Change The Background Color October 26, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : How do I ?, Formatting, Writing, Style , add a comment
The bright white text area of most word processors can become a quite tiring on the eyes after a few hours. You can of course jiggle the brightness and contrast settings on your monitor but a far better solution is to give your blank pages a light grey tint.
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Open Word so that you can judge the effect.
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Click Start, Control Panel and then Display.
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Select the Appearance tab and click into the area marked Window Text.
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Click in the Color box, open the color palette, and chose the shade of grey that’s most comfortable. FYI: The tint only applies to the display and will not affect the way documents look when they are printed.
Word Zoom October 26, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : How do I ? , add a commentYou know the feeling. You’ve been working hard on the computer all day. It gets hard to read anything. You could change the text size by using the Zoom control’s drop-down menu on the Toolbar… but even that’s too much hard work.
Here’s a great trick to change the text size.
Press and hold the Ctrl button on your keyboard and spin the mouse wheel.
Everything gets larger, and Larger and LARGER…
Fixing Word After It Crashes October 26, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : How do I ?, Troubleshooting , add a comment
Many of Word’s problems are related to the Normal.dot file. This is the master template behind word. When you start word, this is the file that determines the page layout, fonts, styles and so on.
When this file get damaged, for example a very long document may have many tables, bullet lists and headers, which may cause it to collapse under the weight of trying to remember all these settings.
When the Normal.dot file crashes, word crashes.
However, it’s not as bad as it sounds. If you delete this file, and restart Word, a new clean version of the Normal.dot file is automatically created.
To delete and then recreate the Normal.dot file, follow these steps:
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Make a copy of your Normal.dot file.
It’s usually found at: C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates -
Delete the original Normal.dot
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Close down and then re-start the computer.
Word automatically creates a new Normal.dot and goes back to its default settings. This may also improve its performance and reduce the likelihood of it crashing.
Print Out All Your Keyboard Shortcuts October 26, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : How do I ?, Formatting, Style , add a comment
Have you ever forgotten your keyboard shortcuts? This often happens if you haven’t used them for a while or changed computers. The best thing to do is print out a list of all shortcuts on your machine.
It’s very easy:
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Go to File, Print.
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In the Print What drop-down menu, select Key Assignments.
Creating Keyboard Shortcuts October 25, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : How do I ?, Formatting, Writing , add a comment
In MS Word you can assign frequently used commands to a keyboard shortcut.
To create a shortcut, follow these steps:
Right-click in the toolbar area.
Select Customize and click the Keyboard button.
To auto fix a table’s content, highlight Table on the Categories list, and then click AutoFixContent in the Commands window.
Type the keyboard combination into the Press new shortcut key box.
Click Assign.
If this combination is already in use, Word will advise you to find another combination or replace an existing one.
Quick Preview In Word October 25, 2006
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Microsoft Word’s preview tool lets you view the contents of a document WITHOUT having to open it.
This is a terrific time saver, especially if all you want to do is look at the cover sheet of a large document.
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From the File menu, click Open.
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Instead of opening the file, click the Views menu in the Open window pane.
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Select Preview. This opens a preview pane which displays the contents of the document.
Word Split Screen October 25, 2006
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When working on long documents it is sometimes useful to be able to see and edit other sections of the text at the same time. Word will let you do exactly that, though unless you stumble on the feature by accident you’ll probably never know it exists.
It’s really easy to use, all you have to do is:
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point, click and drag the tiny separator bar that’s immediately above the arrow on the vertical scroll bar.
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Drag it down to halfway and you have two separate views of the same document, each with their own scroll bars so you can move around both sections of the document independently. To revert to the normal single pane view, slide the separator bar of the screen.
Word Quick Launch October 25, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : How do I ?, Formatting, Writing, Troubleshooting , add a comment
Use this tip to automatically open the last document you worked on. This will save you time from having to go to the File menu and opening the document every time.
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Right-click on an empty part of the desktop.
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Select New, Create Shortcut.
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In the ‘Type location of the item’ box, paste the following command.
For Word 2000 use:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\WINWORD.EXE” /mFile1 Word 2002:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\winword.exe” /mFile1
Word 2003:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\winword.exe” /mFile1 -
Click Next, and name the Shortcut, for example, Open Word.
Change Your Word Icons October 25, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : How do I ?, Formatting, Writing, Style, Troubleshooting , add a commentMicrosoft Word lets you change and edit the icons on the toolbar.
Right-click onto an empty area of the toolbar and select Customize.
Right-click on the icon you want to change. Select either ‘Change button image’ or ‘Edit button image’.
Select a different icon or use the options to change its color and layout.
Remembering Where You Were In a Document October 25, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : How do I ?, Troubleshooting , add a comment
If you write a lot of documents, it’s easy to forget where you made your last edits. Instead of trying to find the last word you changed, you can use the Go Back feature. This automatically returns you to the last word you changed before the document was saved.
To return to the last edit you made, press Shift + F5.