The Verse - Volume 9
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Tech Tips – Great tips for Microsoft Word – Part Two

No matter how long you've been using Microsoft Word, you can always learn new techniques to help you work faster and smarter. Here are some advanced tips and tricks for Word 97/2000/XP compiled by the editors of TechRepublic. See last month’s issue of The Verse for some basic Word tips.

Advanced tips

Instant AutoCorrect. Right-click on a word that's flagged as misspelled to display the Edit shortcut menu. If Word has a suggested alternative, AutoCorrect will appear on the menu. Choose AutoCorrect and then select the correct version of the word from the submenu to create an AutoCorrect entry.

Effortless AutoText. Save time by inserting AutoText automatically. Type an entry name and press [F3]. Or take advantage of Word's AutoComplete feature. Just open the Tools menu, select AutoCorrect, click the AutoText tab, and turn on the Show AutoComplete Tip for AutoText and Dates option. With this feature active, Word will show a ScreenTip after you begin typing an AutoText item. Just press [Enter] and Word will insert the item for you. (This feature works the same way with dates and days of the week.)

Marker display. Work with paragraph markers and tab marks displayed. Simply click the Show/Hide ¶ button on the Standard toolbar. Displaying those normally hidden characters helps you avoid inadvertently deleting objects or changing formatting; it also helps you figure out funky alignment and extra white space problems.

Use AutoCorrect as a text expander. You don't have to keep typing those long words or phrases you have trouble with. Come up with a three- or four-letter abbreviation for it and add it to AutoCorrect. For example, say you often need to type Indianapolis. Press [Alt] T (to open the Tools menu) and press A to select AutoCorrect. Type indy, press [Tab], type Indianapolis, and press [Enter] twice. Now, any time you type indy followed by a space or any punctuation, Word will automatically "correct" that spelling and replace it with Indianapolis. You can save up to 255 characters in an AutoCorrect entry. (If you need more characters or you want to include pictures along with text, use AutoText instead.)

Clear a table. If you need to delete the contents of all the cells in a table, just select the table and press [Delete] (not [Backspace]).

Display built-in styles. When you create a document, Word starts you out with a handful of basic styles. If you need to apply a more specialized style, hold down [Shift] and click on the arrow beside the Style box on the Formatting toolbar. Word will expand the Style list to include all its built-in styles. Just select the one you need and Word will apply that style and add it to your document.

Quick table column total. Performing addition in a Word table is simple. Click in an empty cell at the bottom of a column of numbers. Open the Table menu, select Formula, and press [Enter] to accept the default Sum function.

Styles as you go. Define styles on the fly: Format a paragraph the way you want, type a name in the Style box on the Formatting toolbar, and press [Enter].

Add a border to a page. To add a border to page, open the Format menu, select the Borders and Shading command, and click the Page Border tab.

Faster Go To. Double-click the left end of the status bar to bring up the Go To tab so you can jump to an item in your document such as bookmark, a specific page, a table, a section, and so on.

Splitsville. See two parts of a document at the same time by choosing Split from the Window menu and clicking to place the split bar where you want to divide the document window. Separate vertical scroll bars allow you to bring different portions of text into view—and you can set different view preferences for each pane (such as normal view in the top pane and outline view in the bottom). To restore the panes to a single window, just double-click the split bar or drag it beyond the top or bottom of the window.

Selective word count. Need to know how many words, characters, paragraphs, or lines appear in a portion of a document? Just select the text you want to run the count on prior to choosing Word Count from the Tools menu.

Trim ragged text by turning on hyphenation. When text contains many long words and your left and right margins are close to one another, your right margin can look ragged. To help smooth out that edge, choose Language from the Tools menu, select Hyphenation, click in the Automatically Hyphenate Document check box, and click OK.

Copy formatting to more than one block of text. To copy the formatting from the current word or paragraph, click the Format Painter button on the Standard toolbar and then select the word or block of text to which you want to apply that formatting. To copy the same formatting to more than one block of text, double-click on the Format Painter button. Then you can apply the formatting to several blocks of text. To turn off the Format Painter, just click the button again or press [Esc].

Jump quickly between documents. If you work with a lot of open, overlapping documents, here's a quick way to cycle between them: Press [Ctrl] [F6] to jump from one to the next; [Ctrl] [Shift] [F6] will jump you backward.

Insert and format symbols. For instant access to thousands of special symbols, like foreign characters and wild and crazy icons, open the Insert menu, choose Symbol, and look through the selections available with different fonts and subsets of fonts. After you insert a special character or symbol, you can then select it and use [Grow Font] and [Shrink Font] on it.

Create a desktop shortcut to a document. To create a document shortcut, first highlight some text to serve as a target in the document and click the Copy button. Next, minimize the Word window or drag it out of the way so you can see the Windows desktop. Then, hold down [Ctrl], right-click on the desktop, and choose Paste Shortcut. You'll probably want to change the shortcut name to something more meaningful. To do this, click on the shortcut to select it and then press [F2] to activate the label for editing. Type the desired name and press [Enter]. Close your document, clicking Yes to save your changes. You can even exit Word, if you want. Then, simply double-click on the desktop shortcut. Word will open the associated document, navigate to your target text, and select it.