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Pros and Cons of Microsoft Office 365 for Proposal Writers
Real-time co-authoring and online comments make the Web version of Microsoft Word a great tool for collaborating with SMEs and Reviewers. But sparsity of features makes it untenable as a ...
2 Great Word-to-Email Commands You Never Heard Of
Microsoft Word has commands you may never have heard of, since they don't appear on any Ribbons. In this post we will look at two of these little known commands that make it easy to share ...
Custom Styles 101 for Proposal Writers – 4 Reasons Why Custom Styles Fail
Almost half of our Styles Survey Respondents reported that ‘Direct Formatting’ was their most common method of changing formatting AFTER inserting content into a proposal. Direct Formatting is ...
Custom Styles 101 for Proposal Writers – The Secret Power of Heading Styles
Most of the respondents to our Styles Survey report using Custom Styles to format proposals. But even among avid Custom Style users, the proper use of Custom Heading Styles is debated. Here is ...
Custom Styles 101 for Proposal Writers – Creating a Custom Style
Twice as many of our Style Survey Respondents report that they use Custom Styles for their reusable proposal content than those who do not. If you create your styles correctly, formatting your ...
Custom Styles 101 for Proposal Writers – What is a Style?
Almost 50% of our Styles Survey respondents who report NOT using Custom Styles cite not understanding how as the primary reason. Styles are easier than you think and well worth the time ...
Set an Expiration Date for Reusable Proposal Content
Once you have created a Library of Reusable Proposal Content, you should next give some consideration to how you will keep track of updates to the content. This is especially challenging if ...
Fields and Links and Controls, Oh My!
In a previous post we looked at using Word's built-in Find and Replace functionality to customize our proposal content. In that example, we used simple highlighted text to serve as ...
Searching Text in Old Proposal Documents Without Opening Each One
Have you ever needed to find something you had written in an earlier proposal but had no idea where to find it? Being able to search across multiple proposals has been a frequently requested ...
Sample Content Library Structures
In the previous post we used distinctively formatted labels to organize the content in a master ‘Content Library’ document. In this post we will look at some sample Main Category and Subcategory ...
Four Steps to Perfectly Organized Content
In an earlier series of posts we looked at how to make reusable content 'Copy-Paste ready' Now we can focus on organizing it in a way that will help us find the content we need easily, and make ...
The Reasons Why You Need a Content Library
In the olden days (say 20 years ago) there were very few software solutions for storing reusable proposal content. Ours –the RFP Machine– was one of the first. Now there are many, many solutions ...
Generic-ize or Customize: The Secret to Foolproof Placeholders
Almost everyone has their own embarrassing story to tell about copying content from an old proposal or sales letter and inadvertently leaving in the old customer name.
Needless to say we want ...
Quick Tips for Spotting Formatting Booby Traps
In the previous post we compared the advantages of using Normal style to those of using custom, user-defined styles.
With either strategy it is important that styles be applied consistently ...
Normal or Not? Choosing the Best Style Strategy
When you are preparing content for reuse, your formatting decisions will affect how easy or difficult it will be every time you copy and paste that content in the future. You can avoid many ...
Turning Code Off and On
In a previous post we wrote a ‘SpecialPaste’ macro to paste content from the clipboard into a numbered questionnaire and select and indent the content after it is pasted:
This macro indents ...
Innovation & Excellence…
Teams do extraordinary things with Expedience Software
I used several proposal software applications and knew the importance of ease of use. Many of the proposal apps are so complicated that users revolt against the system. Expedience is the easiest proposal automation software that I’ve ever used, and our proposal writers actually love using it!
Vice President of Marketing
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