60 Word Processing Tips

Tweaking the Interface

Nobody's perfect--and neither is your word processor. Make the program work the way you do by tweaking its look and feel and sidestepping its quirks and annoyances.

Simplify Word 97's Interface

If you're like most people, you've found that Word 97 has many menu commands and toolbar options you never use. Wouldn't it be convenient if you could strip down Word's baroque interface to suit your needs? You can.

Close Word. Using Start, Find, Files or Folders, locate normal.dot on your hard disk.

Right-click normal.dot and select Rename. Type default.dot and press Enter. (Doing this preserves the original normal.dot file so you can revert to the full interface later if you wish.) Start Word 97. The program creates a fresh version with all its factory defaults.

Select Tools, Customize, and click the Toolbars tab. Get rid of any unwanted toolbars by removing the check mark from the box to the left of those toolbar names. Mark any toolbars you want visible by clicking the box to the left of those toolbar names.

Click the Commands tab in the Customize dialog box; then click any icons you never use, drag them to the document window, and drop them there. If you're not sure of an icon's function, right-click it and read its name in the Context menu.

Keep the Customize dialog box open as you click each main menu command and examine the submenu commands that appear. If you find a command you never use, click and drag it to the document window. A triangle appears to the right of menu commands that have submenus. Remove individual submenu items by clicking them and dragging them down off the toolbar or menu.

To activate your changes, click Close in the Customize dialog box.

Note: Any time before you close the Customize dialog box, you can click Reset to undo all the changes you've made up to that point. But once you close the dialog box, you can't undo the changes from within Word.

If you wish, you can change other default settings from the Options dialog box (select Tools, Options) and by using the View menu's Toolbar item. When you've input all your changes, exit Word.

The next time you run the program, you'll see your changes implemented as the new default interface. You've now tamed your formerly complex program to suit your needs.

This tip also works well if you want to hide tricky or treacherous features from innocent novices. If you need to regain the full Word interface temporarily, select File, New, select the default.dot template you created, and click OK. To return to Word's defaults permanently, exit Word, delete normal.dot, and rename default.dot back to normal.dot.

Extra tip: If you foul up Word's interface irreparably or if you inherit a PC with a scrambled Word interface, and you need to reinstate the original default settings, simply delete normal.dot when Word isn't running. The next time you run Word, the program creates a new template that uses the default settings. All versions of Word can do this.

Get Help With Dialog Boxes

Dialog boxes in today's word processors tend to overflow with options, many of which you may not understand or need. Fortunately, there's an easy way to get help.

In Word 95 and 97, and in WordPerfect 7 and 8, click the question mark button at the top of the dialog box, and then click the option you don't understand. A box pops up with a description of that item's function. In Word 95, you can also right-click any feature for an explanation. In Word 97, right-click the feature and then click the What's This? command.

Drag-Free Text Selection

Do you find that your word processor scrolls too fast when you try to select a block of text taller than the screen? Fortunately, there's an efficient way to handle selecting large blocks of text; the technique works in every word processor because it's a basic Windows function.

Click where you want the selection to begin. Use the scroll bar instead of the cursor keys to move down in the document until you can see the end of the desired selection. Hold down the Shift key, and then click at the end of the text you want to highlight.

Fine-Tune Text Selection

Current word processors allow you to select whole words, sentences, or paragraphs in a single operation. Most of the time that's fine, but when you need to select one character at a time, these tools can just plain get in the way. Here's how to turn off the automatic selection feature:

Word 6.0 and later: Press Ctrl-Shift before or while you click and drag.

WordPerfect 6.1 and later: Press Alt before or while you click and drag.

Word Pro (all versions): Press Ctrl-Shift while you press the right arrow. There's no way to select character by character with the mouse in this program if you have Smart Select enabled.

Partial Cell Selection

When working with tables in Word 6.0 or later, you may be unable to select only part of the text in a cell, because Word insists on selecting the entire cell. Click to the left of the first character of any line, and Word automatically selects the entire cell rather than moving the cursor to that character. This inflexibility can be a problem, especially when you use tables to create parallel columns of text, or when you have placed multiple paragraphs of text in one cell. To avoid this pitfall, carefully position the mouse pointer over the first character in the selection rather than to the left of it, and then click and drag to select the desired text.

Lay Off the Assistant

Microsoft believes its animated Office Assistant feature is all the rage. Not everyone agrees. You could get rid of it completely by using the Setup program to remove it from your PC, but then you'd also lose the handy, plain-English help feature.

Here's how to force the pesky helper to stay in its cubicle until you summon it. If the Assistant isn't visible, display it by clicking the Office Assistant icon or by pressing F1. Next, right-click the Assistant itself and select Options from the pop-up menu. In the Office Assistant dialog box, clear all selected options, and then click OK.

Get Quick Formatting Info

You can get instant information about the formatting of any text or graphic in a document by pressing Shift-F1, which turns the mouse pointer into a question mark with an arrow. Click the text or graphic in question to call up a box showing formatting information.

Extra tip: After pressing Shift-F1, you can also click any command, icon, toolbar, or other feature in Word's window to see a description of that item. Just press Esc to return the mouse pointer to its normal function.

Pick Your Default Template

Users who need to work from a specific template in Word often use the File, New command right after launching Word to start a new document and pick a template. But if you almost always use a particular template, why not make it the default and save yourself a few keystrokes? Here's how to substitute another template for the default.

Exit all open copies of Word. Select Start, Find, Files or Folders and search for normal.dot. You may get several matches for different versions of Word on your system, so look for the one with the most recent date stamp. Right-click it, select File, Rename, and type default.dot. Press Enter. (This step preserves the original file in case of a mishap.)

Locate and select the file you want to use as the new default template. Using the steps described above, rename it normal.dot.

From now on, Word automatically loads the new normal.dot template at launch. Whenever you want to use the plain old template, simply select File, New and choose the default.dot template you created earlier.

Make Long Documents Easier to Navigate

Do you write long documents you'll be distributing on a network rather than on paper? Make life easier for your readers by adding navigational aids. Word 97 and WordPerfect versions 7 and 8 offer simple tools for creating hypertext links that let readers jump quickly to any location in the document.

Word 97: As you create your document, mark headings, subheadings, and other important locations as bookmarks. To do this, position the cursor at the location you want to mark, and then select Insert, Bookmark. In the Bookmark dialog box, type a unique name for the bookmark, inserting an underscore character between each word, and click Add.

Once you've got your bookmarks, you can create links to them. First highlight the text you want to use as a link; for example, you might use the words Chapter 7 as the link to Chapter 7 itself. Select Insert, Hyperlink (or press Ctrl-K). In the Insert Hyperlink dialog box, click Browse, select the appropriate bookmark in the resulting dialog box, and click OK twice to finish the job. Your highlighted text is underlined and displays in a different color. Repeat this step as needed to create links to all your bookmarks.

WordPerfect 7 and 8: As you create your document, mark its heads, subheads, and other important locations as bookmarks. To do this, place the cursor where you want the bookmark. Select Tools, Bookmark (in version 8) or Insert, Bookmark (in version 7). Then click Create, type a name for the bookmark, and click OK.

To create links to your bookmarks, highlight the text you want to use as a link and select Tools, Hyperlink (in version 8) or Tools, Hypertext/Web Links (in version 7). In WordPerfect 8, click the Bookmark drop-down list in the Hyperlink Properties dialog box, select the appropriate bookmark, and click OK to create the link. In WordPerfect 7, click Create in the Hypertext toolbar. Select Bookmark in the Create Hypertext Link dialog box, and then choose a bookmark after pulling down the associated list. Click OK to mark the selected text as a link.

What's Up, Doc?

In Word 95 and up, every time you use File, Save, Word tacks a .doc extension to the file name you enter, leading to confusing file names like budget.89.doc. To make Word use the extensions you prefer, simply place quotes around your file names in the Save As dialog box: For example, enter "budget.89". Word will accept your file name without adding an extension.