The Making of the DACHS Christmas Family Recipes Using Onstyle
The DACHS Presents: Christmas Family Recipes, published December 10 on LinkedIn in addition to being a significant document driven by love and camaraderie, was facilitated by using the Word add-in OnStyle.
I present here, step-by-step, how the Recipe Book was created by my colleague Szilárd Németh and how OnStyle facilitated this noble endeavor.
Upon solicitation of DACHS employees for their holiday recipes, Szilárd collected over 30 family recipes along with some pictures and anecdotal family experiences.?These recipes were first downloaded and then translated from Hungarian, and each was made into it’s own Word document. As these were provided as many different types of communications, this was not a trivial task! Many types of formatting, inconsistent fonts, font sizes, styles and list formats needed to be resolved.?
These recipes were then assembled by copying and pasting into one central document, which would ultimately become the final Recipe Book. The recipes were then characterized and then organized by categories such as Soups, Mains, Desserts, and Sides, and appropriate headings and sub-headings were applied. An example of what the recipes looked like before headings were applied is provided below. Sender/chef names and recipe sources were added as well.
At this point, the document, although in the final sequence/organization of recipes, still contained many different text styles and formats, and this would require a lot of time and effort to conform the Book into a common style and structure. This is where OnStyle makes a difficult task quite easy!
DocConfig Transformation
Szilárd made a copy of the document and then applied a DocConfig to the copy.? An OnStyle DocConfig stores collections of predefined formatting standards for fonts, styles, or table formats. When the DocConfig was applied to the Recipe Book, OnStyle imported stored styles and configures or “transforms” the document based on the stored rules and standards. The margins and pages sizes are all now uniform, with no overhanging pictures and lines.
Paragraph Styles
The paragraph styles in the Book were all in Normal style, and each individual recipe had different types of direct formatting.
This was addressed using the Convert Style function of OnStyle. This easy-to-use tool replaces and conforms styles according to a user-specified mapping: set a rule to convert all normal style to paragraph style.? The dialog box below shows how this is easily applied.
This OnStyle function, when applied to the Recipe Book, found and converted 413 instances of inappropriate paragraph formatting.? This would have taken a writer a lot of time to complete if done manually.? See below.
Now all paragraphs look very neat and uniform, but more issues with the document were apparent.
Heading styles
The Christmas meal course categories (i.e. Soups, Mains, etc.) should not be the food names, as it is now, but should be subheadings.? In addition, these should not be numbered, as they are now. OnStyle again provides an easy method to accomplish this task efficiently and quickly. Using the Convert Style function in OnStyle again, Szilárd set the cascading rule to convert all current Heading 1-s to Heading 2 NoNum (Not Numbered) and convert Heading 2-s to Heading 3 NoNum-s and so forth. As a result, now all headings look great: there are no numbered headings anymore and no Heading 1-s. In addition, the food categories were set to Heading 1 NoNum (soup, main, etc...) using the quick buttons on the OnStyle toolbar. Some minor adjustments were also performed at this point, such as removing any underlined formatting.
Pictures
Our DACHS colleagues were kind enough to provide beautiful illustrative photographs of their festive creations. Using Word’s Picture Format tool, all pictures in the document were set to 10cm width.
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Lists
Ingredients and Preparation portions of most recipes are in the form of lists. As expected, these lists have been provided by our colleagues in vastly different styles; or formatted (not formatted?) in no style at all (i.e. Just a paragraph). These were all updated to Standard Lists using the OnStyle quick button for Lists.
Validation and QC
All text in the Recipe document looked great, or so Szilárd thought. Onstyle provided a Validation Report based on the executed inspection module/group/set validation results. This takes a critical look at all requested inspections.
To his surprise, he found that almost 800 issues needed to be addressed!
See what this Report looks like below.
These issues found upon Validation, although they seem plentiful, are easily and quickly addressed using OnStyle:
The validation inspections and all these 8 steps together took a mere 10 to 15 minutes to accomplish using Onstyle!
Now the document is correct from a technical standpoint.
Decoration
It's now time to decorate!!
The first page illustrations were created by Szilárd using Canva. The background for the interior pages of the Recipe Book was designed in Canva as well.
Table of Contents
For the finishing touch, Szilárd easily added a TOC using OnStyle.
As a medical writer, I am very impressed at both the content and the appearance of this endeavor. This truly illustrates the ease and utility of OnStyle for document formatting according to a set guideline.
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About the author:
Neal Azrolan, PhD, MBA has been involved in medical writing since 1996, as a PhD graduate student at New York University. Much of his manuscript and grant writing was as an Assistant Professor at The Rockefeller University. As a researcher, he has written over 60 clinical manuscripts, as well as over 80 posters as a named author. He has also participated in both labelling and Agency submissions as a lead medical writer. As such, he has experience using several Word add-ons, including OnStyle. Besides having a passion for writing non-fiction, medical text and poetry, Neal is also a musician and enjoys playing saxophone in The Whitehouse Wind Symphony [1], as well as writing music for and performing with The Central Jersey Saxophone Quartet. [2]