Sweet Suite Tips

Tips for Word and WordPerfect

Create Your Own Word Toolbar Buttons: With the limited selection of buttons for Word's toolbars and the overly long text titles for buttons, you might sometimes wish you could get rid of the text and create your own toolbar buttons. Fortunately, you can customize any button in Word 97 or 2000, but doing so takes time and requires some artistic skill.

First you need to get rid of the toolbar text. Select Tools, Customize. With the Customize dialog box open, right-click the toolbar button you want to alter. Be sure to right-click the button itself on the toolbar, not the name of the button in the Customize dialog box. Since Word requires some text for buttons associated with toolbars, select all the text in the Name box of the pop-up menu and press the spacebar. Word will accept a single space as the required text, so this will minimize the size of the button.

Next, to create a custom button (or to edit an existing button), select Edit Button Image in the same pop-up menu. Choose a color from the Colors palette of the Button Editor dialog box and draw in the Picture window by clicking and dragging or by choosing single pixels. The Preview shows what your new button will look like. You can move what you've drawn by clicking the up, down, left, and right Move arrows. To erase, click the striped Erase box and then click and drag on the picture. When you're satisfied with your creation, click OK and Close in the Customize dialog box.

Unscrambling Word's Menus and Toolbars: If you've fooled around with the Customize dialog box in Word 97 or 2000 and accidentally fouled up your menus and toolbars, or if another user has scrambled your Word interface, there's a simple method for getting back to the default settings. Choose Tools, Customize and then click the Toolbars tab in the Customize dialog box. Select the name of the toolbar or menu you want to fix from the Toolbars list and click Reset. Confirm by clicking OK in the Reset Toolbars dialog box. Repeat for any other menus or toolbars you want to reset and click Close.

Turn Off Word's Automatic Lists: Whenever you start a line with a number in a Word document, the application automatically starts a numbered list, even if that's not what you want it to do. To turn off this automatic-list option in Word 97 and 2000, select Tools, AutoCorrect and click the AutoFormat As You Type tab in the AutoCorrect dialog box. Deselect Automatic bulleted lists and Automatic numbered lists, then click OK. This will shut down those automatic features. Now when you need a bulleted or numbered list, just click the appropriate icon on the Formatting toolbar.

Convert Adobe PDF Files to Word or WordPerfect Documents: Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format files are popular, especially on the Internet, but you can't edit or save them in another format with just the free Acrobat Reader (you need the full version of Adobe Acrobat to do so). However, you can extract the text from a PDF file and paste it into either a Word or WordPerfect document.

Open the PDF file in Acrobat Reader, select Edit, Select All (or press Ctrl-A), and then choose Edit, Copy (or press Ctrl-C). Now open a new or existing document in either Word or WordPerfect and select Edit, Paste (or press Ctrl-V) to insert the text at the current cursor location. There's a catch, though: Acrobat Reader's Select All command selects only the text on the current page, so you'll need to repeat the process for each page of the document. And once the text is in the word processor's document, it'll probably look a fright, what with all the strange characters, odd font sizes and styles, and general PDF mayhem. You'll have to do your document formatting manually.

(Legal note: Be sure to observe copyright laws when moving text from PDF files into your own documents.)

Adjust Word 2000 Tables Automatically: How much time have you wasted dragging table cell borders around in Word 2000 in an attempt to make the contents of your rows and columns line up? There's an easier way: Fill in your table without any thought to the dimensions of rows and columns, and once the table is filled out and the text formatted, select Table, AutoFit. Now select the submenu command that best suits your needs: Shrink the table to fit the contents, expand it to the width of the window, give all columns the same width, or make all rows and columns the same size. Your table will snap into shape automatically.

The Single-File Approach to Document Management

Combining several individual files into a single document is easy to do in both Word and WordPerfect, and it can help keep you organized: You keep the contents of your folders from becoming unwieldy, and it becomes far easier to search for related files, such as different drafts of a proposal or a series of e-mails on a specific subject.

The single-file approach is also a good way to archive files on a completed project, and best of all, you're not limited just to the program's own document files. You can use the technique to create one document containing spreadsheets, text files, and any other type of file supported by the program.

Word 97 and 2000: Create a new document, select Insert, File, and navigate in the Insert File dialog box to the first file you want to add. If the file isn't a Word document, select All Files (*.*) in the 'Files of type' drop-down menu. Choose the file and click OK. Word converts spreadsheets to tables, inserts document files or text files at the cursor location, and repositions the cursor at the end of the document. (If a dialog box pops up asking how you want the conversion done, select the appropriate options and click OK again.) Repeat the process for all the files you want to add. When you're done, select File, Save As and give the new document a distinctive file name. Note: While this technique imports graphics already placed in other Word documents, you can't insert separate graphics files this way. To add a graphics file to the document, select Insert, Picture, as you would in any Word document.

WordPerfect 8 and 9: Create a new document, select Insert, File, and navigate in the Insert File dialog box to the first file you want to add. Choose the file and click the Insert button. If a dialog box appears asking how you want the file imported, choose the appropriate options and click OK. Once the file appears in your new document, WordPerfect positions the cursor where it was before the file was inserted. To move the cursor to the end of the document, press Ctrl-End. Repeat the process to insert any other text or graphics files you want to add. (Unlike in Word, in WordPerfect the same menu item performs both text and graphics importing functions.) When you're done inserting files, select File, Save As and give your new document a distinctive name.