Make Insert Key Do Something Useful

09/04/07

Recovering Corrupt Word Documents

21/03/07

Reader’s Tip -- Label Printing In Word

24/11/06

Bizarre Borders In Word

I am probably doing you no favours by telling you this but Word has a little-known feature that lets you make your letters look really yucky (or delightful, depending on your point of view...). You can, for instance, surround your carefully crafted words with little ice-cream cones, Christmas trees, Cherries or cream cakes.  Please don’t do it, or at least do not send any disastrously decorated documents in my direction but if you want to know how it’s done, purely out of academic interest, then go to Format > Borders and Shading and click the Page Border tab. At the bottom of the dialogue box there’s a drop-down menu labeled simply ‘Art’ click the down-arrow and you’ll see what’s available in all of its ghastliness. Incidentally, I’m sure you know this but you’ll only see the border when Word is in Page or Pint Layout View

13/11/06

High Visibility Word Icons

Even those with 20-20 vision can have trouble with the icons in Toolbar Microsoft Word. They’re pretty small to begin with but they becoming increasingly indistinct on larger screens at higher resolutions so if you find your self squinting or switching to precision mouse mode to avoid mis-clicking then try this simple little tweak.

Right click into an empty part of the toolbar, click Customize then select the Options tab. Under Other check the item ‘Large Icons’ and the toolbar icons will double or even triple in size, depending on your screen settings. Finally click Close to exit the Customize dialogue box. One point to watch out for, this change affects all MS Office programs, so be prepared to see some big icons in Excel, Outlook and so on.

02/11/06

Word Backup Macro

My recent travails with Microsoft Word left me with what was effectively a new installation and I quickly discovered that one of most frequently used features was missing. It’s a macro, called Allsave and I have relied on it for at least the past seven or eight years to make regular backups of the document I’m working on. In days gone by they were sent to a floppy, nowadays they go to a UDF formatted CD-R, which works just like a giant floppy. Fortunately I kept a record of the macro, so for anyone who is interested here it is again:

To install it all you have to do is go to Tools > Macro > Macros in the Name box type Allsave then click the Create button. The Word Basic window opens and you will see a flashing cursor after the words 'Sub' (and before the word End Sub), copy and paste the following commands:

Sub Allsave()

'

' Allsave Macro

Dim Pathroute

Pathroute = ActiveDocument.FullName

ChangeFileOpenDirectory "D:\"

ActiveDocument.SaveAs FileName:=ActiveDocument.Name, FileFormat:= _

wdFormatDocument, LockComments:=False, Password:="", AddToRecentFiles:=True, _

WritePassword:="", ReadOnlyRecommended:=False, EmbedTrueTypeFonts:=False, _

SaveNativePictureFormat:=False, SaveFormsData:=False, SaveAsAOCELetter:= _

False

ChangeFileOpenDirectory "C:\"

ActiveDocument.SaveAs FileName:=Pathroute, FileFormat:= _

wdFormatDocument, LockComments:=False, Password:="", AddToRecentFiles:=True, _

WritePassword:="", ReadOnlyRecommended:=False, EmbedTrueTypeFonts:=False, _

SaveNativePictureFormat:=False, SaveFormsData:=False, SaveAsAOCELetter:= _

False

StatusBar = ActiveDocument.Name & " saved in active directory and on backup drive"

End Sub

In this example the backup drive letter is D: if yours has another assignment simply change the letter in the line: ‘ChangeFileOpenDirectory "D:\"

To assign the macro a button on the toolbar (or keyboard shortcut) click on Customize on the Tools menu, select the Commands tab, scroll down the list in the left hand window and click on Macros.

13/10/06

Draw Vertical Line in front of Text

12/10/06

When Word Goes Bad -- Some Helpful Hints

Having just spent the best part of a day wrestling with a corrupt copy of Microsoft Word I thought I would pass on a few things I’ve learned from the experience. I’m still not sure what the fault was, it finally disappeared after the third reinstall and a System Restore but one thing I wish I had done was to have made regular backups of the ‘normal.dot’ document template file. This contains all of your Word preferences, macros, AutoText entries and so on. I did have a backup but it was well over a year old and lacked the many changes I had made in the intervening period.

In XP you will find your normal.dot file in C:\Documents and Settings\<yourname>\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates. Copy it now, whilst Word is working properly, keep it in a safe place and resolve to update your backup every few weeks or months, depending how much you use and tinker with Word settings.

Tip number 2, when Word goes bad it does so spectacularly and rather than waste hours trying to fix it -- like I did -- just make sure your document backups are safe, then uninstall. Before you reinstall rename your existing normal.dot file to 'normal.old'. When you reinstall Word a new normal.dot will be created and you can tell straight away if the problem lies with Word, or normal.dot.

11/10/06

Revealing Word’s Hidden Secrets

As you may know Microsoft Word documents are not always what they seem. They can contain a wealth of hidden information and every so often this forgotten privacy and security flaw is forgotten as someone -- usually a smart journalist -- disassembles and finds something embarrassing inside a Word document sent to them on disc or in an email. There are several different types of data concealed in documents and one of the easiest to remove is Metadata. This contains information about you, your PC, document revisions, comments and all sorts of other things. If you are using Word 2000 you should read Microsoft KB article 237361 for Word 2003 users the place to go is KB 825576.

Your documents could also be concealing Field Codes and links so you might want to have a look at a little freeware add-on called the Hidden File Detector. This adds a new command to the Tools menu, and when you’ve finished work on a document, simply click on ‘Detect Hidden Files’ and you’ll see straight away is there’s anything lurking between the lines that shouldn’t be there.

21/09/06

Comment Using the Spoken Word

If you use Microsoft Word then you may be aware of the Comment facility that lets you add helpful notes to your documents, but you may not have spotted a little extra facility, for embedding ‘spoken’ comments. It’s really easy to do and all you need is a microphone connected to your PC. Open your document and click the mouse on the spot where you want the Comment to appear, now go to Insert > Comment and on the split frame toolbar that appears beneath your document, click the tape cassette icon. (in later versions of Word got to Inert > Comment and select Voice Comment from the drop-down menu). This opens the Windows Sound Recorder utility, click the Record button, say your piece and press Stop. The voice comment will now appear in the document as a speaker icon or sound ‘object’ and clicking on it replays the recording. 

09/08/06

Hidden Table Feature in Word

Here’s a weird little feature in Word that you may not have come across. It’s a way to create a highly configurable single and multi row table. It’s different to the Create and Draw Table tools on the Table menu (or the Toolbar Insert Table icon) in that each cell can be as little as one character wide. All you have to do is type the plus symbol (‘+’) followed by one or more hyphens (‘-‘), followed by another plus sign. Repeat for as many columns as you require, then press Enter. So, for example, a five-column table would look like this:

+-+-+-+-+-+

and produce this:

Adding extra hyphens between the plus signs varies the cell spacing, so this:

+-+--+---+----+-----+

produces this:

If you want to add extra rows place the cursor at the end of the table and press Tab or Enter as many times as necessary.

03/08/06

Remove Manual Formatting from Word

If you’ve ever copied and pasted chunks of text into a Word document from a web page or another document, you may have noticed that both the new text and old text can sometimes start to behave oddly, changing size or font, for example, for no apparent reason. The unexpected changes are caused by hidden formatting commands interacting with the existing document’s formatting.

Here’s a couple of tips that are worth remembering if you do a lot of copying and pasting, and the first one is to remove as much formatting as possible by using Word’s Paste Special feature. Simply highlight and copy (Ctrl + V) the text you want to paste in to your document, but instead of pressing Ctrl + V (Paste) go to Paste Special on the Edit menu, or click the Paste Special icon on the toolbar (it looks like an open book, next to the Format Painter ‘paintbrush’ icon, and on the drop-down menu that appears select Unformatted Text.

You can strip out any manual formatting in a piece of pasted text by highlighting the item then pressing Ctrl + Spacebar. This should then force the highlighted text to take on the formatting of the document or paragraph it has been inserted into.     

28/07/06

Free Pirate Font and Much More Besides

Arrr, me hearties… What with all this Pirates of The Caribbean stuff doing the rounds at the moment I though you might like to know about the Kallot True Type Font, which includes all of the skull and crossbones and skeletons motifs and you’re ever likely to want or need. Kallot is just one of hundreds of free fonts (for personal use) available from the dafont website. There’s some really imaginative and eye-catching designs, check out the furry Barrio or the gothic Kingdom Hearts, and the flouncy Sweetie Hearts is just the job for your next amorous missive. Simply download the zipped font file onto your PC, extract it into your Windows/ Fonts folder and click ‘Install New Font on the File menu and it’s instantly available for use in Word and any application that uses text.

11/07/07

Printing Sheets of Different Labels

Word has a specialised label printing tool, which is easy to use but it’s not obvious that it can also produce label sheets made up of different addresses. Go to Envelopes and Labels on the Tools menu, click the Labels tab then the Options button and select the label type (make, reference number or custom dimensions etc.) from the list. It is important to double-check the dimensions by clicking the Details button and compare the measurements (margins, pitch etc.) against your label sheet. You should also verify that your printer settings are correct (paper size etc.) from Page Layout on the File menu.

To produce a label sheet made up of different addresses open the Label dialogue box again and check the item ‘Full page of the same label’ (and no, it doesn’t make sense…) then click the New Document button. The label sheet will now be displayed (if not select Print Preview from the View menu), and you can key your addresses into the boxes, and since it a Word document you can vary font, style and size. When you are finished click print and the alignment should be perfect. Save it as you would a normal Word document and it will be ready for printing or updating. 

INVISIBLE WRITING & SECRET MESSAGES IN WORD

Most of us have played with secret writing and invisible ink at some point and there are plenty of recipes for making your own (lemon juice and urine are supposed to work quite well…) but here’s a few ways to save and send secret messages using MS Word, without making a mess or using lighted candles.

The absolute simplest method is to write your message as normal, then highlight it, click Font on the Format menu, change the Font Colour to white and hey presto, your words will disappear from view. The only problem with this method is that hidden words buried in a document can be difficult to find but highlighting everything (Ctrl + A) and selecting black font colour will make them reappear once again. A slightly more elaborate method is to highlight your message then go to the Font drop-down menu and change it to Wingdings 3, It’s pretty obvious and you don’t need to be James Bond to see through this one, though changing the Font colour to white as well should keep snoopers guessing. The last trick is to highlight and resize your secret text to 1pt italics. On most screens the characters will merge together and appear as a thin slightly ragged line and in this way you can disguise quite large chunks of text as underlines or break lines in copy.

28/06/06

AUTOMATIC WORD BACKUP

Contrary to popular belief Microsoft Word doesn’t have an automatic backup facility, features like Save Auto Recovery info (Tools > Options) merely save your document as a temporary file, which may get you out of trouble if Word or your PC crashes, and you know where to look for it, but it is not a backup and the recovery files are automatically deleted when Word, or the document are closed.

There is no substitute for manually saving your work every few minutes, and the Ctrl + S keyboard shortcut is easy to remember, but there is a better way. A small freeware utility (actually it’s a Word Macro) called SaveReminder can be set to remind you to do a manual Save every few minutes, or if you prefer, do it for you automatically. Simply download and extract the zip file into your Word Startup folder and the configuration menu will open the next time you launch Word. You will find the location of your Word Startup folder from Tools > Options > File Locations (On Windows XP it’s usually C:\Documents and Settings\<yourname>\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP

SEEING THE WHOLE PICTURE IN WORD

When working on long or complex documents in Word the jumble of toolbars, menu and status bars can be a real distraction, as well as taking up valuable screen space. Word has a facility to make them all vanish and display your document full screen, you may even have come across it before, it’s on the View menu.

When selected a small button appears on the page so you can switch back to normal view. However, even that can quite intrusive but it’s actually a toolbar and you can move it out of the way by ‘docking it to one of the sides of the screen where it becomes a skinny toolbar. You can also make the Full Screen view a toolbar button. Just right-click onto an empty area of the toolbar and select Customize then the Commands tab. Scroll down the Categories list to View then locate the Full Screen icon on the Commands list and drag it onto a toolbar. If you don’t like the look of the button you can change it by selecting Customize again, then right-click on the button and select Change button image. You can also remove the button when the Customize dialogue box is displayed, by dragging the button off the toolbar. 

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REVERSE AND MIRROR PRINTING IN WORD

Here’s a couple of quick and nifty tweaks for Microsoft Word. The first one is Reverse Printing, which is probably not what you think. This is a way of setting Word to reverse the order in which documents are printed. BY default it’s set to print in the order they appear on the screen, i.e. page one first. The trouble with that is when you print a long document you have re-collate the printed pages so that page one is on top of the pile. To switch on Reverse printing, so that the last page prints first, go to Tools > Options and select the Print tab and under Printing Options check ‘Reverse Print Order’.

The second tip is a way of printing text backwards, or ‘mirror’ printing. In fact this function isn’t built into Word, but you can trick it into doing it in small batches of a line or two. Open the Drawing toolbar (View > Toolbars > Drawing) and click where you want the Mirror text to appear on your document. Next click the WordArt icon (slanty capital letter ‘A’ on the Drawing toolbar), select the plain style in the top left hand corner and compose your text. You can also set font type and size from this box. Click OK and it’ll appear at the insertion point. You can change to a solid colour from the Fill Colour icon on the Drawing toolbar, and change any other attributes you feel necessary. When you are happy with its position and size click the Draw drop-down menu on the Drawing toolbar, select Rotate or Flip, then Flip Horizontal and hey-presto, backwards writing.  For larger blocks of copy the only solution is to copy the page to a drawing program, mirror the image and paste it back into the document as a non-editable picture.

AVOID REPEATING WORDS IN WORD

It’s difficult not to be repetitive when writing long documents and all too often when you go back and read something you’ve just written, you can easily miss repeated words or phrases, but Word can help avoid repetition. Go to Find on the Edit menu and select the Replace tab. Type the word you want to check in the Find box then in the Replace box type the command ‘^&’ (without the quotes, the ^ character is Shift 6 on a UK keyboard). This tells it to find but not to replace the word. Now click the Replace All and the number of times the word has been used will be displayed.

DIY CALENDAR IN WORD

Okay, I know my timing is not too clever but you can always squirrel this tip away for later in the year, or use it now to make fancy month planners. Either way here’s how to use Microsoft Word’s little-known facility to make quite smart-looking calendars. Just go to New on the File menu and select the Other Documents tab, if Calendar Wizard isn’t shown then click ‘Templates’ in the Create New box. If Word says the feature isn’t installed you may have to dig out your Word or Office installation disc and load that, but it’s worth the effort. Click the Calendar Wizard icon and follow the prompts to choose a style, layout and whether nor not you want space for a picture, then set the start and end dates and the finished design will appear. You can fiddle around with it as much as you like, it’s simply a Word document, and when you are happy with it just click Print and it’s done.

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FANCY BULLETS FOR WORD

No doubt you have crossed swords with Word’s automatic Bullets and Numbering feature, which seems to pop up when you don’t want it. Nevertheless if you are a fan of bulleted and numbered lists then you may not known that you are not limited to the plain round bullets, in fact you can use just about any character or symbol you like for bullet points, you can even use clipart images or photographs. To make the change go to Bullets and Numbering on the Format menu, select a style then click either the Picture or Customize button. The former leads you into a clipart browser whilst Customize takes you to another dialogue box from where you can choose a bullet from the Symbol font lists. Once you’ve chosen your new symbol just use the Bullet or Number icon on the toolbar in the usual way. 

SPELLCHECKING THE WORD DICTIONARY

If you use Microsoft Word the built-in spellchecker is your best friend, automatically highlighting miss-spelt words and helpfully suggesting alternatives. One of its most useful facilities is to add words it doesn’t know to the Custom Dictionary, but here’s the rub. If you are in a hurry it’s very easy to add miss-spelled words to the Dictionary and thereafter Word will always ignore your mistake. So how to you correct the Dictionary? It’s simple, just go to Options on the Tools menu and select the Spelling and Grammar tab. Click the Dictionaries button and your Custom Dictionary -- and any others you might have installed -- appears in the box. Highlight the entry and click Edit and a list of all the words you’ve added appears. You can now edit the list like a Word document and when you’ve finished Save it as normal.

WATERMARKING WORD DOCUMENTS

There is a little known and very well hidden feature in Microsoft Word that lets you create eye-catching watermarks that can be used to identify or distinguish your documents by lightly printing a background image or words behind your text. Start with the image or text that you want to use and make sure you know where to find it on your hard disc. Now go to the View menu and select Header and Footer, decide where you want the watermark to appear by clicking the cursor then go to Insert > Picture > From File and browse to your image, double click on it to insert into the page. You can now adjust the position using the sizing handles. Next double-click the image to open the Format Picture dialogue box, select the Layout tab and click ‘Behind Text. Select the Picture tab and on the Color drop-down menu choose Watermark; adjust Contrast and Brightness as necessary to vary the visibility of the image. Exit the Header and Footer toolbar and preview the effect on the View menu by clicking Print Layout.

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ADDING FILENAME AND PATH TO WORD DOCUMENTS

Yes, I know you can do this automatically in some versions of Word but here’s a simple little wrinkle that automatically displays the path and filename of the document you are working on in the toolbar and lets you put it anywhere you like in a document. Begin by right-clicking on an empty area of the toolbar, select Customize then the Commands tab; scroll down the Categories list and click on All Commands. Now scroll down the Commands list to Web Address, left click and hold on the icon and address bar and drag and drop it onto the end of your toolbar. Exit the Customize dialogue box and the web address bar will now display your open document’s path and filename. Now all you have to do is click on the line to highlight it then copy (Ctrl + C) and paste (Ctrl + V) it anywhere you want in your document.

TWO TOP WORD TRICKS

Here are a couple of little-known tips for Microsoft Word (all versions from 97 onwards) that might come in handy one day. The first one is a way to create underlined spaces. These are useful for online forms or documents, to indicate where you want the reader or recipient to enter information, like this: Name:          .

A normal underline doesn’t work because as soon as you try to type on it, the underline disappears; try it and you’ll see what I mean. To make underlined spaces press an hold Ctrl + U + Shift then press the spacebar and the underlines will appear, it takes a little practice but you’ll soon get the hang of it.

Tip number two is how to avoid wasting ink by just printing the parts of a document that you actually want. This should also work with other MS Office applications as well. Most printers support this feature though one or two might not co-operate so give it a try, in case you ever need to use it in anger. Start by highlighting the block of text that you want to print then go to Print on the File menu and look for the ‘Page Range’ box and click ‘Selection’ then the OK button.

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WORD RULES

Here is another of Word's handy hidden features. This one should be of particular interest to anyone who inserts pictures or graphics into their documents and needs to position them accurately on the page. The idea is you place the mouse pointer on the horizontal ruler at the top of the page then press and hold the left button. A vertical line appears, which you can move right or left, to line up with the edge of the object you want to measure or position. Now, whilst still holding down the left mouse button press and hold the right button and the ruler changes to a set of precise measurements, showing the exact distances the line is from the left and right margins. Clever huh?

LOREM IPSUM - BETTER DUMMY TEXT FOR WORD

You may know the hidden Word trick for creating paragraphs of ‘dummy’ text (a repetition of ‘The quick brown fox etc…’), in case you’ve missed it just enter =rand() anywhere in a document and see what happens (see also this Top Tip for refinements).

Anyway, the idea of dummy text is to help with document layout and it goes way back -- to the 1500’s -- and traditionally printers and typesetters have used paragraphs of fake (or is it..) Latin, which begins: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua…’ and so on.

Handy though it is the dummy text generated by Word is repetitive and doesn’t look very natural, so is there a better way? Unfortunately Word cannot generate Lorem ipsum… but there is a website that can. Just tell Lipsum.com how much need then copy and paste it into your document or layout.