1 First of all before you start writing any scientific document you should first ponder over its content and come up with approximate structure. You should not plan it in all details, the structure can be easily altered during your work on the document, but you must have some structure to begin your writing. Besides, it is a good psychological approach to go off and start writing with the structure, for it obliges you to nothing.

2 If you don't know how to start planning your document's structure I would recommend you just to take a pen or pencil and a sheet of paper and just outline some parts the document must contain. You can try to arrange these parts in a sort of multi-level list dividing your document into sections, chapters, subchapters and even smaller parts. Don't write any text now, just designate your logical parts with a story-telling title so you can easily remember afterwards what you intended to have here.

3 It is important now what you decide whether you would like to house all parts of your manuscript in a single document or rather split it up into several independent subdocuments you can work on separately (and let other people work!).

4 Let's switch to Word 2007 and try to implement the structure of a sample scientific document.

8 Though it might be not so usual to learn elements from right to the left, I would like first to draw your attention to the huge red button with white St. Andrew's cross on top of it. This button will return you to your normal document view, you'll see this button on several other ribbons not only in Word and this is usually the first button I am looking for if I occasionally pressed something that rearranged my ribbons.

Then you have two main ribbon areas, one for Master Document and one for Outline Tools. Let's skip the Master Document part for some time, we'll come back to it just in several minutes, and concentrate on the Outline Tools.

9 Outline Tools contains two parts separated by a bevel, the left part allows us to define and adjust the levels of our captions throughout the document and the order of the captions, whereas the right part contains the control elements to change the visibility settings so we can see our document at a certain level of abstraction.

So let's begin planning our document!

11 As long as your document grow you start gradually to face two different problems.
The first one is that you may loose the outlook over your document if you get into very fine details and here you should use the visibility options on the right side of the Outline Tools. Here you can confine the maximal visible level, to choose not to use styles in this view and to have only the first line of every paragraph of your normal text. That's more than enough for you to quickly collapse your structure to one page outlook.

The second problem you might face from the beginning on is that your file may grow tremendously as you add multimedia content like images, sketches, audio etc. to it. Big files are difficult to handle, they take longer to open and to save, including the auto-save in background and taking the constant risk of lost data your stakes are much higher in case of a single big file. That's why it may sound reasonable to split that file into several sub-files, which may be edited and stored separately.

In order to do it just click the Show Document. If you have no child documents embedded into your master document so far then you can just proceed next, otherwise you have to click Expand Subdocuments for your subdocuments to be automatically displayed as a part of your master document.

Now you can just select a part of your document you would like to extract into an external document file and click on Create. A new embedded document will be automatically created (but not saved until you save your master document). You can also insert an already existing file into your document by clicking Insert.

Further on, you can split subdocuments if they menace to grow too big or merge them if their size remains modest.

You can undo your splitting at any time by clicking on Unlink. This somewhat contra-intuitive button will just merge the content of your subdocument located in an external file into master document, so there will be no more child document (even though the caption structure should remain preserved).

12 Working with subdocuments is in no way different as working with a single document.  Even more, in the usual document view (Draft of Print Layout) you won't notice any markers indicating the begin and end of your subdocument, except for the Continous Section Break. So, any changes done in the master document are automatically propagated to you child documents and vice versa, the if you manually open any of the child documents (you can do it by double-clicking on the document icon in the Outline view) the changes will be as well back-propagated to the master document.

Do not worry if you see absolute links in the document. By absolute I mean the links which contain the full path to the document. You can easily move your document to any new location and open it without any hazard of breaking its consistency: the links are stored internally as relative to the master document and as soon as you keep all your documents in one folder or just preserve your folder structure for complex documents your links will be automatically corrected on document open and shown in the form of an absolute path.

13 This concludes the first part of the learning series "Scientific Writing with Word 2007". See you soon!