One of our company’s first projects was to edit and format the strategic plan of a telco spun out of AT&T (the planning group wanted to display forward-thinkingness by using the then-new technology of desktop-publishing). We devised a business-like layout with sideheads (headlines in the left margin), that we’ve updated from time to time for desktop publishing projects. But we haven’t used it for a few years, and I had forgotten about it until one of our clients sent us a white paper, handsomely formatted with sideheads.
I thought it might be helpful to pass along a method for making sideheads in Microsoft Word. This is adapted from an approach posted in 2002 to the MS Word Pagelayout Group by the estimable Word MVP Suzanne Barnhill.
Set the margins
Sideheads go in the margin, so we need a wide left margin. Something like this should do.
Create the sidehead in a frame
You’ll need to have the forms toolbar available (right-click in the toolbars and select “Forms”). Type your headline, select it, and click the “Insert Frame” button.
To compensate we make the space before 24pt. Get it? Neither do I, really. But it works. Wasn’t that fun? You may reasonably ask, Why don’t you just use tables? Well, it’s harder keep page breaks in order, for one thing, and you can lose year’s off your life coping with Word’s preference for selecting whole cells instead of paragraphs .Format the sidehead
Right-click the shaded frame boundary and choose “Format frame.” Give it a width and put it on the left margin, as shown, by setting its position relative to the page.
At this point, things get a little confusing. The sidehead gets its vertical position from the style of the paragraph it was extracted from (Body Text 2 in this case, which has 36 pts of built-in space before), and from the style of the paragraph immediately preceding (BigItalic, with 12 pts of built-in space after).
Besides paragraph space, the sidehead will need a distinctive headline font. You’ll also probably want to get rid of the border. Choose ” Borders and Shading” from the Format menu to do that.
Once you’ve got it looking pretty much the way you want it, assign the format to a heading level (I use heading 1 for level 1 subheads). This keeps you from having to go through this rigmarole next time you want a sidehead.
Here are the style attributes. Note that there is a style set for the following paragraph. This way, as soon as you type a carriage return in the sidehead, the cursor moves into the lead paragraph of the section.