Module Creation of Topics Introductory Material

Module Creation of Topics Introductory Material is a help class for those who are working in theWord module creation, and transferring works from other formats to theWord.

Introduction

What do we do with the introductory material of a book. Definitely we do not want to delete it, we want to pass it over to the module we create for that book. But here we have the title, the table of contents, the preface(s), the introduction(s), etc. I have seen up to 5 of these element all in their own chapters or topics in theWord.

The question is, do we combine all of that material into one single topic?, and what do we name it?, or do we make them independent topics. On the one hand, it doesn’t matter. There is a possibility of messing up the chapter numbering if you give each one of those a chapter number (1 through 5 say) then the first “real” chapter (chapter 1) would have the name 6, or something like this, “06 Chapter 1”. Again the problem is what number is that topic?

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But there is another consideration. When you actually use theWord (which I question whether the people making all these extra chapter ever use intensively theWord), when you use it, what happens? For example, you want a work on the Atonement. You search “atonement” in the topics only, and you start getting results of “Introduction” “Table of Contents”, “Preface 1” “Preface 2” etc. These topic names are not helpful. You have to look into each one to see if that is what you want.

My Rule of Thumb

So my take on this (my rule) is that all of that material should disappear into a single topic named “Author Title”. That will tell you enough that you can decide whether you want to go there or not.

There is a very nasty problem of not seeing very much of the actual module in the little windows we have on our computers. Worse yet is if you use a laptop. This is not a problem of theWord (you can maximize that pane or panel in theWord to see more), but our physical setup (screen size that we can afford).

So as a module creator, we should focus on making things as easy and visible as possible for the end user.

Introduction

My Rule of Thumb

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