Word 2010

One of the things I love most about doing this blog is what I learn from readers. People often chime in on the comments to suggest solutions to problems others are having or better ways of doing things.

One recent comment especially deserves its own spotlight.  Debbie Leonard Lovejoy stepped forward to help fellow commenter Ariel with a tricky formatting problem in a Table of Authorities. Specifically, this is what Ariel wanted:

I’ve searched high and low for a way to automatically format the cases in the TOA so the case name up to the comma is on a line by itself and then the reporter information and year and the page number are on a second, indented line, but no luck. I know I can manually do this just before printing by editing the table but I lose that formatting when the table updates and would like a more permanent solution if one exists. Strangest thing is that on the “Table of Authorities” dialog box, the example table in the Print Preview box has it formatted the way I’d like (though I imagine that is more a result of limited space in that box than some taunting and unavailable formatting option). Any idea? Thanks!

I had nothing. The only thing I could suggest was to “edit the right indent of the paragraphs to make them wrap a lot sooner than they would otherwise (in other words, not so close to the page number on the right margin).” Close (sort of), but no cigar.

Here’s Debbie’s much better solution:

Click here to learn this cool tip!

Okay, show of hands: How many of you remember being taught how to center text in typing class? (Alright, hands down. Those of you who responded with “Typing class? What’s typing class?” have officially made me feel ancient.)

For you youngsters out there, here’s how it went down: All of us typing students rolled a sheet of paper through the platen (look it up, kiddies) of the typewriter and spaced over to the center of the page 4.25″ from each edge (using the tab key and space bar), calculated how many letters and spaces were in whatever phrase we wanted centered, divided by two, then backspaced from the center point by that many spaces.

Years later, it exhausts me just to describe it.

Fortunately, modern word processors like Microsoft Word make exercises like this obsolete. Oh, sure, you already know how to center text, right? But using center justification centers the text between the left and right margins. But what if you want to center text across another point on the page?

Answer: center tabs.

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If your law firm does litigation work, you’ve probably prepared lots of discovery. And you may have wondered if there’s any way you can (a) avoid typing the phrase “Interrogatory No. X” in Microsoft Word over and over again and (b) get that X to be an automatically incrementing number.

If so, the answer is, yes, you can!

One of the reasons I love reader questions is that the best ones get me flipping through my reference books, scouring the Internet, and testing, testing, testing, trying to find a solution to a problem I’ve been wondering about myself (but never got around to examining).

Such was the case with this reader question:

I’ve been searching for the best way to create auto numbering for discovery requests: dare I say in WordPerfect I had the most amazing macros that used “counter” and creating a set of discovery was a snap. I’ve struggled to find something workable in Word. Some people use Discovery Request No. X – Interrogatory; others use Interrogatories No. X, Requests for Production No. X, Requests for Admission No. X throughout a set of discovery. There has to be a way to do this in Word, and I’ve tried several different approaches, none of which worked out that well. Would you please steer me in the right direction? Thanks very, very much.

I tossed back a rather glib answer about using the AutoNumLgl field code to number the discovery requests, and she threw in this little wrinkle: her attorneys like to play mix-and-match with their discovery. In other words, they may put in a couple of interrogatories, then throw in a related request for production, then another interrogatory, then a request for admission that’s related to that interrogatory.

Um. Okay. So they’re going to need three numbering sequences operating independently. Back to the drawing board.

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It ought to be pretty simple, really. Even though Microsoft Word, by default, sets left tabs every half inch (at least in the U.S. version – elsewhere may vary), sometimes you need something different. Even if only for a particular part of your document. So, how on earth do you set tabs in Microsoft Word?

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It always seems to happen when you’re under the gun — the lights flicker or an application crashes, and your computer goes down right in the middle of a document. Or you get distracted and forget to save your document before you exit Microsoft Word.

You might not be able to stop computer crashes or inconvenient interruptions, but you can prevent losing an important document. In my post at Lawyerist, I show you not only how to take 30 seconds to set up Word’s AutoRecover feature, but also how to use it to recover a document that might otherwise be lost.

Click here for the full illustrated tutorial.

This week: Stop wandering around Microsoft Word’s Ribbon looking for commands and do some strategic double-clicking instead, why putting an ampersand in your Excel header or footer yields a weird result (and what to do if you really, really want that “&” to show up in your header or footer), and more news about an exciting iPad application that lets you edit Office documents. That’s right … it’s the Weekly Roundup!

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Now that it’s past the annual holiday season here in the US (Santa brought me a way-big monitor!) it’s back in the saddle again for the Weekly Roundup. This week: Microsoft Office blog does its own list of most popular posts (including a couple of issues that continually plague legal Office users), a quick-and-dirty Excel tutorial on printing title rows, and an exciting rumor for iPad users.

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For our Thanksgiving week Roundup: Adobe shows us how to print both entire batches and selected pdfs from an email portfolio (a great way to archive email for future reference), and if you hate the Microsoft Office Ribbon, you can get rid of it without downgrading your Office Suite.

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Don’t you just hate it when you want Microsoft Word to do something really simple and obvious, like underline blank spaces, and it just refuses to do it? That’s the dilemma faced by reader who recently wrote me, really frustrated over a signature line:

From time to time, I am inserting a line for a signature block or for some other purpose and after clicking underline or using control u I get nothing but blank space. When I check the font dialog box it shows underline and the font color is black, what is the problem?

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In this week’s Roundup of the reading file: a quick (and really fun and challenging) online typing test (how long has it been since you took a typing test?), how to configure Outlook 2010 for your Gmail account, some inexpensive speech-to-text alternatives for those who want to dictate to their PC, yet another reason to use Microsoft Word’s Style feature, and what those little black boxes next to your Microsoft Word text mean, particularly for your document’s pagination.

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Save those trees! Printing compressed copies of large documents

by The Guru
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If you’re not anywhere close to having a paperless office, but you still want to save room in those bulging files of yours, here’s an option you might not have considered before: condensed printing. Think “travel transcript,” like those 4-up duplex printed deposition mini-transcripts you get. If some of your hard copies could just as easily be printed in “mini” form for your file, then click Read More to learn this trick in Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, your default Windows photo printer, and virtually any other application you have.

Reader Question: Incrementing numbers in headers

by The Guru
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A reader wrote me recently with an interesting dilemma: She needed to be able to automatically increment numbers in a Microsoft Word footer. But she’d found that the otherwise trusty AutoNum field doesn’t work in headers or footers. So how was she going to put the correct “Exhibit [X]” at the bottom of her documents? Here’s the solution I came up with for her. Click the “Read More” link to see the demonstration video.

Weekly Roundup: Paste text your way, troubleshoot Outlook, AutoCorrect secrets

by The Guru
Thumbnail image for Weekly Roundup: Paste text your way, troubleshoot Outlook, AutoCorrect secrets

From this week’s reading file: Vivian Manning shows us what that little blue line underneath some of your text in Microsoft Word really means, how to re-start Microsoft Outlook in troubleshooting mode, and how to paste text in Microsoft Word to ensure the least amount of post-paste cleanup. Click the “Read More” link for more info.

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