The WMF Archives

By Kerrie McLoughlin

Recently I wrote about my ebook creation journey and admitted that I had used PowerPoint for the text of the first version and that it was a formatting nightmare. Fellow WM Freelance Connection blogger Alyssa Ast was curious about what problems occurred when I used PowerPoint for the text of my ebooks.
I’m glad she asked because it made me rethink how I had done things, and I switched my ebook to Microsoft Word format for the second edition of Get Published in Regional Parenting Magazines. This made my life easier for a number of reasons:
1. Changing the margins (something buyers wanted me to do so they could print and three-hole-punch the book) was a snap, and in Word the page breaks fell in natural places*. In contrast, after I changed my margins in PP words just fell off the page and into space and would have to be cut and pasted onto the next page.

2. Buyers also wanted me to put the ebook in a smaller font so they wouldn’t have to use so many pages to print it. Changing the font from 18-point to 14-point in Word again found page breaks falling naturally. Individual text boxes in PP made changing fonts a tedious process.

3. The margins are static in Word, as opposed to PP where you have to try to line up text boxes exactly the same from page to page.

4. Bullets and PP text boxes do not mix as far as text lining up underneath the first word of each bulleted point.

5. I also like how Word has the option for me to view the document with the dots for spaces between words (the toolbar button with the paragraph mark on it) so I could quickly tell if I had 1 or 2 spaces between words and sentences.

6. I thought Word would be hard to work with when I needed to pop in a sample invoice or sample e-mail message box, but it proved to be the opposite.
*Of course on some pages (where only one or two lines of writer’s guidelines were on a page alone) I had to do a Control+Enter to make a hard page break.
I’m always happy to answer any questions you might have about ebooks. I’m still learning the best way to produce ebooks, so I also welcome constructive criticism and other feedback.

Using Microsoft Word Versus PowerPoint for Ebook Creation