Microsoft Word Tips, Tricks & Templates » Tips

How to Convert Boring Text into Stunning Tables

Editor — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:23:01 +0000

Let’s say you have a large block of text that you want convert into a table. How do you do it?

I write many technical documents. This means that many times I need to reformat text so that it is more attractive and easier to read. One way to do this is to place the text in tables. This lets the reader see the information in a more structured format. You can also do this by pasting the text in Excel but you then have to bring it back it Word, which defeats the purpose.

How to convert text to a table

1. Before you start insert separator characters — such as commas or tabs — to define where you want to divide the text into columns. For example, in a list with two words on a line, insert a comma or a tab after the first word to create a two-column table.

2. Select the text that you want to convert.

3. On the Insert tab, in the Tables group, click Table, and then click Convert Text to Table.

4. In the Convert Text to Table dialog box, under Separate text at, click the option for the separator character that is in your text.

5. In the Number of columns box, check the number of columns.

If you don’t see the number of columns that you expect, you may be missing a separator character in one or more lines of text.

6. Select any other options that you want and click OK.

If you want to undo what you’ve done, click Ctrl-Z.

Next week, how to convert a table into text!

How to change MS Word’s default color White to Blue

Editor — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:06:30 +0000

You can change the background color of Microsoft Word from White to Blue.

For some people, this makes it easier on the eye as it reduces the glare from the screen.

I have to admit, I prefer blue to white but have difficulties when adding images or inserting text with different color schemes.

Anyway, it’s a nice option to have. Here’s how I do it:

1. From the Tools menu, choose Options.

2. Click Blue Background, White Text.

That’s it!

How to Add Special Effects to your Next Business Report

Editor — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:16:05 +0000

How do I animate text in a Word Document? For example, to make dancing ants or add sparkles to the text.

1. Select the text you want to animate.

2. Click Format, Font, and then the Text Effects tab.

3. In the Animations box, click the effect you want, for example Sparkle Text.

You can preview the animation in the box at the bottom of the menu.

Only one animation effect can be selected at a time.

How to Create Keyboard Shortcuts in MS Word

Editor — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:03:25 +0000

Want to know how to Create Keyboard Shortcuts in MS Word?

In MS Word you can assign frequently used commands to a keyboard shortcut. To create a shortcut, follow these steps:

1. Right-click in the toolbar area.

2. Select Customize and click the Keyboard button.

3. To auto fix a table’s content, highlight Table on the Categories list, and then click AutoFixContent in the Commands window.

4. Type the keyboard combination into the Press new shortcut key box.

5. Click Assign.

If this combination is already in use, Word will advise you to find another combination or replace an existing one.

Did this work for you?

How to Improve Readability on Laptops and HD Flat Panel Displays

Editor — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:03:00 +0000

If you use a laptop to write, then get this free download from Microsoft. It gives you improved font display quality over traditional forms of font smoothing or anti-aliasing. ClearType improves readability on color LCD displays, such as laptops and flat panel displays. Readability on CRT screens can also be improved.

Tip: Use this online tuner to turn on and tune your Windows XP ClearType settings. If you experience problems download the Windows XP PowerToy version of the tuner. The online tuner does not currently work with Windows Vista.

ClearType improves the readability of text on existing LCDs (Liquid Crystal Displays), such as laptop screens, Pocket PC screens and flat panel monitors. With ClearType font technology, the words on your computer screen look almost as sharp and clear as those printed on a piece of paper.

ClearType works by accessing the individual vertical color stripe elements in every pixel of an LCD screen. Before ClearType, the smallest level of detail that a computer could display was a single pixel, but with ClearType running on an LCD monitor, we can now display features of text as small as a fraction of a pixel in width. The extra resolution increases the sharpness of the tiny details in text display, making it much easier to read over long durations.

Get ClearType and read more here.

5 Tips for Keyboard Fanatics & Time Poor Tech Writers

Editor — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:30:24 +0000

Donationcoder continue their excellent series of products with TapTap Hotkey Extender, a tiny super-efficient tray-based utility (under <100k) for keyboard fanatics.

It monitors hotkey combinations not supported by most programs (e.g. like doubletap right shift key). When such hotkey combinations are detected, TapTap will simulate a normal hotkey that the user has configured.

In this way, you can configure any of your programs to respond to these extended hotkey events as if they supported it natively.

For Example:
You might have a program which normally triggers on Alt+Ctrl+F5, but you want to configure it to trigger with a double tap of the right control key. You can use TapTap to detect Right Control Doubletap events, and send a Ctrl+Alt+F5 when it does. In this way, you can control your programs the way you want to, and they never know the difference.

TapTap Hotkey Extender is written in lean and mean C++ and highly optimized for insignificant cpu/memory access. It makes no changes to any system files and is completely safe. Comes with an installer but you can unpack the download manually and run it without installing.

Download it here: http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/TapTap/index.html

Why you MUST learn how to create a macro in MS Word 2002/2003/2007

Editor — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:25:59 +0000

One of the hidden features in Microsoft Word is macros. These are small mini-programs that you can create to automate tasks, for example, formatting a document, changing the layout or updating styles.

What is a macro? A macro is a series of commands and instructions that you group together as a single command to accomplish a task automatically.

Read why you MUST learn how to create a macro?

Why create a macro?

It makes your life that much easier. You can setup a macro to:

Automate a complex series of tasks
Combine multiple commands — for example, to insert a table with a specific size and borders, and with a specific number of rows and columns
Make an option in a dialog box more accessible
Speed up editing and document formatting

To do this, you can use the macro recorder in Word to record a sequence of actions, or you can create a macro from scratch by entering Visual Basic for Applications. The Visual Basic Editor contains a complete debugging toolset for finding syntax, run-time, and logic problems in your code.

If it sound’s intimidating, don’t be alarmed. If I can do this, you can.

How to create macros in Word 2007

To work with macros in Office Word 2007, you need to have the Developer tab displayed. This is turned off by default.

Here is how you turn it on.

To show the Developer tab in Word 2007:

1. Click the Microsoft Office Button (top left corner in Word) and then click Word Options.

2. Click Popular.

3. Select the Show Developer tab in the Ribbon check box.

The Developer tab is now displayed to the far right of the ribbon.

How to record a macro

1. Click on the Developer tab, then in the Code area, click Record Macro.

2. In the Macro name box, type a name for the macro.

Careful! If you name the new macro the same as a built-in macro in Word 2007, the new macro actions will replace the built-in macro.

3. In the Store macro in box, click the template or document where you want to store the macro.

Maybe you want to apply the macro to one document only or maybe to all documents. It’s up to you.

4. In the Description box, type a description, for example, Change Fonts to Verdana.

5. Do one of the following:

To save the macro — without assigning it to a button on the Quick Access Toolbar or to the keyboard — click OK.

Otherwise…

To assign the macro to the Quick Access Toolbar:

1. Click the Button icon.

2. Under Customize Quick Access Toolbar, select the document (or all documents) you want to add the macro to the Quick Access Toolbar.

3. Under Choose commands from dialog box, click the macro you’re recording, and click Add.

4. Click OK to begin recording the macro.

To assign the macro to the Keyboard

1. Click Keyboard.

2. In the Commands box, click the macro that you are recording.

3. In the Press new shortcut key box, type the key sequence you want (e.g. A + F4) , and then click Assign.

4. Click Close to begin recording the macro.

5. Perform the actions that you want to include in the macro.

6. When finished recording, click Stop Recording in the Code group.

How to use Visual Basic for Applications

If you need to update the macro, you can go directly into the code and change it through the Visual Basic for Applications editor.

Note that this is not the Visual Basic software that developers use to create applications but is an editor —that is already inside Microsoft Word — which uses a scripting language to update the macro.

If you’re familiar with any scripting language, then you’ll soon figure this out.

1. On the Developer tab, in the Code group, click Macros.

2. In the Macro name box, type a name for the macro.

Tip: If you give a new macro the same name as a built-in macro in Office Word 2007, the new macro actions will replace the built-in macro. To view a list of built-in macros, click Word Commands in the Macros in list.

3. In the Macros in list, click the template or document in which you want to store the macro.

4. Click Create to open the Visual Basic Editor.

How do I run the macro in Word 2007?

You have a few choices.

If you created the macro to run from the menu bar, click the Button you added there.

If you created the macro to run from your keyboard, click the numbers
and/or letters you assigned to the macro, for example, I use F4 to run a formatting macro and F5 to run a macro that changes all the text to US English.

If you setup neither of these, you can run the macro as follows:

1. Click on the Developer tab.

2. Click Macros.

3. Select your macro.

4. Click Run.

This activates the macro. It runs through the actions as per your instructions.

How to create a macro in Word 97/2000/2003

Open a new Word document, and type a few words.

1. Click Tools.

2. Scroll to Macro, and click Record New Macro.

3. Type Test in the Macro Name: window and click OK.

An activity box appears which shows that you are now in Record mode. You can use shortcut keys for the commands you want or you can use your mouse.

4. Select one of the words that you typed before starting the macro.

5. Now (with the word still highlighted) change the font style (example: “Times New Roman” to “Verdana”) and the font size.

6. Remove the highlight from the word by pressing your right-arrow key.

7. Click the square in the CommandBar to close it and stop the Macro recording.

8. Click Tools, Macro, Macros, click Test, and then click Run.

The commands you made while recording your macro will take place when you run the macro!

9. Next, click Tools, Macro, Macros, Test, Edit, File, and then click Save Normal.

You’ve now saved the macro and added it to the list of macros in Word.

Finally, close the Microsoft Visual Basic editor and assign a shortcut key to your new macro, for example, if you want to use it in the future. This is optional. You don’t have to. When you re-open the Macro Editor, you’ll see that the Test macro is still there.

How to test your new macro?

1. Using the example above, click to the right of any word in a document and then run your macro.

2. The font and font size will change automatically, e.g. it will change from Times Roman to Verdana.

You can use the macro recorder to record a sequence of actions, or you can create a macro from scratch by entering Visual Basic for Applications code in the Visual Basic Editor.

My macro doesn’t work?

There could be a few reasons for this.

1. Check if the macro is setup to run in all active templates.

You might have setup the macro to run in the current document only or maybe in the
Normal.Dot file only. Open the macro, check this setting and then re-run.

2. When you record a macro, you MUST use the mouse to click commands and options on Word’s menu bars. You can’t select text.

You MUST use the keyboard to select text.

3. You didn’t assign the macro to a button or to the keyboard.

If you didn’t do this, then you need to go into the Developer tab (far right on Word menu bar
in 2007), click Macros and then select the macro from the list.

Want to learn more?

You MUST read this book on Mastering VBA for Microsoft Office 2007.

Also, try this here and this here and here.

Did your macro work?

I hope so!

If not, let me know what went wrong and we’ll try to fix it.

PS: Where are the built-in macros in Word 2007? To see a list of built-in macros, click on the Developer tab, then Code group, Macros, and Word Commands.

7 Steps to Better Technical Writing

Editor — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:22:00 +0000

Technical Writing is not difficult when you know where and how to start. So, when you write a technical document, consider the following 7 points:

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Glossary – make a glossary, even for a half dozen words.
Definitions – create a list of definitions and acronyms. Always explain what the acronym means when it’s first encountered.
Use bold for the definition or acronym to make it easy to find it again.
Analogy – provide a comparison or analogy.
Graphics – Provide graphics to illustrate the object in question, how it is assembled, or how it is used by operatives.
Replace general, abstract, and needlessly objective words with more concrete, specific, and simpler words.
Break long sentences into shorter sentences.
Use terminology consistently.

These points are not meant to be all-inclusive. However, if you are new to tech writing, this should put you on the right road.

New Wikipedia of Organization Charts

Editor — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:44:15 +0000

No Inc have taken AJAX and “Web 2.0-ness” to create CogMap, which is a terrific Wikipedia of organization charts.

Their own site is an organization chart wiki! This means that it is a collection of organization charts online that anyone can edit, add to, and help maintain.

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CogMap is a tool for sales people, entrepreneurs, and recruiters to understand organizations and keep information up to date. If you are like us, you had some of these things happen to you:

Worked at a company without a published organization chart and had no idea who worked for anyone else
Tried to figure out who to call at a company and come up empty
Bought a list of people to call and had all the information be wrong
Met people that all had different titles and been unable to tell who was the decision-maker in the room!

There are several demos over here http://www.cogmap.com/help.php including one on Microsoft.

How to Quickly Reduce Microsoft Word File Size – Secret #1

Editor — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:13:26 +0000

Ever had your Microsoft Word file explode from 1MB to 10MB in just a few minutes? In the tech writing world, Microsoft Word tends to get a bad rap.

One of the arguments put against Word is that its fairly unstable and prone to creating ‘horrors’, such as bloating in size until your (Microsoft!) operating system grinds to a halt.

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Compared with Adobe FrameMaker, this is true. FrameMaker is very stable, BUT can be awkward to use. Not even cut and paste…

I’ll admit it! I prefer Microsoft Word any day.

Bloated file sizes are a real problem. No-one will deny this. But, in the course of creating some long documents in MS Word, I’ve learned a few small secrets.

And these small secrets are guaranteed to save you ALOT of time.

The first offender is Bullet Lists. If there is one thing that’s guaranteed to destroy Word, its bullet lists.

Here’s what tends to happen.

When you click on the Bullet List from the Word toolbar, Word ‘points’ this Bullet List to the Normal.dot file.

In other words, it uses the default settings in the Normal.dot and applies these settings. Fine. No problem!

But… if you then cut and paste a Bulleted List from another document into your working file, Word gets very confused.

“What Normal.dot file do I now link to?”

AND, if you then use a special bullet style, it has a nervous breakdown…

What happens? Suddenly, your machine starts to grind while Word struggles to resolve this issue. And as it can’t, it crashes!

Here’s what to do instead!

In Word, create separate styles for each different bullet lists that you need, for example Bullet Regular, Bullet Indent, Bullet Square and so on.
When you need to use a bullet list, select the correct style from the drop-down menu.
If you want to import a bullet list from another document, first select the Clear Formatting option from the drop down menu (this removes all formatting) and then cut it into the working document. Then apply the correct style.

Follow these three steps and you’ll keep your Word docs happy and healthy.

In the next article, we’ll look at another way to reduce large word files.

This is our first ‘insider secret’ on taming Microsoft Word. What’s been your experience?

PS: Please drop me a line at ivan klariti com and we’ll share it online.

ivanwalsh.blogspot.com

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When is a Word document not a document?

Editor — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:33:47 +0000

The new Word Blog over on MSDN keeps cranking out the good stuff.

Scroll down this page and read the Q and A about document types.

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Q: When is a document not a document?

A: When it’s a form.

“This is another question that we spent a lot of time discussing when we started to think about building what became content controls. We didn’t just want another tool for doing online forms in Word – not only is there a great tool to do it today, but people already know how to do that in Word and don’t need another way to do the same thing.

Review The Office 2007 UI Bible

Editor — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:25:37 +0000

Jensen Harren has compiled the 200 or so posts he’s made since starting last September.

To make it easier for the rest of us he and a colleague created a Table of Contents of all the posts.

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“I’ve been meaning to sit down and create a kind of table of contents for all of the posts here—a starting point for people to read about the Office 2007 UI. But then, I found out that someone already did the work for me. Patrick Schmid, a OneNote MVP and friend of the Office 2007 UI, put together what he called the Office UI Bible on his blog—a fully organized catalog of many of my posts.”

This is worth bookmarking if you’re interested in the new Office user interface.

Visio Hyperlink Problem in Internet Explorer 7

Editor — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:40:48 +0000

Visio is used by many Technical Writers and Programmers to create diagrams and flowcharts. Some of you have encountered issues involving hyperlinks in Visio’s HTML output and Internet Explorer 7. For example, clicking a hyperlink in a drawing saved as HTML from Visio 2003 results in an error that says “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site. Operation aborted.”

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Then you may want to read this post as it offers some ways to work around it. Visio’s HTML output and IE7

How to update the Date automatically when you open Microsoft Word 2003

Editor — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:42:42 +0000

You can update the Date and Time in Word when you open it. There are two steps involved here:

To add a date that Word will updated automatically, you need to insert a ‘field’.

1. To do this, go to Insert, Date and Time and choose the format you want.

This inserts a field in the page which displays the time. This time, by the way, is determined by your computer’s clock.

2. Check “Update Automatically” so that it will update when you print.

The second approach is if you want to change the format of the date field or work with the other features.

To do this:

1. Click File, Insert, Field, Date and Time.

2. Select Date from the field names list and pick a format that suits your needs.

Tip: to manually force an update, click in the date and press F9.

How to Change the Windows Desktop Theme

Editor — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:43:31 +0000

Like its brother-in-arms, the Screensaver, the Windows Desktop Themes eat away at your computer’s memory. Unless you really need them, uninstall! You’ll have a much quicker and more reliable machine.To change or remove desktop themes, follow these steps:

On the Desktop, right-click and click Properties.
Click the Themes tab.

3. In the Theme box, select the theme you want or click None.

Tip: if you have to use a theme, select one with few graphics.