When one of the comments to your guest post is, “I think I love you,” you know you’ve struck a nerve. That’s just part of the response I’ve gotten to my list of five little-known tricks for fixing misbehaving formatting in Microsoft Word.
Click here to find out how you, too, can alleviate your frustration even when you don’t have time to diagnose the problem.
From this week’s reading: when Outlook’s Autocomplete … won’t, when Excel’s autocalc … doesn’t, cleaning up imported data in Excel, and what to do with 250 Vcards.
If you’ve ever wondered why *this* paragraph looks a little different from *that* one, or couldn’t figure out how to get some text you’ve inserted into a document to just behave, you need some serious formatting diagnostic tools. Fortunately, in Microsoft Word, there are several available to help with both diagnosing and fixing these head-scratchers.
In my recent guest post on Legal Practice Pro, I show you three indispensable tools for not only figuring out what’s wrong, but leading you to precisely the right menu option to fix the problem. The post includes instructions on setting these up so that whenever you encounter a formatting issue, you can know, at a glance, what’s required to fix it.
Click here to read the entire article.
One of the things I’m on a rant about these days is loooooong documents. Complicated documents, like 20+ page contracts and appellate briefs and stuff like that.
Why? Because they always seem to need special stuff inserted in them. Like custom headers and footers. And level-1 and level-2 and level-out-the-wazoo headings. It’s enough to make your head spin.
But if you’ve got mad skills and you plan your document right, a lot of this stuff becomes easier. Like putting in a simple table of contents, for example.
Have you ever been typing along and looked back at what you just typed and discovered that something weird happened? Like, you typed a few dashes, hit return, and suddenly there’s a solid line all the way across the page?
There’s more than one possible explanation for these kinds of oopsies (none of them your fault, fortunately), so there’s more than one fix. Today, we’re going to talk about setting your AutoFormat options.
How many times has this happened to you?
You’re typing merrily along (or maybe not so merrily, but, hey, you’re typing), and whatever you’re drafting/transcribing has a list that starts with (a), then goes to (b), then to (c), etc.
And you type the open paragraph symbol, the letter “c”, and the close paragraph symbol, and as soon as you hit the space bar …
Where did that *#*@&#^! copyright symbol © come from?
Yes, AutoCorrect strikes again. And when it’s not correct, it’s wrong. Seriously wrong.
Fortunately, there’s a way to fix that. I promise.
I’ll admit it — I’m not a big fan of the Columns feature in Microsoft Word. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, per se. It works fine (until it doesn’t). But in a legal office environment, I usually format blocks of information with tables because they’re a bit easier to control.
But I’ve seen lots of legal professionals use columns to format things like service lists in Certificates of Service. Hey, to each her [his] own.
So if you want to use this feature in your Microsoft Word documents, here’s what you need to know:
If you have a brief, etc., in Word 2007 in which a footnote drops down to a subsequent page (the number mark within the main text is on p. 2, but all or part of the footnote text keeps dropping down to p. 3), here’s how to fix it:
Compatibility Options in Word 2007
Your footnote should now appear on the correct page.
(You’re welcome.)
Got a long brief or other document that has lots of headings, subheadings, etc.? You need Styles, baby.
No, not style — Styles.
The Styles function in Word is a handy tool for, among other things, setting up headings for different sections of a document. These styles serve a dual purpose: not only do they help keep document formatting consistent (i.e., all paragraph and subparagraph headings at a particular level, for example, will be consistent through the document), they can help later when you create a Table of Contents, since Word can use these styles to create the levels of your Table of Contents.
There are a couple of different ways to use Styles & Formatting (as the feature is formally known) in your document.
Occasionally, you need to present information in a form other than paragraphs. Whether it’s a set of numbers or other obviously tabular data, or if you’re just looking to get the alignment of something just right, tables can help.
As usual in Microsoft Word (and most software programs), there’s more than one way to insert a table into your document:
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