Format Painter – Styles for the lazy! (4/12)

Most of us know that we could use Styles and other fancy tools to format our Word documents (as well as Excel, PowerPoint and more) but the truth is that finding the time to master Styles just isn’t going to happen for many of us. (If you are someone who wants to master styles go to the end of this article; we’ve suggested some excellent reference sites.) In the meantime – here is a tip for the rest of us!

You’re working on a document and love the way that your heading (or paragraph or imate or…) is formatted. Format Painter allows you to copy ALL of the formatting associated with that part of your document to a new section. Simply:

• Select the text or graphic or cell that has the formatting that you want to copy. If you want to copy only text formatting, select a portion of a paragraph. If you want to copy text and paragraph formatting, select an entire paragraph, including the paragraph mark.
• On the Home tab, in the Clipboard group, click Format Painter. The pointer changes to a paintbrush icon. Note: Double-click the Format Painter button if you want to change the format of multiple selections in your document.

• Select the text or graphic that you want to format.
• To stop formatting, press ESC.

You can read about how to properly implement Office 2010 Styles here or take a look at this information from addictivetips.

WORD: Combine Portrait & Landscape

March, 2012: It is sometimes helpful to be able to mix landscape and portrait pages if you need to insert a chart or other graphic that works better in landscape in the middle of a text document. You can’t just change the orientation because that changes it for the entire document. The document below illustrates this requirement:

What you can do is to use section breaks, because page orientation actually applies to sections, not to the entire document. What you need to do is insert a section break before and after the material that you want to display in landscape format, and then apply landscape orientation to that section.

To do this, insert a section break before and then after the page you want to format as landscape:

Then, on the page that you want to appear as landscape select Page Layout – Orientation – Landscape.

WORD: Delete ALL Review Comments, then inspect before sending

To delete all review comments in a WORD 2010 document (assumes you’ve been through them and taken care of any suggestions and now want to just make sure you’ve deleted all of them):

Select Review > Delete > Delete All Comments in Document

If you would like to go one step further, with WORD 2010 you can “Inspect” your document. This checks for more than comments (revisions, personal information, hidden fields and more) and is a nice step if you are sending documents outside your company.

To inspect your document, go to File > Info > Check for Issues > Inspect Document as shown below.

You will then see a list of items that can be inspected.

Select “Inspect” and you will see something similar to the report below:

Be aware that some of these changes cannot be undone.

WORD 2007 & 2010: Using the Status Bar

WORD 2010 has a Status Bar at the bottom of the of the WORD window that puts lots of information right in front of your nose. As an example, the status bar below has information about what page is currently being edited as well as Word Count, Track Changes and Page Layout.

Right-Clicking on the Status Bar brings up the Customize Status Bar Menu, allowing you to determine which features you want accessible via the Status Bar.

You can also click on the individual items on the status bar to either toggle between settings or bring up sub-menus. For example, clicking on the Word Count brings up a set of statistics about the document content:

Clicking on Track Changes: On toggles between Track Changes: On and Track Changes: Off. Experiment with the options and see what is most useful for you.

WORD 2010: Quick Photo Editing

WORD 2010 has some pretty cool photo/picture editing tools built right in. Certainly not enough for a photo professional, but plenty for most of us amateurs who need to insert an image in our documents from time-to-time. As an example, let’s work with this photo of Mike and Jason serving beer at the Taste of Reston last weekend:

This photo was taken in the evening, so it is a little dark. We can use the Format > Corrections > Brightness and Contrast function to lighten the photo so that their smiles are easier to see:

 There are also fun effects such as the one below (Glow Edges):

To use these picture/photo editing tools, first insert a picture using Insert > Picture as shown below:

Once the picture has been inserted, click on it and you will see a Format Menu appear:

Using the options under the Format menu you can correct contrast, add color, add a border, change the shape, crop the picture and much more. Have fun, but remember that if you get too wild it will distract from the content in your document.

Note: BEI is a member of the Reston Chamber and we volunteer at many community events that are sponsored by the Chamber. Come to the Oktoberfest in the fall and we’d be glad to pour you a beer!

WORD: Doing the same thing again, and again (but faster with Quick Parts!)

Many WORD documents that we produce on a daily basis have common elements – the paragraph that describes your company, the section that gives an overview of your services and so on. WORD 2007 and 2010 provide a very easy way of storing those elements and then pulling them in for use in your documents – this method is called “Quick Parts”.

To store a snippet in Quick Parts:

• Highlight the selection you would like to save and reuse.
• Select Insert > Quick Parts > Save Selection to Quick Parts Gallery

• Enter a name for this selection. Description is optional and Options gives you the ability to place the selection among the existing text, in its own paragraph or on its own page.

To use a selection that has been stored in Quick Parts:

• Select Insert > Quick Parts

• Click on the selection you would like to add to your document and it will be placed in the document.

Note that you can use the Building Block Organizer to organize your selections into Categories.

Changing Text to Columns in Word & Excel

Have you ever been faced with a list of names or other text that you’d like to separate into individual columns (for example, first and last names)? It is often useful to parse a full name into its associated first name and last name. In the past, you could either commit to cutting and pasting, or go through a lengthy process to use Word and/or Excel to move the text around. Office 2007/2010 makes this process much easier.

Excel

• Select the text that you would like to convert

• Select Data > Text to Columns

• Select Delimited

• Select the Delimiter used (often a space, tab or comma)

• Next select the Column data format and the Destination for the newly formatted data

• Select Finish

Word

• Select the text that you would like to convert to columns

• Insert >Table > Convert Text to Table

• Confirm the Number of columns, the column width (Autofit usually works) and the character that separates the text (again, often a space, tab or comma)

• Select OK

Style Sets in Word 2010

Using Style Sets enables to you quickly reformat your document if you want to make a change. Think of setting font, color, size etc.as setting independent characteristics while applying a Style Set enables you to change many characteristics at once.

A Style Set is a group of Styles that all work together. Word has a number of Style Sets that are pre-defined and you can also define additional sets of your own.

To use style sets, select your styles from a Style Set:

You can then change a document as dramatically as shown below with just one click of the “Change Styles” button (Change Styles > Style Set > Select your style!)

Contextual Spell Checking

Starting with Office 2007 Word offers the ability to perform Contextual Spell Checking.This means that when you’ve used a word that is spelled correctly but perhaps does not have the intended meaning, Word will flag it if you are using Contextual Spell Checking. These words are called homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meaning.) Some examples include:

• allowed, aloud
• buy, by, bye
• ware, wear, where
• your, you’re
• click here for more examples…

Even when you KNOW the difference it is easy to quickly type the wrong one. Word will flag this incorrect word usage as shown below:

The word that is spelled incorrectly (greate) is underlined in red – Word is telling you that it does not recognize this word. Loose is underlined in blue because Word doesn’t think that this is the right word for the context.

Here’s how to turn on contextual spelling -

• Word 2007: Windows button > Word Options > Proofing > Use contextual spelling

• Word 2010: File > Options > Proofing > Use contextual spelling

Using Hyperlinks in Word and Outlook

Everyone uses hyperlinks all the time – just copying the URL from a web page and inserting it into an email or Word document. But, instead of using links that look like this:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/office-2010-which-suite-is-right-for-you-FX101825640.aspx

Isn’t it much nicer to use something like this:

Which Office Suite is Right for You?

This is very simple to do:

• highlight the phrase where you want to insert the hyperlink
• right click and select “Hyperlink” as shown to the right
• You’ll then see the menu below:
• You can then use the “Browsed Pages” option to select from pages that you have browsed, or you can copy and paste or type a URL into the address bar at the bottom.
• Select “OK” and you’ll have your nice, clean hyperlink.