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Word Trivia

Holman Jenkins:

… Notice that Microsoft no longer bothers printing a manual for its convoluted Word program. Instead, it gives users at least 15 ways to perform a basic and necessary function like selecting a block of text for manipulation.

Here’s the source, although it has little to do with Microsoft or Word.

Word Tip # 28: Changing Highlight Colors Throughout a Document

Had a document with highlights. Tried to print them, and they were not dark enough.

How to change all of them at once?

Allen Wyatt had the technique needed.

• Choose the new highlight color first.
• Now do a Replace with ALT H R to open the Find and Replace dialog window.
• With the “Find what” bar active, click “More” at the bottom left, then “Format” then “Highlight”. A notice will show up under the “Find what” bar that says highlight.
• Repeat that for the “Replace with bar”.
• Click “Replace” or “Replace All” to complete.

This is not intuitive. There is no visual color, just the word “highlight” under each box.

It’s also not clear to me why, when you assign highlight to the “Find what” box, it knows to look for existing highlighting in the old color, not the current color you selected and made active.

Word Tip # 26a: Update On Pasting Photos Into Table Cells

I wrote in Word Tip # 26 about pasting photos into table cells (I use this for seating charts for class).

My PC got an upgrade in October. My earlier tip did not work. I actually spent several minutes on Google searches to figure out why, but I came up empty-handed. Many people suggest what I had done before.

But it was failing for some, so it’s not just me.

Towards the end of this thread, I came upon a workaround that was quick and easy for me.

1. Do follow the old tip, which amounts to fixing the size of the cells in the table.
2. Paste the oversize photos into the table, and don’t worry about them.
3. When you are done pasting, resize one, by right-clicking on it to bring up a context menu, and then choosing Size and Position.
4. Without doing anything else, go to the next photo, and click F4, which repeats the last action. Repeat as needed.

Word Tip #22: Multi-Level Lists Are Really Hard (Reveal Codes Help)

Maybe you don’t use multi-level lists. This is Word’s name for something that’s in an outline format: you know, maybe a roman numeral for sections, then a capital letter for subsections that are indented, and so on.

Do note that I’m talking about something that you are creating in your document. I am not talking about Word’s Outline View (which is a convenient thing in and of itself).

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This is one area of Word where I find it incredibly useful that, when WordPerfect started its long death march, Word incorporating every power user’s favorite feature of WordPerfect: reveal styles (known as Reveal Formatting in Word). In Word, you click Shift+F1 to get this. Do note that the information gathered for this tool is not saved when your close Word, so it can take some time to regenerate the first time you use it after re-opening your document.

What opens up is a panel to the side of your document that can show all the styles that apply to the particular part of your document that you’ve highlighted. And there are a bunch: everything you see has font styles, paragraph styles, and maybe even section, bullet, numbering, and other styles. Who-hoo.

When all else fails, and you can’t figure out why what you’re looking at won’t look like how you want it to be, open that Reveal Styles panel. Your problem is in there.

And near as I can figure, “when all else fails” is going to happen a lot when you have multi-level lists. Hold those thoughts for a bit.

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Another issue that comes up with multi-level lists is that most people like some sort of separator either after the outline numbering, or after each item in the outline numbering. So you want your outline numbering to look like this:

I. rather than I

I.A. or I A rather than IA or I A

Who knows, maybe you want something else in there too, like a colon:

I: rather than I. or I

I.A: or I A: rather than IA or I A

Here’s the (double) tip: do include anything between the outline letters in the setup for the list, but do not include anything after the last level in the setup (whether it’s a letter or number).

The reason for doing it this way is that any time you want to cross-reference those headings, what shows up in the cross-reference is whatever is in the setup only. It looks pretty cool if in your body you refer the reader to Subsection II.C, but if you refer them to II.C: it just looks weird. Especially if in the former you can add a period if you want to, but in the latter you can’t just delete the colon because it’s already baked-in at the point where you defined the multi-level list.

This raises another hobgoblin though. If you’re using, say, a colon as I did above, what you really have is an outline entry that was created automatically, followed by the outline entry itself. But now the beginning of your entry is a colon. Not surprisingly, if you begin an entry with a colon or other character it’s going to set off the grammar check. Those will each need to be corrected by hand. I have not found an easier solution for that.

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But, what’s the setup you may well ask?

Here there are sites that can help you out. Shauna Kelly probably has the best one on this, and I lifted this image out of her post:

I was pretty much lost writing the first draft of my book about 5 years ago until I found her (rather long) post on this. The “setup” is contained in the Define New List Style dialog window that opens when you click this button (not that one).

Chops to Ms. Kelly, because when I ran into more problems with multi-level lists revising that book, and I went looking for help … hers was still one of the stop sites, and definitely the most helpful.

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Oh, did I mention that you may or may not want to include words like Chapter, Section, or Subsection in the setup? It really depends on whether you want them to show up in cross-references automatically or not. Again, do you want your reference to say II B or Section II B? I prefer the latter, but if you do, bake it into that Define New List Style dialog.

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There’s one more bit of weirdness that I picked up from this site. When you run into a problem with a multi-level list, you’re going to be looking for a tool to edit a multi-level list, right? Not so.

Instead, you follow Shauna’s advice to click this button (not that one).

But this takes you to the Define New List Style dialog window. And yet you want to edit an existing list style.

Silly you for wanting too much. Microsoft does both the defining and editing through the same dialog. So you’re in the right place, but the name is wrong. Live with it.

Word Tip # 23: Turn Off Spell Checking for Part of a Document

This is easy to do, but kind of hard to find.

Highlight the selection for which you want spell checking turned off. Then, on your Ribbon, click through Review, then Language, then Set Proofing Language (this ALT+R+U+L). Then click the checkbox for “Do not check spelling or grammar”.

I have found that Word is a little persnickety about this when it crosses various divisions within your document. For example, I had it refuse to apply this change to an entire table because the headers were included in my selection. There was nothing special about them other than they were in the top row, and separated by a thicker cell border.

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Word Tip # 28: Printing Google Calendars

I’m less than impressed with some of Google’s free stuff. I supposed I shouldn’t complain, right?

I use Gmail, and there are some convenient aspects of Calendar which comes with it.

Printing isn’t one of them.

I don’t need to print my Google Calendar very often, so this isn’t a big deal. But, if I want anything that isn’t the plainest vanilla, the printing facilities offered by Calendar are inadequate.

But I figured out an easy workaround this morning.

• Set up your calendar the way you want it to look.
• Select print from the “More” drop down menu.
• Instead of sending it to a printer, choose “Save as” at the bottom; PDF is the only option (but saving to PDF is quicker than printing to a PDF file).
• Open the PDF calendar in Abobe. You still can’t edit it. But if export it to Word, it will be run through an OCR routine on the way.†
• Open the calendar in Word.

This actually takes advantage of the lack of features in Google’s Calendar: there’s nothing unusual in the layout that interferes with the OCR.

So you end up with a calendar in Word which is almost completely editable.

FWIW: I must not be the first person to have this problem. You’ll get several hundred thousand hits with the keywords “edit printed google calendar”, but many of them are for specialized software that you don’t need.

† OCR is short for optical character recognition: basically turning a picture of words into characters. The PDF that Calendar exports is the picture that can’t be edited like text, but the Word document will be in characters that can be edited like text.

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Word Tip # 27: Printing Pages from Sections

Word let’s you divide documents into sections. Those sections can get their own page numbers (starting at anything you like, and even with different formats). One possibility is that the whole document is numberered normally starting at one. This is what most people do with a mix of portrait and landscape pages.

In Word, you can also print only selected pages from a document.

So how do you do this when you’re drawing pages from different sections?

Supposedly Word does a good job of this, but I seem to always find it problematic. In fact, I often have Word not only report errors, but sometimes act as if it printed correctly without delivering an error message at all!

This is most annoying when doing a mail merge. In this, Word will create a document in which each letter is its own section.

Here’s what I found with a document with about 200 sections, each of one page each (so 200 short letters). The pages are not numbered in the footer. Even so, Word does keep track of them in the status bar at the bottom of the screen (it shows section numbers here too).

What you’re supposed to do when doing a custom print is list a range of consecutive pages:

• This way if they are consecutive: 10-17 (prints all 8 pages)
• Or this way if they are singletons: 10,17 (print just 2 pages)

This all goes out the window when you have sections in your document.

What you’re supposed to do is something like this. For the sake of example, suppose my document is composed of 3 page letters. So page 10 is the first page of the 4th letter, and page 17 is the second page of the 6th letter. You’d enter something like the following in the custom print box:

• This way for all the consecutive pages: p1s4-p2s6
• Or this way for just the two pages: p1s4,p2s6

EXCEPT THAT, OMFG, THERE’s A TYPO IN THE OFFICIAL MICROSOFT WEBPAGE THAT COMES UP MOST OFTEN WHEN YOU GOOGLE THIS ISSUE.

That’s right. At the bottom of this page there’s a table that everyone uses to figure this out, and it shows that the above would have the section numbers before the page numbers, so:

• So: s4p1-s6p1
• Or: s4p1,s6p1

Aaargh! If you actually type it that way, you get an error message that is generic, and completely uninformative about this specific problem.

If you actually read that webpage, it does have the correct form in the body of the explanation. Somehow, the author reversed those in the table, and many thousands of hits later this page is still unchanged.

Now, there is a saving grace if your sections are all one page. If this is the case, you can just tell Word to print sections rather than pages, like so: s4-s6. But if you have multi-page sections, this will get you complete sections. That can be rather a lot.

Note that even really good internet resources, like Allen Wyatt’s site, don’t cover this issue.

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Word Tip # 26: Photos Into Grids

Word doesn’t always cooperate. One area where I’ve had trouble is appropriately sizing images in table cells.†

So, you’re taking photos of different sizes, and trying to put them into a table, so that you can have a grid of pictures.

How do you get all the pictures the same size?

First off, start with pictures that are all larger than the cells you’re trying to fill. I suppose all smaller would work too. The point is to get Word to react to each new photo like it did the previous one.

Now, mix three “tricks” together.

• First, go into Table Properties, choose the Row tab, and set your row height. The trick is to go to the drop down menu to the right, and choose “Exactly”. This keeps Word from resizing your rows.
• Next, while still on the Row tab, make sure the checkbox below that titled “Allow row to break across pages” is unchecked. This keeps Word from making your photos all fit in their natural size by breaking the table across pages.
• Lastly, while still within the Table Properties dialog, go to the Table tab, choose Options, and make sure the checkbox titled “Automatically resize to fit contents” is unchecked. This puts a lid on Word’s hyperactivity when it thinks it might be appropriate to resize for you.

Your performance may be OK if you only do some of those three. But the way to make it foolproof is to make sure you do all three.

More complete directions are here.

† I do this a several times a year to make photo seating charts to help learn students’ names.

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Need to Find a Command in Word?

Office Watch’s Word 2010 Command Finder is a table of all the commands (almost 2K of them).*†

Don’t blow this off yet if you’re kinda’ sorta’ interested. These things aren’t documented by Microsoft, so it takes years to put these lists together … but then most of the commands stay the same version after version. So if you work in Office 2013 or 365 or whatever, this is probably still a good resource.

In Office, commands are all the buttons that you see on your ribbon(s), plus … all the optional commands you might like to use or add.

The table contains the name of each command, it’s location on the ribbon (or off of it), it’s VBA code, and some details about how to use the command.

* For Word 2007, go here.

† There’s an apocryphal story that 90% of the requests for new features for Office are things that are already included in those 2K commands.

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Word Tip # 25: Changing Styles Quickly

Via TechRepublic: SHIFT+CTRL+S brings up a tiny little dialog box showing your current style, and smart text box where you can type in the name of a style that you want.

This is much better than using the Styles section on the Home ribbon.

BTW: There’s also a “Reapply” button in that dialog in case your style is acting snaky in your selected text.

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