BOOT CAMP 333 (06/07/04)
Top Tips 4 -- More Word Tips
This week’s selection of
tips for Microsoft Word are mostly concerned with the program’s more obscure
features that even some long-time users may not have come across so without more
ado here’s a quick and simple one to get started.
If you want to emphasis a single word in a document, by
making it bold, italic or underlined the natural thing to do is to use precision
mousing to carefully highlight the whole word, but there’s no need. Just place
the cursor anywhere within the word and click the appropriate style button or
use a simple keyboard shortcut, i.e. Ctrl + B for bold, Ctrl + I for italic and
Ctrl + U for underline. In case this doesn’t work go to Tools > Options >
Edit and make sure 'When selecting, automatically select entire word' is
checked.
This tip is for owners
of ‘wheel’ type mice, hold down the Ctrl button and spin the wheel and the text
display will ‘zoom’ up or down in size with the zoom ratio displayed on the
toolbar.
As you know you can
highlight horizontal blocks of text by clicking and dragging the mouse but did
you also know you can highlight vertical blocks? Just hold down the Alt key,
click and drag. Right click on he highlighted area for all of the usual options.
You never know, it might come in handy one day…
Here’s a nifty tip for
budding secret agents. You can
conceal words, sentences even whole documents within documents using
another little known Word feature called Hidden Text. Just highlight the
block of text that you want to make invisible then go to Format > Font and
under Effects click ‘Hidden’. The words will vanish from the screen, and they
can’t be printed but they are still there. In order to make them reappear you
have to go to Tools > Options and select the View tab and under Formatting
marks click ‘Hidden Text’.
If you want to make
Hidden Text or any other Word feature that you regularly use easier to get at
you can create a custom toolbar button? Here’s how; right click into an empty
area of the Toolbar, select Customize then the Commands tab. Scroll down the
Categories list to Format and click, then scroll down the Commands list to
Hidden (or the feature of your choice), click then drag and drop it onto the
Toolbar. You can leave it as it or whilst it is highlighted (with a black
border) right click the button and select Change Button Image, choose an icon
then click Default Style. To remove a toolbar button right-click into the
toolbar, select Customize, click to highlight the button and drag it off the
toolbar.
Word’s ‘Adaptive’ menus
are supposed to be helpful by displaying the most frequently used commands but
in practice they can be a real pain when you want to access a command that’s not
shown. You can switch it off so that all commands are permanently displayed by
going to Tools > Customize, select the Options tab and deselect ‘Menus show
recently used commands first’.
This one is for
lecturers and aspiring newsreaders as it lets you turn Word into an Autocue or
Teleprompter, with your script or speech automatically scrolling up or down the
screen. Right click into an empty area of the Toolbar, select Customize then the
Commands tab and in the Categories window select All Commands. In the right hand
Commands window click, drag and drop AutoScroll onto the toolbar and if required
change the button as outlined in the earlier tip. Close the Customise box, click
on the AutoScroll button and use your mouse to adjust the scrolling speed and
direction by moving the arrow that appears in the right hand scroll bar, with a
little practice you can control the speed quite accurately. To stop AutoScroll
just click the left mouse button.
Did you know that Word
document files contain a whole lot more than just the text you see on the
screen? It’s called Metadata and, depending on the version of Word that you are
using, it will include your name and company name, the name of your computer and
network server or hard disc where the document is stored, the names of anyone
else who has worked on the document, details of document versions and revisions,
information about the templates you have used, hidden text and comments. You may
well not want others to see all this, indeed several court cases have turned on
Metadata hidden inside Word documents, if so it’s a good idea to sanitise your
Word files before they leave your PC. In
all recent versions of Word you can view Metadata by going to Open on the File
menu, in the Files of Type box select ‘Recover text from any file (*.*)’ and
open the document. The facility to remove Metadata was introduced in Word 2002
onwards, go to Tools > Options click the Security tab then under Privacy
Options check ‘Remove personal information from this file on save’. In Word 2000
it’s a little more complicated so you might like to read Microsoft Knowledgebase
article 237361,
which you can view by typing the KB number into Google.
Next week – Windows XP System Restore
JARGON FILTER
KEYBOARD
SHORTCUT
A
simple and ideally memorable sequence of two or three key-strokes, used to
invoke a frequently used action or activity within a program or
application
WHEEL MOUSE
Mouse with a built-in thumbwheel, used to quickly scroll
through documents, web pages or menus
ZOOM
Changes the size of text and graphics displayed on the
screen, it has no effect on the actual font size or appearance of the document
when printed.
TIP OF THE WEEK
Hyperlinks are one of Word’s most powerful features and
invaluable for navigating around long documents or automatically linking to web
page or other documents stored on the PC. To jump to another part of the same
document highlight a word or block of text, go to Bookmark on the Insert menu,
give the bookmark a name then go back and highlight the word or words that you
want to link to it, right click and select Hyperlink, click the Bookmark button
and select the Bookmark from the list. To Hyperlink to another document or web
page highlight the word you want to turn into a link, right click and select
Hyperlink then type in the web address or use the File button to browse to
another document.
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