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?
Word XP/2003
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!
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.
If your law office is like most of the ones I’ve seen, you’ve got a lot of paper. A ton of paper. Probably more paper than you know what to do with.
Even with all that document digitizing we’ve all been doing in recent years – scanning, e-filing, case management databases, etc. – law firms still do an awful lot of printing. Even so, all those calls for firms to “go paperless” are starting to gain traction.
That said, it’s still true: we do so love our paper. And even the most digital-savvy among us has to admit that hard copies have their advantages. It’s tough to choose.
But what if I said you could have your cake and eat it too? Print as many pages as you want and still use less paper? Click to continue…
I received an interesting email from a reader last week, and it was a variation on a theme I’d covered on this blog quite a while back: how to use autonumbering for court exhibits.
I say “variation” because, unlike my original post, this reader wanted to embed the automatic exhibit number in a footer rather than in the main document:
I am able to enter sequential exhibit numbers on the main parts of each page of my document by inserting the AutoNum category in Field codes. Is there a way to do the same in a footer/header?
If you’ve never actually tried to use certain field codes like AutoNum in a header or footer, you’ve probably never found out (the hard way) that not all of field codes work in the header/footer. Certain field codes will throw an error if you try to use them in headers and footers:
Oops.
So, if you can’t use the automatically incrementing AutoNum field, what can you use?
One of the most basic functions in Microsoft Word is printing envelopes and labels. You’d think that such a basic function would be pretty intuitive. It’s not. One of the most frequent questions I get from longtime WordPerfect users is, “Where on earth are the envelopes (or labels) in Word?”
But even for those who worked in Microsoft Word for years, this feature can be a little hard to find. Some of the problem stems from Microsoft’s habit of moving this feature around between versions of Word. (I think I even remember it being under the Format menu in one long-ago version. It’s moved twice since then!) So we’re going to look at the process in both the Ribbon-based version and the “classic” menu-based versions.
Along the way, I’m going to show you not only the “textbook” way of doing envelopes, but my own preferred method, which I think makes creating an on-the-fly envelope (on pre-printed letterhead) a lot easier (but that’s for you to judge).
In this week’s Roundup: doing the Quick Step in Microsoft Outlook, what to do when your Microsoft Word headers suddenly disappear, and Microsoft’s Outlook blog finishes up its “Best Practices” series.
An attorney reader (whose employer is using Word 2003) contacted me about a curious macro problem:
I have created a macro for my signature for e-filing, etc., and it works in any document I open. I want to create a couple of other macros to automate some typing I have to do in documents before saving them. I have created the macros numerous times, and they work just fine to begin with, but they will not work once I have restarted the computer! It’s like I can’t figure out how to save the new ones permanently. I’ve been unable to make heads or tails of the help from Microsoft either.
This is not the first time I’ve heard of macros not saving, but this was a little different. After doing a bit of digging, I suggested these items for him to check:
That whole “block and copy” thing is probably one of the first word processing skills you learned. In fact, you’ve been working with it so long, you probably think there’s nothing else to learn.
Au contraire, my friend. If you want to speed up your document editing time, my guest post over at Lawyerist (yes, this is a regular thing for me now) shows you several more text selection tricks, including that neat one about selecting a vertical column.
Click here to read the whole post.
(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14822570@N00/3049692026/)
A reader recently asked me if I had any “solutions or helpful hints for footnotes that simply do not fit on the page due to placement or length of the footnote itself.” Well, the placement question (if I understand her correctly) got answered in the post about fixing footnotes that drop down to another page. But I’d never gotten around to addressing the problem of lengthy footnotes.
Fortunately, Microsoft has saved me the trouble of addressing the question of how to adjust the footnote separator—they’ve posted a great video on their support site about how to change the footnote or endnote separator. (To summarize: using the draft view you can access from the View Shortcuts on the Status Bar, double-click the footnote to edit it, then choose Footnote Separator (or Continuation Separator, or Continuation Notice, if you want to change those too) and edit it like text.)
Note: You may need to install Microsoft Silverlight to view the video on their site.
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