I make any changes to the document. All you have to do is right-click and say "Update field." So like, if I went down here and added a new paragraph, "Fake title," you know, "This is my paragraph," and as long as I apply the style to the title and I come back up to my table of contents and I right-click and update the field, there you can see, up, "Fake title" just got pulled into my table of contents. That's how again crazy easy if the document's set up right; a nightmare if it isn't. Yeah. If you play by the rules, it's, it's they, they let you, uh, they let you through to the finish line.
Um, okay. So before we, before we go, um, first thing you, you teach people, as we said, said at the beginning of this, you teach people how to do this in much longer sessions than we have in, in just this podcast. There's, I, I want to, to make sure you know everybody knows we, we have a lot more there. But, um, pop your screen back up if you, if you don't mind again. Um, that "Heading 2 Title" thing, that is a fascinating style to me because we've all, you know, again run across this. I obviously you've been doing this, um, you know, for, for law, you, you're a lawyer, you know what you're doing here. That is a separately formatted, underlined, bolded word or series of words right after the, you know, the number. These are what you would call run-on headings. So I got a title immediately followed by the rest of the paragraph, but I don't want the rest of the paragraph in my table of contents; I only want the title. Right. And in the, in the old days, and by old days I mean Word 2003 and earlier, you, you basically had to, to fool Word by using this horrible feature called a style separator, which was like a hidden hard return between two separate paragraphs that kind of pulled them together so they, they printed together, but it was really two separate paragraphs. Okay. And it was buggy and hard to explain to people. And so in Word 2007, they came out with this new type of style called a linked, L-I-N-K-E-D, a linked style, which actually you can layer on top of another style. So that's what "Heading 2 Title" is. It's originally the paragraph just looked like this, for example, and I just simply selected the title and then I click on "Heading 2 Title," and because that is a separate style, that's what I, I can pull that into my table of contents. And the other ancillary benefit is, styles, once styles are created and applied to the text, you don't have to touch the text anymore to change how they're formatted. You can, you can reformat the paragraphs by changing the style definition. So for example, if I wanted none of these to be underlined, I don't need to go select 92 titles on, on all these pages. I simply right-click and modify "Heading 2 Title," remove the underline attribute, and click "Okay." Every single paragraph on every single page just lost its underline without me touching anything at all. Yeah. Again, that would have been maybe 10 minutes of selecting and turning it off and selecting and turning it off. I don't have to do any of that. I just right-click, modify, click, click "Okay," and the whole document updates itself literally the second I click "Okay."
Yeah, well, and that kind of highlights the idea that, um, these styles are also kind of inherited from the basic style, so like that, that main paragraph style, if you've, if you're set to, um, you know, Courier New and you want to change everything to Arial, you can go to that main paragraph style. Yeah. Every, there, there's a, there's a foundational style called "Normal," and all of the other styles are based upon Normal. So like in this, in this lease agreement, you know, if I wanted to change, this is currently set up for the font Century Schoolbook 12. Now let's say I wanted to change it all to Times New Roman 11. If I right-click and modify Normal and switch it to Times New Roman 11 and click "Okay," the entire document, every page number, paragraph number, every bit of text, every single thing in this, it all switch, it switched fonts and shrank by one point without me touching a single thing. Like it's, it's perfect. And I, I, I mean, that took what, 10 seconds maybe to do that? Right. Right, man. Yeah.
Okay, so you've made a believer out of me here, Baron. Um, and I, I've, I've done, I got into legal tech through automating things in my office through, you know, doing these automations, making same path for me, my friend, yeah, setting up templates and, a, and, and I would have considered myself pretty savvy, especially with the, the styles and, and all that. Uh, this is, this has really solved a lot of the main automation problems that we run into. Um, even in just that last one, my initial thought was, "Oh, you're going to go, you're going to change this and it's going to be everything is Times New Roman 11," but it wasn't; it changed everything, you know, according to the, to the change, you know, it changed everything appropriately. So I still have paragraph numbers, I still got bold titles, I still got the same point size that I had on those, on those titles, the table of contents. Um, it's, it's kind of like, uh, Normal, the Normal style is the building block for everything else. The Normal style is also the default formatting for every single document that's ever existed. And again, if you look at Word, is there anything to tell you that your default formatting is controlled by some style? No. There's nothing that tells you that. No, no, you just have to, I don't know, divine that through, I don't know, prayer. I'm not sure how one, other, I mean, we figured it out through experimentation, but there's very little information out there about that stuff. And I get emails every day where people say, "I Googled this and couldn't find the answer, so I'm trying you." And, and, and that's, and I'm like, and the reason for that is, the way law firms use Word is wildly different than the way all other industries use Word. Specifically, we need a lot more of it. Right. We use it on a higher level than most other industries. Yeah. And, and, and because we lawyers are a tiny little demographic of the overall installed base of Word, there isn't a lot of help on the web. I mean, you think the web has the answer to everything, and in many cases, it, it just doesn't, because what you're trying to do is so unique and weird to legal that other people don't care about it, don't even know what it is, like a table of authorities, for example. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
Well, I will say, um, now if people do want to go find, uh, the answers to some of these on the web, they can find you on the web. Um, they can find you on LinkedIn, they can find you via email. Um, they can go to the, you know, affinityconsulting.com and, and find you. Where else? What's the easiest way to get a hold of you, Baron?
So they can: Henley@affinityconsulting.com. B-H-N-L-Y@affinityconsulting.com. If I'm awake, I'm connected to email seven days a week, so it doesn't matter. And the reason I say that is because a lot of times people have a Word, you know, an emergency. Yeah, and it's on, you know, it's a Sunday night, I got a brief due Monday morning, I can't get my table of authorities to work. Okay, we're here for you.
Fair enough, fair enough. And we've, man, we've all been in that spot where we're, we're printing and binding and we've got, and we just added the paragraph and all the glue went weird. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Baron, thank you for, for talking to me about this. I, I hope this helps. Well, I know this will help a lot of people. Um, so, it, it, um, I'm going to be using Word a little bit less like a typewriter and hopefully a lot more like, let me know if I can assist. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks Baron. I, I always appreciate talking with you. Yeah.