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I’m definitely disappointed that I wasn’t able to finish my report by Monday, although I did get a late draft version in the hands of a few readers for feedback.

In any case, the content is finished, and it’s time to format the report. This is something you can easily send to a VA, but if you’re handy around Microsoft Word, formatting can be done quite quickly. Don’t spend too much time on it, but you do want your report to look a little better than something you wrote in high school.

Most formatting is done simply by working on the text sizes and fonts. You want the text to be easy to read and skim. When you write reports that will be read as PDFs (i.e., on the computer screen), you want to use a sans-serif font. Serifs are those ticks at the start and end of a letter that help readers in print, but can get fuzzy on the screen.

• Times New Roman is a serif font.
• Arial is a sans-serif font.

See the difference?

You also want to break your report into short sections with subheadings. Make the subheadings interesting because they will also go into your Table of Contents automatically. If you have a hierarchy of information, I suggest you use 2-3 levels of subheadings.

The next big tip I can give you about formatting your report is to use the styles feature of Word or Open Office. This makes it easy to have a uniform look throughout your report, and make quick adjustments if you change your mind.

For example, make sure all the paragraphs have the “normal” style, and then if you want to change the font, you can just edit the style.

The headings should be set to “Heading 1″, “Heading 2″, “Heading 3″ (in order of importance). Again, you can adjust the size of each one from the format styles feature in the edit menu, and the changes will instantly update to all the headings.

After you set your headings, I suggest you add a table of contents at the beginning of your report. This will pull in all the headings automatically. If you edit further, you’ll need to update the table or your numbers will be off for your readers.

You can also add graphics if you can. Using screen shots of a website you are reviewing is one easy way to add visual elements. You can also use pictures from sites like iStockPhoto in your report for a professional touch.

The final formatting to do is to make sure you have correctly linked to websites you are discussing in the report. Make sure you make it the default that the links open in a new window so your reader doesn’t lose the report if they are reading in a web browser.

After making the original report, I’ll then go back in and change the links to the code for rebranding. But the first version of the report will be for my own distribution.

With the formatting done, I can move on to publishing the report and getting it online for people to download.

Bob Jenkins

p.s. If you’d like more visual explanation of how to format your report, be sure to check out the Discover Product Creation videos available to Gold and Platinum members inside IM Success Library.

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