|
The Phrase That Pays
If you do a lot of typing then you can be pretty sure you
constantly repeat yourself, especially when writing letters or replying to
emails. Here’s a way to save yourself a few seconds each day, so you don’t have
to keep typing things like Dear Mr…, it was a pleasure to meet you…, thank you
for the… , and anything else you can
think of. Phrase Express integrates
seamlessly with your word processor, text editor and email programs, inserting
common phrases at the click of a mouse or simple shortcut, it expands
abbreviations, auto completes phrases with predictive text, enters dates and
times, even a quote of the date if you so wish and as an added bonus it checks
your spelling. It’s easy to use, highly customisable and yes, before you ask,
it is free for personal use.
07/08/08
Noisy Word Alternative
You might think that Microsoft Word is the only word
processor in town but as regular visitors will know, this is simply not the
case and there are some excellent free alternatives, including AbiWord and Open
Office Writer, and they’re both Word compatible.
Here’s another one, called Atlantis, and it’s free to try for up to 30 days and it can open, edit and save files in Word’s ‘doc’ format.
Those accustomed to Word will find it very easy to use, the layout and menu
options closely resemble the MS program and it has all of the features most
users need, most of the time, including word count, spellchecker, a full set of
formatting options, HTML integration, columns, and much more. There’s even a set
of really wacky sounds that you can assign to most actions, from typing noises
from a manual typewriter to a hooter for error messages. It’s small too, under
4Mb, so you can carry a copy around with you on a memory stick, and if you need
further proof, all of today’s items were written on it, and I didn’t even
notice I wasn’t using Word. Registration costs a very reaosnable $35, a fraction of the cost of a copy of Word.
24/03/08
ZoHo Online Office
Have you seen the price of a decent office suite? Why bother
when you can get everything you want for free, and much more besides. ZoHo is the latest online office suite to hit the
headlines and this one really piles it on thick with a very well specified word
processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, Wiki tool, note taker, groupware
mail client, project management program, CRM (Customer Relations Management)
software, web conferencing, online database, organiser and chat facility.
There’s also a website monitor, viewer and lots more besides and it’s all free.
14/02/08
Tell Word What To Do
Quite literally, this freeware utility, called Natural Word,
lets you take command of Word with simple typed commands. For example, rather
than hunt around the menus if you want to increase the size of a word or change
the colour simply highlight the word or characters and type ‘make 12pt’, or
‘make blue’. There’s no need to memorize the commands, Natural Word will try to
understand what you want. It works with any version of Word (from W2000
onwards), and once installed all you have to do is hit the Tilde key (‘~’) and
a box asking what you want to do opens, or just type the command into a box
that appears on the Toolbar. The program is still being beta tested, so expect
a few gaps in its understanding and maybe the odd glitch (you need to change
the tilde key assignment as it is set up for an American keyboard) but it’s
being improved all of the time and if this taster is anything to go by, it will
make Word a lot more friendly and easy to use, especially for newcomers daunted
by the programs apparent complexity and awkward Help screens.
14/01/08
Stop Repeating,
Repeating Yourself?
One of the
occupational hazards of writing is constantly repeating yourself. The trouble
is, when you’ve written and re-read a long document several times, you become
blind to your mistakes, so if you do a lot of writing, you use Microsoft Word,
and you suspect you’ve used certain words a bit too often here’s a simple
little trick to find out.
Got to Edit >
Replace and in the ‘Find What’ box enter the word you want to check up on, now
in the ‘Replace With’ box enter the following ^& (that’s upward pointing
arrow and ampersand, you’ll find them on shift 6 and 7 respectively). Click the
Replace All button and Word will tell you how many instance of the word occur
in the document. It also says it has replaced them with ^&, but don’t
worry, it hasn’t, that combination of characters is ignored by Find and Replace
and no changes are made.
27/08/07
Staying Compatible With Word
Now that Microsoft Office 2007 is out in the wild users of
older versions of Office and Word may encounter problems opening Word, Excel and
PowerPoint files from Office 2007 users. The new suite introduces new file
formats, called Open XML. Frankly it’s a nuisance but there is a solution so if
you are having trouble and you need to download the Office 2007 ‘Compatibility
Pack’. It is for users of Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2000, 2002 and 2003
and once installed you’ll be good to go. The only exception is documents
written right-to-left and complex script files created in Word 2007, in which
case you need to read MS
Knowledgebase article 925451 for details of fixes and workarounds.
02/07/07
Accents and Special Characters
Word has a built-in facility for producing accented characters. For example, to insert an acute accent over a, e, i, o, u or d press and hold Ctrl then press the apostrophe key, release both then tap the letter you want and you get á é í ó ú, and ð. There's lots more, here's a more or less complete list:
|
à, è, ì, ò, ù
|
Ctrl + ` (grave) + letter
|
|
á, é, í, ó, ú, ý
|
Ctrl + ' (apostrophe) + letter
|
|
â, ê, î, ô, û
|
Ctrl + Shift + ^ (caret) + letter
|
|
ã, ñ, õ
|
Ctrl + Shift + ~ (tilde) + letter
|
|
ä, ë, ï, ö, ü, ÿ
|
Ctrl + Shift + : (colon) + letter
|
|
å, Å
|
Ctrl + Shift + @, a or A
|
|
æ, Æ
|
Ctrl + Shift + &, a or A
|
|
œ, Œ
|
Ctrl + Shift + &, o or O
|
|
ç, Ç
|
Ctrl + , (comma), c or C
|
|
ð, Ð
|
Ctrl + ' (apostrophe), d or D
|
|
ø, Ø
|
Ctrl + /, o or O
|
|
¿
|
Alt + Ctrl + Shift + ?
|
|
¡
|
Alt + Ctrl + Shift + !
|
|
ß
|
Ctrl + Shift + &, s
|
You can also insert a
wide range of special characters and accents into Word, and most other Windows applications,
including email messages, by pressing and holding the Alt key then entering a
4-digit code into the numeric keypad. However, in order for this to work you
must press the Numlock key first to activate the keypad. The numeric keypad on
laptops is usually nestled inside the normal keyboard – see your owner’s manual
for details of how to enable and use it.
|
¤
Alt+0164
† Alt+0134
× Alt+0215
÷ Alt+0247
¶ Alt+0182
† Alt+0135
± Alt+0177
— Alt+0151
– Alt+0150
§ Alt+0167
ˆ Alt+0136
˜ Alt+0152
« Alt+0171
» Alt+0187
¦ Alt+0166
‰ Alt+0137
© Alt+0169
® Alt+0174
™ Alt+0153
á
Alt+0225
à
Alt+0224
â
Alt+0226
ä Alt+0228
å
Alt+0229
Á
Alt+0193
Ã
Alt+0195
Ä
Alt+0196
Å
Alt+0197
|
À
Alt+0192
Â
Alt+0194
æ
Alt+0230
Æ
Alt+0198
ç
Alt+0231
Ç
Alt+0199
ê
Alt+0234
é
Alt+0233
ë
Alt+0235
è
Alt+0232
Ê
Alt+0202
Ë
Alt+0203
É
Alt+0201
È
Alt+0200
ï
Alt+0239
í Alt+0237
î
Alt+0238
ì
Alt+0236
Í
Alt+0205
Ì
Alt+0204
Î
Alt+0206
Ï
Alt+0207
ñ
Alt+0241
Ñ
Alt+0209
œ
Alt+0156
Œ Alt+0140
ß Alt+0223
|
In Word and Outlook Express you can also quickly add acute accents to AEIOU by pressing the Alt GR key (to the right of the spacebar, followed by the letter.
Make Insert Key Do Something Useful
Regular Word users
who haven’t developed touch-typing skills will know only too well the scourge
of the Insert key. It happens when you accidentally brush the ‘Ins’ key, you’re
bashing away on the keyboard and it’s only when you glance up at the screen
that you realise that the text you’ve been entering has been replacing or
overtyping the words you’ve already written. If that sounds familiar there’s a
couple of things you can do. You can permanently switch off the Overtype mode,
or you can make the Insert key do something useful.
To kill the Overtype
function right-click on an empty part of the Word toolbar and select
Customize. Click the Keyboard button
and in the Categories box select All Commands. In the Command box highlight
Overtype then hit the Remove button. Alternatively, you can make the Ins key carry
out the Paste command (normally Ctrl + V). It’s easy, just go to Tools > Options and select the Edit tab
and check the item: ‘Use the INS key for paste’.
09/04/07
Recovering Corrupt Word Documents
If you have ever
been faced with a Word error message saying that ‘The document cannot be
opened’ or …may be corrupted’ you’ll know how frustrating this can be, but
there may be a solution. Often the document will contain readable data, it’s
just that Word cannot open it, so here’s a little trick, using the Work ‘Linked
Document’ facility that might just help.
Begin by opening a
new blank document then type in a single word, I suggest something simple like ‘Recover’
Click Save and use the default name (i.e. ‘recover’). Next, highlight the word
and press Ctrl C. Open a new blank
document and go to Edit > Paste Special and select Unformatted Text then check
the item ‘Paste Link’ and click OK. No go to Links on the Edit menu and select
your original ‘Recover’ document and click the Change Source button. The Open
dialogue box now appears, navigate your way to your corrupted document. Select
it, click Open then OK and with a bit of luck if there’s any recoverable data
in the corrupt document it will appear. You can now save the recovered text as
a new document file.
21/03/07
Text in Blank
Document
If when you open
Word, instead of a blank sheet you find text from a previous document then you
have somehow managed to mess up your ‘Normal.dot’ document template, which is
the file that Word uses to create blank formatted documents. The solution is to
edit Normal.dot, and remove the rogue text. To do that go to Find on the Start
menu and search for Normal.dot; in Windows 98 it should be in the Templates sub
folder and in Windows XP it lives in C:/documents and settings/<yourname>/application
data/microsoft/templates and in Vista it can be found in
C:/users/<yourname>/application data/roaming/Microsoft/templates. When
you’ve found it do not double-click on it, as this will just open a new blank
document; instead right-click on the icon and select Open, and it will be
opened in Word. Delete the text; click Save and normality will be restored…
Reader’s
Tip -- Label Printing In Word
I am indebted to
Diana Rolland who came up with this great tip for label printing in Word. As
anyone who has tried it will know it can be a bit hit and miss, and invariably
the first sheet is wasted due to alignment problems. One solution is to print
them out on a sheet of ordinary paper first, then try and line it up with a
blank sheet of labels underneath but it can be hard to make out the edges.
Diana’s tip is to flip the label sheet over and do a test print on the back.
That way you get a very accurate indication of the alignment, without waste.
Brilliant! By the way, if you want to know how to produce a sheet of different
labels then have a look at this Top
Tip.
24/11/06
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
To draw attention to
a block of text or paragraph you can insert a vertical line in front of it, and
unlike the alternative method, drawing a line using the Drawing Tool, this one
is visible in all Views. The trick is to use Tab Stops. Start by highlighting the
block of text then click and drag the left Tab Stop a few millimetres to the
right, to indent the block of text. Now go to Format > Tabs and in the Tab
Stop box enter 0 (increase if you want to indent the line), under Alignment
select Bar, click the Set button, then OK and it’s done.
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
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.
[ Top ]
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.
[ Top ]
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.
[ Top ]
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.
[ Top ]
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.
|