Ghost in the machine?

Greetings, I am a full-time writer with (soon to) be eighteen novels in print. The first five were handled by a mainstream publisher, after which I joined a cooperative with other writers. We founded our own house and support each other with critique but publish independently. When submitting the first few titles I used OpenOffice with relative ease, but the programme lacks a lot of the (brilliant) features of Word 365 so I moved across about four years ago. And since then there have been problems with every launch.

To cite my most recent experience, I have created my own template for paperback editions of my work. This contains the front matter which, apart from title, copywrite dates and a few other details, remains consistent. I copy and paste the fresh m.s. into this, and that part is usually fine, but yesterday not so. Whatever paste settings were used, I could not retain styles from the doner manuscript unless I were prepared to override page margins from the template. The one paste setting that allowed this also knocked out any italics in the text.

So I tackled the problem in reverse by adjusting a copy of the master document to the necessary parameters (margins) of the template, then pasted the front matter from this. That worked to some extent, although section breaks/page numberings were lost. (The front matter has to be in a separate section to allow page numbering on what is effectively page 7 to start at page one.) It’s a long time since I’ve had to do this, and reading the online instructions seemed straight forward, but the practice proved otherwise, and it took several repetitions of the same process before the correct result was achieved.

I then went to edit the text for widows and orphans. I use three style sheets, one for text, one for mid chapter breaks (* * *) and one for chapter and other headings. For some reason entire sections of the text style was in 1.5 lines and left aligned, whilst others were single spaced and justified, (as specified in the style). Even when the curser was on the erroneous text, the correct settings were shown, but the text seemed to take no notice and I had to adjust each manually.

At one point it also became impossible to close/save the file; the curser on the top band (File, Home, Insert, Draw etc) simply would not register on Home or File. I had to abort, but fortunately the changes held. And there were strange messages on the lines of Autosave will not work as there are foreign elements in the file. I think I found these – some of the carriage return ikons in the main text had turned red – I deleted and replaced with nice new black ones but have no idea why they changed in the first place.

In short, setting up the inner text fine was a nightmare, and always is. The same sort of problems have occurred on other occasions – once phantom white pages kept being created when the docx file was converted to PDF – something that took Microsoft remote help nearly two hours to rectify (and when they had, they remained as mystified as me as to the cause). On another occasion some of the highlighting became embedded and could only be removed by using the format painter. Such horrors seem to be compulsory and have followed me through the last few books and two different laptops – the current being a powerful Thinkpad.

Whatever, I trust all has been sorted now – the proof copy arrives tomorrow – but frankly I am getting tired of this yearly assault course on my nerves. I use Word (and many other programmes) throughout the year; it is just when it comes to submitting a book that these seemingly random faults occur. I’d be very happy to accept responsibility, and would welcome any recommendations for a solid manual that does not assume prior knowledge (as per the user help) although the problems always seem to be different.

I am alone in this; my fellow writers mainly use Macs; those that don’t seem very happy with OpenOffice. Consequently, I may be forced to the ludicrous solution of using Word, with its excellent features, for general/creative work, then copying to an OpenOffice file when it comes to submission.