Finding where Microsoft Word 2010 buried Find — You know, I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t stumble across this first, but thankfully friend-of-this-blog Vivian Manning’s enlightened us all. You see, Microsoft couldn’t leave well enough alone and put the Find function (you know, this familiar dialog box below) …

… where it’s always been. They had to hijack my (and possibly your) beloved CTRL-F shortcut key to take us all to some Navigation Pane we’ve never seen before.

Vivian’s found our trusty Find box once again (it’s buried in the menu system, as she details in her post), but as you’ll see when you click through to the comments at the bottom of her post, that wasn’t good enough for me. I switched it back on my own Word 2010, and I left you illustrated instructions on how to do it yourself.

Five tips for lightning-fast formatting in Word — If you’re as big a shortcut key fan as I am, then you’ll love Susan Harkins’ assembly of the best formatting shortcut keys to memorize. Copy these down, post them near your desk, and use them often!

How to create one Table of Contents from multiple documents — I have to confess, I haven’t tried this yet, but I’m dying to. I didn’t know this was possible, and I’ll bet you didn’t either. Susan Harkins from TechRepublic (again!) gives us the skinny on using the RD function to drive this. She does admit that the master page numbering does take some fiddling, so try it on a dummy document before attempting it on a client project.

And for my U.S. readers, Happy Labor Day!

How to modify a Table of Contents in Microsoft Word

by The Guru · 3 comments

You’ve built a Table of Contents in Microsoft Word using the Styles feature to mark the TOC entries or by marking them manually. And just when you’re about to pat yourself on the back for having an automatic Table of Contents in your document, you notice something’s a little … off. Maybe the font’s not quite right. Or perhaps the font’s okay but the spacing’s not. Or the indentation. Or you want/don’t want the dot leaders running up to the page numbers.

Suffice it to say you just want to alter the format of it. But how?

Let’s take a look at a sample generated Table of Contents:

Right away, I see several problems:

Fonts are not consistent. There’s a mix of Times New Roman (the font for the rest of the brief) and Arial.
I’d probably prefer a bit more white space between the second-level entries.
I don’t like the way the right indentation on the second-level entries is behaving — too close to the page numbers.

To fix the Table of Contents, I basically replace it. Yes, there are other ways to modify TOC entries (if you’re already comfortable with Styles), but I prefer this method because it doesn’t involve me searching all over the document for each Style and modifying it separately. To-may-to, to-mah-to.

Which means … first, we select the entire Table of Contents with the mouse and hit Delete.

Now, we can re-define the Table of Contents the way we want. First, we go to the References tab and find the Table of Contents menu on the far left:

That brings us to the Table of Contents dialog box. We’ll click Modify at the bottom:

… which will take us to the Style dialog box:

This dialog box lists all of the Styles associated with Table of Contents entries. Since the Styles control the formatting of the entries in the Table of Contents, we need to modify the Styles to correct the formatting. The first entry that has incorrect formatting is TOC 2 (the second-level entries). Click on that (click #1 above) to see the current settings in the Preview window, then click on Modify (click #2).

Here’s where we can fix everything that’s wrong with the second-level TOC entries: we can change the font from Arial to Times New Roman with the drop-down in the center, and we can fix the paragraph issues (the right indentation and the amount of vertical space before and after) by clicking on the Format button at the bottom and choosing “Paragraph” from the menu.

That will take us to the familiar Format Paragraph dialog box:

We can repeat the same steps for any other TOC entries that need adjusting, but you get the idea, right?

We can check our progress when we get back to the Table of Contents dialog box:

Notice how the Print Preview window (circled in red) has changed from the first time we saw it. Also notice that, if we want more/fewer TOC levels, or we want to alter or delete the dot leader, those options are available under General (in the lower third of the dialog box).

Once we have finished modifying the TOC Styles, we click OK to insert the new Table of Contents.

So, for my friend Judy, who has asked me repeatedly to do a tutorial on how to modify the format of a Table of Contents … there it is!

(photo credit: D’Arcy Norman via Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/2228982890/)

Inserting a table of contents using styles

by VideoTutor · 3 comments

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.

Click to continue…