Monday, March 30, 2015

Make a Dash

M-N-Hyphen



From the Word MVP Forum:
Dashes

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.


The keyboard shortcuts are:
Alt+0150 for an N dash
Alt+0151 for an M dash or two hyphens in a row

Here's an article from the Editorium.com:
Making dashes easy
By Jack M. Lyon

Here are articles on:
Colons, Semicolons, and Em-dashes

And:
Interruptive Punctuation


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Saturday, March 28, 2015

Embed a Show

Stick it in Word



You might like to distribute a short PowerPoint slide show, and include some extra material.

Open Word and PowerPoint.
Arrange the windows so that both applications can be seen.
(Right-click an empty area of the Task bar and choose "Tile Windows Vertically."

Type your introductory text in the Word document.

Switch to PowerPoint and open the PowerPoint file.

In Slide Sorter View, hold down the Ctrl key and select the slides you want to include.

Drag the selected group of slides onto the Word document.

You will only see the first slide in the document, but if you double-click on the image, the PowerPoint show will run.

It will also work in Excel.

(This, of course assumes that the target machine has PowerPoint or PowerPoint Viewer installed)


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Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Tables

Without reservations


Word is more versatile than Excel or PowerPoint when it comes to manipulating how a table will appear. Go to View>Toolbars Tables and Borders, and also see the Table menu especially, "Table Properties" .
(In 2007 go to Insert Table, or Right click the Table)

Often, you will insert a table at the top of a document, and then later realize that you need to enter text above the table.

A keyboard shortcut to fix this is to place the insertion point in the first cell in the top left corner of the table.

Hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter and Word will move the table down and place the insertion point at the top.

This is also the combination used to split an existing table in two.
(If there are no entries in the cell, the Enter key will move the insertion point. If there is text in the cell or a paragraph above the table, then the Enter key will just start a new paragraph inside the cell.)

Here are some more suggestions from the Word MVPS web site:
Maximising the performance of Word tables

PC World:
How to Create Tables


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Monday, March 23, 2015

Change Case

CAPS - No - caps



Sometimes mistakes are made in setting the case for sentences.
There are four general categories of capitalization:

Sentence Case - The first letter of a sentence is capitalized

Lowercase - all words are in lowercase

Uppercase - ALL CAPITALS

Title Case - All Words Are Capitalized
(This is, really, "Proper case". Title case would be "All Important Words are Capitalized".
Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs should be uppercase. Common articles, prepositions, and conjunctions should be lowercase
.)
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

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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Saturday, March 21, 2015

Word is Full of HTML

Clean up tools


From the Help file:
"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."


Using filtered HTML save may not clean everything up. If you need more help see Informit.com:
Clean HTML from Word: Can It Be Done?
By Laurie Rowell.

Also:

HTML Tidy Library Project


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Monday, March 16, 2015

Holiday Templates

Make your own stationary


Microsoft Office Online has a group of themed holiday designs.

  • Holiday party invitation
  • Holiday menu
  • Holiday place cards
  • Holiday stationery
  • Holiday thank you card (quarter-fold)
  • Holiday gift certificate
Poinsettias


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Monday, March 09, 2015

Identify Formatting Inconsistencies

A suggestion I don't suggest



Microsoft Word can detect formatting inconsistencies as you type and then mark them with a blue, wavy underline.You may want to have all the headings in a document formatted the exact same way, but you inadvertently formatted some of them differently. Word can detect these inconsistencies as you are typing and underline them with a blue wavy line to alert you.

Microsoft Word File Tab:
  1. On the menu, click Options, and then click Proofing.
  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.
ShaunaKelly.com:
How the Styles and Formatting pane works in Microsoft Word 2002 and 2003  

Styles in Word 2010


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Monday, March 02, 2015

Word Ranges

Pre-defined locations



When entries are made in a document, Word creates a Story Range to identify what part of the document is being used. These ranges can be used in macros to search for items , change text, or other actions.

This macro, for instance, changes the text in just the header of the first section:

Sub HeaderFooterObject()
Dim MyText As String
MyHeaderText = "This would be your text"
With ActiveDocument.Sections(1)
.Headers(wdHeaderFooterPrimary).Range.Text = MyHeaderText
End With
End Sub

When you use Edit>Replace in Word, it does a fine job of locating all occurrences of the target in the body of the document or in the header or footer.

Something fails, however, when you record the action and try to run it as a macro. To make it work, you must loop through the built in ranges of a Word document.

The exercise is interesting if only for the exposure to the built in ranges such as:

  • wdCommentsStory
  • wdEndnotesStory
  • wdEvenPagesFooterStory
  • wdEvenPagesHeaderStory
  • wdFirstPageFooterStory
  • wdFirstPageHeaderStory
  • wdFootnotesStory
  • wdMainTextStory
  • wdPrimaryFooterStory
  • wdPrimaryHeaderStory

    and
  • wdTextFrameStory.
See this article for more information: Word.MVPS.org:
Find and replace with VBA
 

Also: Microsoft KB
VBA macro examples to insert text into a document


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