It's Still Sometimes Hard To Find Something If You Don't Know What It's Called

In doing some formatting of my Math book today, one of the items on my list was "Opening word of each chapter in special style." Vicki and I had talked about this after I published the final AgileMan book (where I didn't use that technique), and I had it in mind to incorporate it into whatever my next book might be. Way back when we originally discussed it, in late 2008, I'd even known what it was called (probably thanks to my lovely wife) and how to do it.

Today, on the other hand, I had no what the name for it was nor how to make it happen. Vicki's out shopping, and so I resorted to Google searching for my answer. Now, it's possible that I'm just really bad at thinking of search criteria, but several minutes of attempts yielded me nothing useful. I then resorted to Help within Word itself, putting in keywords like "chapter first word" or "special intro" but getting nowhere.

Eventually I looked under the "Format" tab in Word, saw something called "Drop Cap" which I didn't recognize, and there it was! But this is yet another example of how difficult it still is, in this day and age, to find something if you don't know its actual name. I experienced this same problem earlier in the week, trying to find out how some players in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 manage to have uniforms that blend into certain backgrounds. I tried "camouflage" and "blend in" and "uniforms" but got nowhere with any of them. Later, I happened upon a reference to a "Ghillie suit" which is actually what they're referred to within the game, and then I had tons of reference material available to me. But without the magic word, it's sometimes difficult to take advantage of our information-rich world. Maybe the next breakthrough in search algorithms will come when the code can accept a little broader set of parameters for what you're trying to track down.