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.
I have a confession to make: I love the look of fully-justified text. It’s just so darn … neat. It’s got those nice, straight margins on both sides, not that ragged right margin that looks like it could have been typed on a Selectric. It makes a document looks so much more polished.
Except when this happens:
When I first saw this in my draft, I just thought I’d made a typo — inserted a space in the middle of the word “and.” But when I went back to the document, it looked like this on the screen:
“Well, that’s weird,” I thought. “What on earth could be causing that?”
Here’s another area where WordPerfect got it right (and, strangely enough, Microsoft agrees): The scheme by which Word inserts extra space within and between words to achieve the “full justification” is different than the one WordPerfect has used, and (whaddya know) WordPerfect does it better.
But the good news is, you can get WordPerfect’s justification scheme in your Word 2007-2010 document. Here’s how:
- In Word 2007, click the Office Button in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and click the Word Options button at the bottom of the menu.
- In Word 2010, go to the File tab (in the upper left-hand corner, just to the left of the Home tab) and click Options.
- Click on Advanced, then scroll all the way down until you see Compatibility Options. Click the plus sign (+) next to Layout Options to expand it. You will get a huge list of options with check boxes next to them. Find the one that says “Do full justification the way WordPerfect 6.x for Windows does,” then check the box next to that option.
- Click the OK button to save the change.
Your text will shift somewhat (so check your pagination), but the character spacing should be much improved.
This will change the full justification scheme for the current document only. If you want to change this for all future new documents, go to the drop-down at the top of Compatibility Options and choose All New Documents.
In all the years I’ve been using Word, I think this is the first time I’ve seen this crop up. Have you? Let me hear about it in the comments below.
One of the tactics I regularly recommend to users when transferring content from an old WordPerfect document is to use Paste, Special, Unformatted Text instead of just the plain Paste or CNTRL-V commands:
The advantage here is that Paste Special clears out all of the formatting so the newly-pasted text doesn’t mess up your nice Microsoft Word document.
The disadvantage? Well … it clears out all the formatting. And this can be a pain to re-do, particularly if you’ve got a long document with lots of case citations, etc.
What to do? Here are three tricks to keep in your Microsoft Word skills arsenal.
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If you’ve ever been working in a document (particularly one that’s been constructed with a lot of “cut and paste” from other documents) and wanted to make this paragraph (or this line or this heading) look just like that other one, here’s a simple trick.
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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.
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