Manipulation

Labels: Formatting, Merge

Shape and display

"Ever wonder why some text seems easier to read than others? A few basic formatting changes can make reading text much easier. Factors like line spacing, font choice, font size and margins are key to legibility. "

Labels: Fonts, Formatting

With and without code

"Have you ever been asked to fill out a form in a word processor, only to discover that when you attempted to enter information, the lines on the form moved all over the page? Not to mention that the form was difficult and time-consuming to fill out? Most people don't realize that you can easily create professional-looking forms in Word."

• Part I: Create professional looking forms in Word
  
  
• Part II: Adding Automation to your Word forms
  
  
• Part III: Learn more about VBA macros to automate your form
  
  
• Part IV: Use custom dialog boxes in your Word forms
  
  
• Part V: Linking your AutoForm to a database

Labels: Formatting, General, Tips, Tutorials

Fix the box

• Find your printer's unprintable area
  
  Your printer manual may specify the unprintable areas. Inkjet printers, in particular, often have a large unprintable area at the bottom of the page.
  
  Here's a way to discover them for yourself in Word.
  
  
  1. Choose File>Page Setup>Margins tab. Change all four margin settings to 0". Choose OK.
     
     
  2. You're told that one or more margins are set outside the printable area of the page. Choose Fix.
     
     
  3. Word adjusts the margin settings to your printer's minimum values. Jot down your printer's settings for your future reference, then Cancel the dialog.
  
  
• Adjust the Page Border
  
  
  1. Set the insertion point on the page that's bordered, then choose Format>Borders and Shading> Page Border tab. Choose Options.
     
     
  2. At the Border and Shading Options dialog, note that the default settings are to have all four borders set to 24 pt (which is 1/3"), and to have Measure from: set to Edge of Page.
     
     
  3. To maintain the measurement from the edge of the page, yet move the borders in more toward the center, set the measurements for each of the four margins to 31 pt (the maximum allowed).
     
     For an alternative setting, set Measure from: to Text. Now the Margin settings measure outward from your text margins. You can set the Margin values anywhere from 0 pt to 31 pt.
     
     
  4. Click OK>OK. Use the Standard toolbar's Print Preview tool to evaluate your results.
  
  

Labels: Formatting, Printing, Tips, Troubleshoot

Go back to a simpler time

Labels: Formatting, Shortcuts, Tips

Shortcut to copy

1. Select the text with the formatting you want.
   
2. Ctrl+Shift+C.
   
3. Select the text to be formatted.
   
4. Ctrl+Shift+V will paste the new formatting.

Labels: Formatting, Shortcuts, Tips

I'd Like to Make It Clear

• squinted your eyes trying to see the numbers in a PowerPoint presentation?
  
  
• scratched your head at a charity leaflet with an indecipherable pie chart titled 'Where your donation goes' ... and set it aside?
  
  
• missed discussion at a meeting because you were busy trying to figure out the figures?
  
  
• put aside a graph or table, thinking "I'm not good with numbers."?

• what to include: when unsure what numbers are important, people frequently display them all, overpowering the reader with irrelevance.
  
  
• which format to use: the choice between text and table, table and chart, bar and pie.
  
  
• how to use the technology effectively: computer software generates graphs easily, but the results hide your point behind incomprehensible chartjunk.
  
  
• how to explain the information: selecting the right words for titles, columns and captions.

Labels: Formatting, General, Tips

One picture can mess up a thousand words

Labels: Formatting, Graphics, Tips

Word makes judgments

1. Type the following text:
   
   This line will test how styles and formatting work in Word.
   
   
2. Select all the text, and then apply italic formatting.
   
   
3. Select all the text, and then apply a style such as Heading 1.
   
   You notice that italic formatting is not retained.
   
   
4. Select all the text, apply the Normal style, and then remove the italic formatting.
   
   
5. Select "work in Word" in the text, and then apply the italic formatting.
   
   
6. Select all the text, and then apply the Heading 1 style.
You notice that the italic formatting is retained.

'This behavior occurs because Word uses a specific rule to determine whether to apply a style to selected text. According to this rule, Word applies a style depending on the percentage of the selected text that already has formatting applied. For example, if you already applied formatting to less than 50 percent of the selected text, this formatting is retained when you apply a style. If the selected text includes multiple paragraphs, Word first calculates the percentage of text that is formatted in the first paragraph. Then, it examines the paragraphs in the same range. If the formatting that is applied to the text in the paragraphs that follow the first paragraph differs from most of the formatting in the first paragraph, Word does not apply the style to the following paragraphs. Therefore, the formatting is retained in these paragraphs."

Labels: Formatting

Use your own

1. Choose Document Information in the list of Categories
   
2. In the list of Field Names, choose DocProperty
   
3. Click the Field Codes button
   
4. Add the property name to the Field
   
5. Click OK
   
6. Click OK. Word to inserts the value.

Labels: Documents, Formatting, General, Reference, Tips

Some more of those things I'm sure I used to know

"Bell Labs engineer, Don Macpherson, went to instruct their first client, the Mayo Clinic, in the use of the new (touch tone phone system). He felt the need for a fresh and unambiguous name for the # symbol. His reasoning that led to the new word was roughly that it had eight points, so ought to start with octo-. He was apparently at that time active in a group that was trying to get the Olympic medals of the athlete Jim Thorpe returned from Sweden, so he decided to add thorpe to the end."

Labels: Fonts, Formatting, Reference

Sized and numbered

"If you don't want to spend money on an add-in, or use VBA; and are willing to do a bit more work yourself, here is the method I use. I've produced booklets up to 100 pages long this way, and it works quite satisfactorily for me."

"The WordBookletTemplates.zip file contains Microsoft Word templates for 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, and 32 page booklets, with and without page numbers (16 templates in all). I think I developed these with Microsoft Word 97 and I've never made any changes to them. They use a series of text boxes that flow from one to the other to get the text where it is supposed to be in the booklet."

Labels: Formatting, Printing, Tips

Minimize white space

"When justifying text in Microsoft Word use the hyphenation feature to improve the look of your page. (Without hyphens). . . unnecessary 'white space' is distributed throughout. When hyphenation is turned on the overall typographic color of the page is much more even. To enable this feature in Microsoft Word do the following: After you have justified the columns in your document, choose from the "Tools menu" > Language > then from the dropdown menu, choose "Hyphenation", then choose "Automatically hyphenate document"

Labels: Fonts, Formatting, Tips

More data than the pie will hold

"Chris Weber provides you with a generic method to control the data for pie charts that are actually readable."

Labels: Formatting, Tips

Weapon of Mass Obfuscation

"Redaction is the careful editing of a document to remove confidential information.

The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically.

Sensitive government documents, confidential legal documents, insurance contracts, and other sensitive documents are often redacted before being made available to the public. With the Word 2003 Redaction Add-in, users of Microsoft Office Word 2003 now have an effective, user-friendly tool to help them redact confidential text in Word documents."

Labels: Addin, Formatting

High caliber

Shauna Kelly:

How to control bullets in Microsoft Word

Ins and outs of bullets and numbering in Word

Dubbo College :
(an easy five hours drive from Sydney, four hours from Newcastle and a ten hour drive from Melbourne and Brisbane.)



Paragraph Bullets

Troubleshooting Bullets and numbering

Also see:
Beyond Bullets.com

Beyond Bullet Points, the book



See all Topics
word

Labels: Fonts, Formatting, Tips

Shape or substance

"The legibility of a typeface should not be evaluated on its ability to generate a good word shape.

Word shape is no longer a viable model of word recognition. The bulk of scientific evidence says that we recognize a word's component letters, then use that visual information to recognize a word. In addition to perceptual information, we also use contextual information to help recognize words during ordinary reading, but that has no bearing on the word shape versus parallel letter recognition debate. "

The science of word recognition
by Kevin Larson
From EyeMagazine

Suggested by:
Microsoft Typography

Also see:
Cmabrigde



See all Topics
word

Labels: Fonts, Formatting, General

Budget0056.doc

"Sometimes, when working on a project, you may want to save your documents in sequential order (for example, "0001", "0002", "0003", and so on).

If you wanted to do this manually, you would need to sort through your working directory for the latest file number before you could assign the next number to a new file.

Using this fairly straightforward Word macro, you can make creating sequenced files as easy as pressing a button."

LogicalExpressions.com:

Save sequential number docs
(Kevin Christy)

Also see:

Autonumber Invoices



See all Topics
word

Labels: Customize, Fields, Formatting, Tips, VBA

The other letters

• Ctrl+'
  Adds an acute accent to the character typed next

  Á

  
  
• Ctrl+'
  When followed by d or D, creates the old English character "eth"

  Ð

  
  
• Ctrl+`
  Adds a grave accent to the character typed next

  À

  
  
• Ctrl+^
  Adds a circumflex to the character typed next

  Â

  
  
• Ctrl+~
  Adds a tilde to the character typed next

  Ã

  
  
• Ctrl+:
  Adds a dieresis or umlaut to the character typed next

  Ä

  
  
• Ctrl+@
  Adds a degree symbol above the letters a and A; used primarily in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish

  Å

  
  
• Ctrl+&
  Creates combination or Germanic characters based on the character typed next

  Æ

  or

  ß

  
  
• Ctrl+,
  Adds a cedilla to the character typed next

  Ç

  
  
• Ctrl+/
  Adds a slash through the letters o and O; used primarily in Danish and Norwegian

  Ø

  
  
• Alt+Ctrl+?
  Creates an inverted question mark

  ¿

  
  
• Alt+Ctrl+!
  Creates an inverted exclamation mark
  

  ¡

  
  

Labels: Fonts, Formatting

Creating sequentially numbered documents

In the template from which you create the document, insert a bookmark named Order in the location where you want the sequential number to appear and create an AutoNew macro, as follows:

Sub AutoNew()
Order = System.PrivateProfileString("C:\Settings.Txt", "MacroSettings", "Order")
If Order = "" Then
  Order = 1
Else
  Order = Order + 1
End If
System.PrivateProfileString("C:\Settings.txt", "MacroSettings", "Order") = Order
ActiveDocument.Bookmarks("Order").Range.InsertBefore Format(Order, "00#")
ActiveDocument.SaveAs FileName:="path" & Format(Order, "00#")
End Sub 

If you do not need to display the number in the document, but just want to save it with a sequential number, there is no need to create the bookmark in the template and you should then delete the second last line of the code.

Article contributed by Doug Robbins
Word MVP Site

Microsoft Knowledgebase:
Macro to Increment Invoice Number to New Form Document

WordTips:
Sequentially numbered Labels

Here's a further discussion including methods to create sequential ticket numbers:

Here's the PDF version:
Word Field Codes Revealed



See all Topics
word

Labels: Documents, Fields, Formatting, Tutorials

More typography

Kerning

Adjusting (increasing or decreasing) the space between adjoining type characters.

Kearning pair

Two adjoining type characters to which a particular kearning value is applied.

Kearning value

The space between two adjoining type characters. This value is usually measured in em.

1. Select the text you want to change.
   
2. On the Format menu, click Font, and then click the Character Spacing tab.
   
3. Do one of the following:
   
   • Expand or condense space evenly between all the selected characters
     
     Click Expanded or Condensed in the Spacing box, and then specify how much space you want in the By box.
     
     
   • Kern characters that are above a particular point size
     
     Select the Kerning for fonts check box, and then enter the point size in the Points and above box.

Note: Selecting Expanded or Condensed alters the spacing between all selected letters by the same amount. Kerning alters the spacing between particular pairs of letters.

Microsoft Typography:
A Disagreeably Facetious Type Glossary

WebStyleGuide.com:
Webstyle Guide - Typography

About.com:
Typography Tutorials

Typographica
a journal of typography featuring news, observations, and open commentary on fonts and typographic design.
Here's the RSS connection:
Typographica Feed



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word

Labels: Fonts, Formatting

Publisher/Word

..."Word is ubiquitous. If you buy a new computer, chances are good that it will come with some version of Office or Works Suite (which includes Word) installed. Word is a powerful word processing program that incorporates many of the features of a page layout application, but there are times when a page layout or desktop publishing application is what is needed. If you are using the Small Business Edition of Office 97 or Office 2007, Professional, or Ultimate, you have such a program: Microsoft Publisher.

...even if you use only Word, Publisher can be useful to you. Because once upon a time, at least, it came with an excellent manual. The Microsoft Publisher 97 Companion is a 328-page book (compare this to the 19 pages devoted to Publisher in Discovering Microsoft Office 2000 Premium and Professional), and it contains much material that can be equally helpful to Word users.

For example, the chapter "The Look of Words" discusses what fonts are, how to choose them, and how to get the most from them. The following tips, guidelines, and rules of thumb are excerpted from that chapter [with some comments interspersed]. We have not attempted to reproduce all the illustrations that appear in the actual manual, but even the text alone is helpful."

Labels: Formatting, Tips

M-N-Hyphen

There are three kinds of dashes, each a bit longer than the other.
You don't need to put spaces before or after dashes (in the US).

Use the hyphen (-) for hyphenating words.

Use the en dash (–) where you would use "to," as in "business hours are 10 A.M. – 5 P.M.," in a range of numbers (pages 17–25), or to link certain compound adjectives like "the Tokyo–Hong Kong flight" or "anti–blood clotting serum."

Use the em dash (—) instead of parentheses—as is done here—to set off a parenthetical phrase. On the typewriter, two hyphens stood in for this dash.

Labels: Formatting, General, Reference, Tips, Tutorials

Without reservations

Labels: Formatting, Tables, Tutorials

CAPS - No - caps

You can make changes to selected text by going to
Format>Change Case
and choosing the correct style. (Including tOGGLE cASE)

You could also use a keyboard shortcut.
Select the text and then hold down the SHIFT key and tap the F3 key to toggle through three of the main cases – All Cap, Lowercase, and Title.

SAP Design Guild:
Quick Guide to Capitalization in English

Technical Communicators' Forum:
Capitalization of Headings and Titles

From The Editorium.com:
Here's a macro to change Heading styles to true Title case:
TITLE CASE MACRO, VERSION 2
By Jack M. Lyon

Word Tips:
Capital after colon

Automatically correct capitalization in most any MS 2007 App.



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word

Labels: Formatting

Clean up tools

"When you save Web pages format with Microsoft Word, additional tags are added so that you can continue to use the full functionality of Word to edit your content.

To reduce the size of Web pages, you can save them in filtered HTML. Filtered format removes Microsoft Office-specific tags. If you save in filtered HTML and then reopen the file in Office programs, text and general appearance will be preserved, but some features may work differently.

If you reopen a Web page in Word that you saved in filtered HTML, your text and general appearance are preserved, but you may not be able to use certain Word features in the usual way to edit your files. For example, the appearance of bulleted or numbered lists is preserved; however, some of the Word functionality associated with lists will not be preserved.

If you will need to edit the file later, you can maintain two files: one in Word format and one in filtered HTML format. You can edit the content in the Word document, save it in Word format for future editing, and then save a copy in filtered HTML format."

Labels: Formatting, General

A suggestion I don't suggest

1. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Edit tab.
   
2. Under Editing options, select the Keep track of formatting check box, if it is not already selected.
   
3. Under Editing options, select the Mark formatting inconsistencies check box.
   Formatting inconsistencies will be marked with blue, wavy underlines.
   
4. Click OK.
   
5. In your document, right-click the blue, wavy underline where a formatting inconsistency has occurred.
   
6. Do one of the following:
   To correct the inconsistency, click the command that describes the inconsistency.
   To have Word remove the blue, wavy underline and not correct this inconsistency, click Ignore Once.
   To skip all occurrences of the inconsistency in the document, click Ignore Rule.

PC World:
Word 2002 adds fast formatting for stylin' documents.

ShaunaKelly.com:
How the Styles and Formatting pane works in Microsoft Word 2002 and 2003

I would suggest that you don't use this feature. See:
Runaway Styles in 2003

If you are going to use it, just to track formatting, remember to turn it off for the majority of uses.

Also see Wopr lounge



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word

Labels: Formatting, Tips

Or do you love it?

" This study sought to determine if certain personalities and uses are associated with various fonts. Using an online survey, participants rated the personality of 20 fonts using 15 adjective pairs. In addition, participants viewed the same 20 fonts and selected which uses were most appropriate.

Results suggested that personality traits are indeed attributed to fonts based on their design family (Serif, Sans-Serif, Modern, Monospace, Script/Funny) and are associated with appropriate uses.

Implications of these results to the design of online materials and websites are discussed."

Labels: Fonts, Formatting

Stop them up front

Labels: Customize, Fonts, Formatting, Tips, Tutorials

Copy/Paste formatting in Word, PowerPoint or Excel

Labels: Formatting, General, Graphics

Demo tutorial

You can control when Word decides to break for a new page.

Ctrl+Enter is the keyboard shortcut, but there are a number of variations.

This MS link has both Demos and text tutorials.
Page breaks

BTW; a merged document is made up of Section breaks, not Page breaks.

For ease of printing, Replace ^b with ^m



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word

Labels: Documents, Formatting, Tips, Tutorials

2007 gives you more than you ask for

"(A) lesson here for me is that lots of people seem to think of Word as a typewriter (remember typewriters?). There are many examples of this, in the way people construct a table of contents for their Word documents, use the TAB key to align columns, and the way they always hit ENTER twice after typing each paragraph (for those who are fans of extra space between paragraphs).

Many, many of the feedback comments on the line-spacing issue had to do with wanting "single spacing." But, of course the line spacing in the new template is single spacing. It's just that it's a little bit "more" than single spacing used to be: 1.15, instead of 1.0.

But what is 1.0? You might think that if you're using an 11-point font that line spacing of 1.0 would be 11 points. But if you lay out paragraphs that way - depending on the font you're using - the parts that stick below one line will crash into the parts that stick up from the line below. You need to allow some extra space between lines.

In a former life when I set type on a Compugraphic phototypesetting machine, the convention we used was about 20% extra space, so we'd set 10-point type on a 12-point line. Larger fonts demanded more breathing room. This was at a newspaper, so we spaced things a bit tighter than you'd expect to see in, say, a report or a brochure (or, dare I say a professional looking document).

Labels: 2007, Formatting