Professional Looking Word Documents

I've seen a lot of Word documents in the course of my professional existence.

Problem is, most of them are poorly done. Some of the major mistakes I see:

1. Misspellings
2. Misused words, malapropisms, and inappropriate tenses ("the bird flapped it's wings" is incorrect; the correct phrasing is "the bird flapped its wings"; "disinterested" means impartial, not that you don't care)
3. Incorrect page numbers
4. Missing pages
5. Inconsistent use of fonts, sizes, and markup

The thing I find really puzzling is that most of these are so easily avoided.

So I'd like to offer a couple of best practices to make long documents really work in Microsoft Word. Some of them will sound like findings straight from the University of Duh, while, hopefully, others will be from the University of Aha!

1. Use styles consistently for your headers. Use at least two levels - the first level is the chapter name, the second level is the sub-topic under the chapter. Longer documents may require a third or fourth level of heading. You make the call - does the document justify it? I've done training for federal government and private sector organizations dealing with some fairly complex regulatory information, and four levels of header is not unheard of. Look at your subject matter.
2. Make an absolute religion out of using sections. Make your title page one section, your TOC another section, and each chapter in your document its own section. If you have an index (which you really should), make that its own section.
3. As mentioned in #2, you should have a TOC, an index, and a title page.
4. In the header for Chapter 1, go to View->Header and Footer. Then, go to Format->Borders and Shading. Put a border on the bottom, and apply it to the paragraph. Make the header contain the chapter title. In Chapter 2, and each successive chapter, go to View->Header and Footer. Click on the button that says "Same as Previous" to break the link between Chapter 2 and the previous section. The good news is that the border stays, but the chapter name can be different for each chapter.
5. In the footer, just keep the page number. Let that be consistent throughout the document, with the exception of the TOC and the title page. If you want, you can have the TOC and any other supplementary information (acknowledgements, copyright information, stuff like that) be all one section, and have the page numbering be Roman (i, ii, iii) instead of Arabic (1,2,3).
6. I would recommend using Next Page section breaks instead of Odd Page or Even Page section breaks. Odd and Even Page section breaks really only work if you're willing to have the page be COMPLETELY blank, devoid even of a page number. If you want a blank page at the end with the header and footer information, I'd use page breaks, rather than odd or even page section breaks; that way, I have more control over the document.
7. Indexes are a good idea if the reader is going to use your document primarily to look for specific terms, rather than read through a concept. If that's the case, a well-developed index will save your reader hours of time. Granted, it'll take us writers some time, but so what? We're here to serve the needs of our readers. End of discussion.
8. Small thing, but one that annoys the living daylights out of me: If you're going to use images (figures, illustrations, photos, etc) make sure they're high quality. Nothing says "I don't care what you think, Thou Reader" (thank you Walt Whitman) like a crappy image you downloaded off of someone's website and then (gasp!) enlarged. Just don't do it. Don't strain your readers eyes that way, and don't destroy your professional credibility in the first place. Get a good source image you can downsample, and go from there.
9. As far as images go, one other point - ClipArt and WordArt rarely if ever look professional and clean. You're better off not risking it.
10. Keep your markup to a minimum. Use bold and italics sparingly. Don't use sparkle text at all. Don't ever use underline, unless it's to reference a website.

Remember, above all, that your document is for the reader. Make it work for them, not for you. That's priority #1.