Adapted from Microsoft Small Business Kit by Joanna L. Krotz, John Pierce, and Ben Ryan

A business plan is a highly visible and essential tool for educating and inspiring your team and for selling your business ideas to banks or individual investors who may offer financial backing. Because your business plan will be shared with people who will scrutinize it carefully, you'll want to be sure that its content and appearance reflect favorably on you as a business professional. By using the handy features in Microsoft Office Word 2003, you can easily enhance your business plan document.

Research services

When creating a business plan, you need to formulate a marketing plan. The backbone of a marketing plan is developed through research — whether that includes searching for similar businesses in your city or reading about recent trends in the market segment that you're targeting.

Typically, market research is broken down into primary and secondary market research. Primary market research is the data gathered by you — for example, the number of regional competitors that you determined by conducting a survey. Secondary market research is the data gathered from printed sources — for example, census data and periodical publications such as trade journals. Follow these steps to conduct secondary market research while working within Word by using the Research task pane:

1. To open the Research task pane, click Research on the Tools menu.

   You can also press ALT and click the left or right mouse button.

2. In the Search for box, enter the term you want to research.
3. In the drop-down list box below the Search for box, select the research site or sites that you want to search. Some of the available resources are the following:
   • Encarta Dictionary
   • Encarta Encyclopedia
   • MSN Search
   • Factiva iWorks business search tool (requires that you set up a user name and password)
   • MSN Money stock quotes
   • Thomson Gale company profiles

It's always wise to document your sources, so make sure that you correctly attribute any information you collect online, and confirm whether permission is required to reproduce graphs, drawings, photographs, or similar types of content.

Using styles

Formatting a lengthy Word document by hand can take hours of work. For example, while working on page 38 of your business plan, you decide to change the font for all of your section headings; you will have to scroll through the entire document and make each change manually. Also, manually formatting a lengthy document often results in a document with an inconsistent appearance. For example, one paragraph might be indented five spaces, the next one three.

Rather than format a Word document manually, use Word styles. Styles are a collection of formatting properties that you can apply and maintain simultaneously.

Display your document styles

For the most part, styles are applied to each paragraph in a Word document. An easy way to see which style is applied to a paragraph is to display the document in Normal view and then adjust the width of the style area of the document. To display the styles used in your document, follow these steps:

1. On the View menu, click Normal.
2. On the Tools menu, click Options.
3. In the Options dialog box, click the View tab.
4. In the Style area width box under Outline and Normal options, enter 1".

The style names appear along the left edge of the document.

 Note   You can also view styles by clicking Styles and Formatting on the Format menu or by clicking the Style list on the Formatting toolbar.

To apply a style to a paragraph, select the paragraph, and then choose the style you want from the Style list on the Formatting toolbar or from the list of styles in the Styles and Formatting task pane.

Change the look of a style

Suppose that you want to change the formatting that defines the Normal paragraph style. You want to use a different font, indent the first line of all paragraphs, and reduce the space between each line of text. Follow these steps to quickly change your formatting:

1. To open the Styles and Formatting task pane, click Styles and Formatting on the Format menu.
2. In the Styles and Formatting task pane, right-click Normal in the Pick formatting to apply list, and then click Modify.
3. In the Modify Style dialog box, click the Format button, and then click Font.
4. In the Font dialog box, select the font you want to use, and then click OK.
5. In the Modify Style dialog box, click Format, and then click Paragraph.
6. In the Paragraph dialog box, in the Special list, select First line. In the By box, enter the amount of indentation you want.
7. In the Paragraph dialog box, click the Indents and Spacing tab.
8. In the After box under Spacing, click 6 pt.
9. In the Paragraph dialog box, click OK.
10. In the Modify Style dialog box, click OK.

The new attributes of the Normal style are now applied to each paragraph.

Following these steps is a lot less work than changing each paragraph individually and also helps keep the look of the document consistent. You can follow steps similar to these to change other styles and formatting within a document.

 Note   If you want to create a style of your own, open the Style and Formatting task pane and then click New Style. In the New Style dialog box, enter a style name and then define the properties of the style, such as font, font size, and line spacing.

More tips for your professional documents

After working through the business plan template, be sure to attend to some behind-the-scenes details before distributing your business plan as a printed document or as an e-mail attachment.

Headers and footers

Make sure that you update the information for page headers and footers — the text that appears at the top or bottom of each page. Your options include changing the format of the pagination or inserting additional text — your company's name, for example, or the label "Confidential" if you're disclosing information that you want people to treat with discretion.

To work with document headers and footers, on the View menu, click Header and Footer. Use the Header and Footer toolbar to modify or insert the information you want to include.

Page breaks

Be mindful of how the text falls on the pages of your business plan document. For example, ideally you wouldn't want to split a table across two pages, and you wouldn't want the title of the next section to appear by itself at the bottom of a page.

You can use the Line And Page Breaks tab in the Paragraph dialog box to control how Word paginates your document. For example, you can prevent a page break from occurring within a paragraph.

To set the ways in which Word paginates your business plan document, click Paragraph on the Format menu, and then click the Line and Page Breaks tab. Here's a list of the options you have:

• Widow/Orphan control   If you choose this option, Word doesn't print the last line of a paragraph by itself at the top of a page (a widow) or the first line of a paragraph by itself at the bottom of a page (an orphan).
• Keep lines together   This option keeps Word from inserting a page break within a paragraph.
• Keep with next   Select this option if you don't want a page break between a paragraph you selected and the paragraph that follows it.
• Page break before   If you choose this option, Word inserts a page break before the paragraph you selected.

Use these handy tools in Word, and you'll be able to devote more time sharpening the quality of the information you provide about your business, rather than spending valuable time manually formatting your document.

About the authors   Adapted from Microsoft Small Business Kit by Joanna L. Krotz, John Pierce, and Ben Ryan. Visit Microsoft Learning to learn more about this book and its authors.