Ever wish you could take a pdf that someone’s e-filed and edit it for your own use? (Yeah, me too.)
Well, apparently now you can at PDFtoWord.com … for free, even!
Only you can decide whether this service is safe enough for confidential client documents. PDFtoWord.com’s privacy policy states that files that are uploaded and converted are deleted immediately upon processing and never touch human hands.
But if you don’t want to re-type, and you like free services, you can’t beat this!
While Word does some default paragraph formatting for you, you may want to change the formatting to suit a particular need. For example, you may need to double-indent a section of text to quote case law for a brief.
First, let’s talk about basic indentation (which can be done from the Formatting toolbar), then we’ll go over more advanced indentation (like double-indents for quotes).
In WordPerfect, block protect is block protect — you highlight a block of text and protect so it all shows up on the same page.
Is Word that simple? Oh, no. Microsoft had to come up with TWO different versions of block protect: Keep Lines Together and Keep With Next (accessible from the Format, Paragraph menu):
So, what’s the diff? And how do you know when to use one or the other?
Click here to read more …
You’re circulating a draft of a brief — the key word there being “draft.” You want to make sure no one mistakes it for something that needs to be filed or, worse, has been filed.
Sure, you could scrawl DRAFT in red ink on the top of the first page. But, hey, you’re too classy for that, right?
Here’s how to put a nice watermark “DRAFT” on every page so nobody’s confused:
Most users who’ve been working with Microsoft Word for a while know how to put a self-updating date into their document (say, for the top of a letter).
But what if you want something other than today’s date? You may want to display the last time the document was updated (to keep up with which day’s draft you’re looking at), or the date the document was created, or when it was last printed. Sometimes, particularly when multiple people are reviewing/editing a document, that’s important information to print on a draft.
So what do you do?
Here’s how to embed those document-specific dates into your document:
While I haven’t quite gotten to discussing how to use the Bullets and Numbers feature in Word (that will require a video tutorial to be really effective), you may find you need to create a series of numbers not related to paragraphs. Here is a quick and easy way to embed automatic numbering you may not have thought of:
Click here to read more …
Often in legal documents, you need to insert special characters not found on the keyboard, like paragraph symbols (¶) or section symbols (§). Here’s how to do that:
Click here to read more …
We have this recurring problem where I work. I bet you have it, too.
Sometimes, our Word documents (particularly when they’ve been generated by our time & billing software) leave huge gaps of white space between a heading and the text that’s supposed to go right under it by mysteriously breaking the page right after the heading.
Except, there’s no page break! No one’s inserted a hard page break anywhere — the document’s just stubbornly refusing to put text that will clearly fit on page 1 on page 2.
What’s going on?
Click here to read more …
Have you ever had a document that you had to get all on one page, but there seemed to be just a little too much text to make that happen?
I assume you’ve already tried reducing the font size or making the page margins smaller. But have you tried any of the following?
Click here to read more …
While boldface, italic and underline will get you through most character formatting challenges, Word has more in its font arsenal via the Format Font dialog box (accessible via Format, Font on the menu bar):
Click here to read more …
