Microsoft Word Tips, Tricks & Templates » Dialog box

How To Take a Perfect Screenshot & Avoid Cropping the Screen Capture Image?

Editor — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:58:11 +0000

You want to take a screenshot of something and not have to fix it when you’re finished.

Screenshots can be tricky if the window, dialog box, or application floats over the main screen. Instead of taking a screenshots of the entire window, you can automatically take only the most active window.

Here’s my favorite trick when taking Print Screens. Some people call these screenshots or screen dumps.

Tip: The print screen button (PrintScrn) is next to F12 on your keyboard.

1. To take a screenshot, press PrintScrn.

2. Open Word and Paste (Edit, Paste) the screenshot into your document.

This is fine if you’re capturing the entire screen.

But what do happens if you’re using an application, such as SAP, with multiple floating screens?

You don’t want to capture all these screens floating over each other. It looks terrible and too much work to fix in Paint.

So, how do you capture the active ‘floating’ screen only? Is there a quick way to avoid editing the entire screen?

Here’s the trick!

Hold down ALT and then press PrintScrn.

This captures the active screen only. This trick can save you many hours editing and tidying up images.

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!

MS Word 2010: Is the new Find re-design better or worse?

Editor — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:39:04 +0000

In the new version of Word 2010, there is a new ‘integrated flavor of the Find feature’.

Scott Walker, Lead Program Manager, for Microsoft Word explains that ‘Rather than a modeless dialog box that jumps about on the screen to get out of the way, the basic Find experience now sits conveniently at the top of the navigation pane.”

Note: The Word 2007 Find dialog is still available by clicking the dropdown at the right-hand edge of the search box.

So, what is the new Find user experience?

Scott runs through how it works:

Type in the Search Document box at the top of the navigation pane to start.

As you type:

All matches within the document highlight yellow. Word scrolls the document to the first match (and continues to scroll as you refine the term).
If you’re on the headings tab of the navigation pane, any tab corresponding to a heading whose content contains the term you searched for is highlighted yellow
If you’re on the pages tab of the pane, the thumbnails for the pages that don’t contain the search term are filtered out, leaving you with just the list of pages that have what you’re looking for
If you’re on the search results tab, you’ll see the list of matches with a small snippet of context. Note that this list grows and shrinks as you refine your search
Hit Enter is the same as clicking Find Next.
The dropdown menu to the right of the search box also offers many of the popular object types you might want to search for, including graphics, tables, equations, footnotes/endnotes, and comments (by author).

Other features

You can turn off the incremental search mode, and in the search options you can change settings such as match case, whole word only, etc.

The New Find Experience in Microsoft Word 2010: http://blogs.msdn.com

How to Force Word to Close after it Crashes

Editor — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 06:05:00 +0000

Word crashed. But when you go to re-open it, it refuses to do so. What’s happening here and how do I fix it.

How to Force Word to Close after it Crashes

When Word crashes, the Winword.exe file may still be running behind the scenes. I know.

If it is running, why won’t it open? There is no easy answer to this but here’s how you can get it re-started.

What you have to do is close this the Winword.exe before you re-open Word as otherwise system conflicts may arise, i.e. you may not be able to open Word, as the system sees that Winword.exe is currently running.

To close Winword.exe let’s use the Task Manager

1. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL. In the Windows Security dialog box, click Task Manager.

2. On the Processes tab, click any instance of Winword.exe, and then click End Process.

3. Close the Windows Task Manager, and then re-start Word.

Final Tip

One final tip here is that when you re-open Microsoft Word, make sure that the files you were looking for can be opened.

If you have difficulty with this, please take a look at this very detailed tutorial over on the Klariti site.

How to Open and Repair a Damaged Word file

Editor — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:46:51 +0000

You can “force” Word to recover a document after it has crashed. Microsoft Word tries to automatically recover a damaged document if it detects a problem with the file. Here’s how.

Microsoft Word tries to automatically recover a damaged document if it detects a problem with the file.

When this happens, it will re-open Word and show you a version of the document – before it crashed. It may also show you a second version of the document, which will be a second version of the document, usually recovered with the ‘autosave’ function.

How to Recover Text from a Crashed Word file

1. Open Word, and in the File menu, click Open.

2. In the File of type list, click All Files *.*.

3. In the Open dialog box, select your document.

4. Point to the arrow on the Open button, and then click Open and Repair.

This will open the Word file.

The style and formatting may be slightly damaged but you will have most of the text and can, at least, use it to rebuild a new document.

One final suggestion is to copy the material into a new Microsoft Word document, just in case there is some gremlin in the recovered document.

Does this work for you?

Let me know if your system is different. I’m on XP and use 2003 & 2007. Maybe XP is different.