Direct Response Business writing is different to ordinary business writing, which is why I decided to share this mini series of tips for stopping the hair-tearing frustration when working with Microsoft Word.

These 8 tips share insights to how to get your page looking exactly the way you want it to

1) Start a new page by pressing Ctrl + Enter not by pressing the enter key until Word starts a new page for you. Doing it this way means that any additional text you add before your page break does not push your text further down the next page.

2) Add a border to your page when creating an Order Form (See my article: Direct Mail Campaigns: 10 Rules to Creating Your Magnetic, Irresistible Order Form).

From the menu: Format, Borders and Shading. On the Page Border tab explore the Art options in the Style section.

3) Use leader tabs to make it easier to read columns of tabbed text. A leader tab enters a dotted, dashed or continuous line leading up to the tabbed position.

From the menu: Format, select Tabs, type a position for the tab and choose a Leader style.

4) Create the underlines on an order form using an underlining leader tab. See the previous tip.

5) Balance the gap between a page border and the text:

From the menu: Format, Borders and Shading. On the Page Border tab use the Options button to set the Margins and the 'Measure from' setting.

6) Balance columns of text on a page. Insert a continuous section break at the end of the last column of text:

From the menu: Insert, Break, Section and then Continuous.

7) Add page Numbers. From the menu: Insert, Page Numbers. Select the style and position you want.

8) Set the page numbering to start at 1.

In books or reports, where you have a table of contents at the beginning, you may want to start the page numbering on the first page following the contents page.

First you must have a section break:

From the menu: Insert, Break, Section and choose Next Page.

On the page where you want to restart the page numbering:

From the menu: Insert, Page Numbers, Format. Select Start at. Click OK, THEN Click on CLOSE. If you click OK you may upset any headers/footers you have created

Bonus Tip: If you are creating a form using the tables feature in Word and want the table to be as close to the bottom of the page as possible, you get a blank page following the one containing your table. This is because a table always has an empty line following it and, because theres no room on that page, it automatically creates another.

You can get rid of the page very easily, Click to the left of the empty line at the top of the empty page. You get a black box where youve selected the invisible paragraph marker.

Click on the font size box, type the figure 2 in the box and press the enter key. The font is set so tiny that it fits on the page under the table and the empty page disappears.

In the other articles in this mini-series I share another 17 tips:

* Preparing Word How to Stop Word being bossy and taking over your document.

* Keyboard shortcuts (some well known, others not so well known) to save you time.

* Creating Contents lists; quick tips for spell checking and hyphenation.

* Paragraph numbering and spacing (Including how to stop your numbers and bullets disappearing when you want a line gap between paragraphs!)