Word
Removing formatting 1
Ever copied something into Word and had problems removing somebody else's weird and wonderful formatting from the text? This seems to be an issue especially when copying something from a Web page.
Try highlighting what you copied in Word, holding down the Ctrl key and pressing the Spacebar.
That should remove character formatting (bold, font size etc.). You could then hold down Ctrl and press Q to remove paragraph formatting (indents, bullets etc.).
Removing formatting 2
This is a more radical cure for the above problem.
Copy the text with the formatting into Notepad. This useful application is usually to be found under Start | Programs | Accessories. Notepad is a 'text editor'. That means that it deals only with text, and therefore strips formatting. If you then copy the text from Notepad into Word, you should find that even the most evil formatting is no more.
What to do when Word formatting goes horribly wrong 1
Even after one has been using Word for several years, it is fairly common for something inexplicable to occur in one's formatting.
The following displays non-printing characters (Spaces are dots, tabs are arrows etc.):
On the Tools menu in Word, click Options, and then the View tab.
Under 'Formatting marks', select the All check box.
Return to Word editing.
Looks hideous doesn't it? However, now you can actually see all the formatting characters in your document. This should explain many strange formatting experiences. You have a chance of seeing where it has gone wrong.
What to do when Word formatting goes horribly wrong 2
This is stronger medicine for the above condition.
Open Notepad by going to Start | Programs | Accessories | Notepad.
Notepad is a "text editor". It does not support formatting, and so should remove all formatting from text.
Copy the part of the formatting that has gone wrong, and a chunk before and after it, into Notepad. N.B. you don't need to save the text in Notepad.
Now copy the text from Notepad back into Word over the problem text.
These two tips solve about 90% of Word formatting problems; the rest are rather more resistant to treatment.
UFOs
i.e. Unidentified *Formatted* Objects
Ever had some object (e.g. a piece of formatting) behaving strangely in Word?
Go to the Help menu and click What's This.
Your mouse cursor gains a question mark.
Click the object, and Word will provide information on what it is, formatting etc.
Incidentally if you have converted a document from Word Perfect, strange things happen to objects in Word.
One often does best to copy the text of the document into Notepad (Start | Programs | Accessories | Notepad), copy it into a new Word document and reformat it from scratch.
Need to insert accented characters into Word?
There's rather a nice system - hold down Ctrl, press the accent and then press the letter.
Here are some examples:
Ctrl-'-e gives e acute (' is probably under @ on your keyboard)
Ctrl-'-E gives E acute
Ctrl-`-e gives e grave (`is probably to the left of the 1 [one] key)
Ctrl-Shift-^-e gives e circumflex (^ is probably above 6, hence the Shift)
Ctrl-Shift-:-u gives u umlaut (: is probably above ;)
Ctrl-Shift-&-s gives German sz (& is probably above 7)
Ctrl-Shift-~-n gives n tilde (~ is probably above #)
Presumably at some point Microsoft will add this useful feature to its other programs (Excel, Access etc.) ...
Inserting pictures
To insert a picture in a Word document or on a PowerPoint slide, go to Insert | Picture | From File.
(Is that the only case Gates & Co. speak English?)
If you are working on WTS, Word and PowerPoint look for pictures by default in N:\MyWork\My Pictures\.
Fortunately this is also where Internet Explorer saves its pictures by default (when you use right-click | Save Picture As).
You can import pictures in most formats (e.g. .jpg, .gif, .bmp) into Word and PowerPoint.
If you cannot import a picture, it may be possible to change its format to .jpg in an image-editing program such as Photo Shop Elements (on WTS).
You would open the picture and go to File | Save As and select JPEG in the Format box.
This may also be worth doing with large pictures (over a couple of hundred Kb) as they slow down Word and PowerPoint.
As always with pictures, do NOT use it if you are unsure about its copyright status!
Changing the font size
There is a quick way of changing the font size in Word.
First highlight the text whose font size you want to change.
Then:
- hold down the Ctrl key and press [ to decrease the font size by 1 pt.
- hold down the Ctrl key and press ] to increase the font size by 1 pt.
Note: [ and ] are probably to the right of the P key.
Points and fonts
One spends a surprising amount of time changing point sizes and fonts in Word.
Ctrl-Shift-P and Ctrl-Shift-F can save using the mouse, and therefore, quite a bit of time.
Select the piece of text whose font you wish to alter.
Ctrl-Shift-P (for *P*oint) takes you straight to the Font Size box.
Type the size you want in points (noting that many people struggle to read much if it's smaller than 12).
Admittedly Ctrl-[ and Ctrl-] may be quicker ways of changing point size.
Ctrl-Shift-F (for *F*ont) takes you straight to the Font box.
Type the first letter of your font (e.g. v for Verdana) and then use the down-arrow to scroll through all fonts starting with e.g. v until you come to the font you desire.
Note the notation: Ctrl-Shift-P means hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys and press p.
Creating headings quickly in Word
You can create headings in a Word document really quickly by placing the cursor anywhere in the text to be the heading, holding down Ctrl and Alt and pressing 1 (Ctrl-Alt-1) for the biggest heading.
Yes - you don't even need to select the text to be the heading, just placing the cursor on the line is enough.
There are also Ctrl-Alt-2 and Ctrl-Alt-3 for smaller headings.
You can control the formatting of these headings by going to Format | 'Styles and formatting'*, selecting "Heading 1" etc. in the left pane and clicking the Format button and then Font.
Change the font settings and click OK.
Tip within a tip:
Moreover, if you insert a table of contents or an index (go to Insert | Index and Tables), Word knows to indent the various levels of headings in it correctly, as long as one has used them consistently throughout the document.
*i.e. 'Styles and formatting' on the Format menu
Telling Word etc. where to start
Have you noticed that programs presume you want to open files in a particular folder when you issue an open command (e.g. File | Open or Ctrl-O)?
It's a real pain if they are presuming you keep your files somewhere outlandish, and you have to scroll up and down trees of folders to find where you do keep them.
Anyway, some programs let you tell them where you keep your files. For example, in Word, go to Options on the Tools menu.
Click the File Locations tab. Bingo.
If you select Documents and then click Modify, it will let you change Word's starting folder.
Just click OK when you're in the right folder, and, with a good wind, that is the last time you'll need to go folder searching in Word.
I would suggest that you keep files in a system of folders (defined by subject) on your N or R drive. The topmost folder would be the one that you point Word at.
A spring clean in Word
Windows Explorer is the best place to do major file management, but if a spring clean of Word files is required, Word has some useful functionality:
In Word, hold down Ctrl and press O to bring up the Open dialogue box.
Navigate to the folder you want to tidy up.
If you know you want to get rid of a file, highlight it and press the Delete button on your keyboard (yes - it does work here!).
If you want to rename a file, either press F2, or right-click* the file, click Rename, give it a new name being careful not to delete its extension e.g. .doc and press Enter.
To copy a file, hold down Ctrl and then press C (for Copy) and V (for paste). The file is called "Copy of [filename]".
*Click it using your right mouse button, instead of the normal left one.
Tidying up your working area
One of the irritations of modern computing is over-busy screens.
So much of the screen is taken up by things you never use, that you do not actually have enough space to do the work.
In Word, the solutions to this problem lie on the View menu:
You almost certainly require the Standard and Formatting toolbars*, but you are probably best switching off any others. Anyway, you can control which toolbars you have switched on, by going to the View menu and selecting Toolbars. For example, the Antioch (Greek), Antioch (Hebrew) and Reference Manager 9 toolbars are switched on by default at UCL, but you can almost certainly save a lot of space by switching all three off.
Then there are the rulers at the top and sides of the screen. Again you should probably switch these off by default. You can always get them on again if you are working with tabs, images etc. Control whether they're on or off on the View menu by selecting Rulers. (shortcut: Alt V R i.e. Alt then V then R, NOT Alt-V-R all down at the same time!)
Lastly, Normal View is most efficient from a space point of view. Go to the View menu and make sure Normal is selected.
(shortcut: Alt V N)
*toolbar "a row of clickable icons"
Tables
Tables are obviously useful for inserting data in tabular format into Word, but they are also a powerful way of arranging items on a page.
Go to Insert | Table on the Table menu. Enter the number of columns and rows. Try to get the number of columns right as it is a little fiddly to change it later. If you don't have enough rows, pressing the Tab key in the last cell will add another one.
The only difference when using tables for layout is that you probably want the borders of the table to be invisible. With the cursor in the table go to Select | Table on the Table menu. Right-click and go to Borders and Shading. Click None in the left column and then OK.
For example, if you had three columns in your table, you could have text in the first, a picture in the second (Insert | Picture | From File) and then more text in the third. This is a surprisingly powerful technique.
You can drag the column borders where you want them; just place the mouse cursor above the border, wait for it to display two arrows, then hold down the left mouse button and drag.
One strange thing about tables:
To delete a row you need to click in the margin to the left of it and press Ctrl-X (or go to Edit | Cut). If you were to press the Delete key instead you would delete any data in the row, but the row would remain there stubbornly.
Incidentally tables may be used in a similar way in Dreamweaver for laying out Web pages.
Converting files from other formats
Word 2002 (the version presently on WTS) can open documents created in a wide variety of formats - WordPerfect, Rich Text Format (.rtf), plain text (.txt), HTML (.htm or .html), Works (but with a low success rate, although it's a Microsoft product!) etc.
To open a document in another format, open Word, hold down Ctrl and press O. Navigate to the folder where the file is, and, in the Files of Type box, select All Files. Click OK.
The file should now open. You may well find you need to change the font. Hold down Ctrl and press A to select the whole document and then select Times New Roman etc. in the Font drop-down box on your toolbar.
To convert the file to Word, choose Save As on the File menu and make sure the Files of Type box says Word Document. If it is saying something else, click in the box and press the Home key, which takes you to the top of the list of file formats, i.e. to Word Document.
Remove any fullstops and special characters from the file name, as Word does not like them. The .doc ending ("extension") will be added automatically.
Click OK and it's done.
Converting from .doc to .pdf
At present there is no utility on WTS to turn Word files (.doc) into PDF files (.pdf).
However, there is a utility on the web.
Just go to
http://gobcl.com/convert_pdf.asp
and fill in the online form.
It will convert a Word document so long as it is not larger than 2Mb, and email it to you.
The Web site seems to make a good job of the conversion, and often e-mails the PDF file soon after one has filled in the form.
So far I have only found one disadvantage to this approach - security.
I don't think I would trust the website with a document containing sensitive information.
Print only to the end
You probably know that you can print ranges of pages in a Word document, by pressing Ctrl-P and typing, for example, 3-4 in the Pages box.
However, did you know that typing e.g. 3- (with just the hyphen) will print everything to the end of the document?
Good use of the options in the Print dialog box can save a lot of paper.