Once you get past the beginner level in Word, it’s tough to know what skills to master next. Here’s my suggestion: Styles. For my money, Styles can give you the most leverage over your documents, save you editing time, and let you do all sorts of editing magic you didn’t even imagine possible. Click below for my list of the 6 best reasons you should start using Styles … NOW.
A reader recently pointed out a flaw in my method for one-click conversion of Word to PDF, so I took to the internet to investigate. Here’s what I found. How does it affect your workflow? Join the discussion in the comments.
From markup to insertion to fixing TOA formatting and entries, here’s a comprehensive guide to Table of Authorities in Microsoft Word.
Hands down, the biggest complaint I get is that Microsoft Word seems to have a mind of its own when it comes to formatting. People swear they did nothing more than breathe on their document, and things went completely wonky!Of course, without actually standing over their shoulder and watching them work, it’s really impossible for…
If you’ve ever needed to copy columns of text from a tabbed list and thought you had to retype them, think again. Try this trick instead.
Here’s a little Microsoft Word fields experiment with the SEQ field – incrementing paragraph numbers with the ability to reference the current and previous paragraph numbers, all combined with AutoText.
During a recent interview, legal technology expert Dennis Kennedy was aghast at the continuing resistance of lawyers to even basic document assembly. Here’s an excerpt of that interview, including his suggestions for where lawyers should start.
If you’ve been working with legal briefs lately, you’ve probably typed “id.” more times than you can count. Here, I show you a trick that one of your fellow readers told me about: having AutoCorrect turn “id.” into its underlined form automagically. Click the link below or the title above to see the full illustrated tutorial.
I’ll admit it: I am not a world-class typist. I can do about 85-90 on a good-to-average day, but years of working with word processors has made my error rate a little dodgy.
And I’ve noticed, over the years, that no matter how much typing practice I get, there are a few words I misspell (really, mistype — I actually do know how to spell them!) frequently. That annoys me. A lot.
But taking the advice of my fellow blogger Vivian Manning, I’m going to stop obsessing about typos and let the computer do more of the work for me. Because if the machines can do more work, why not let them? And because not many people know how to get Microsoft Word to correct their common typos, I’m going to show you how. (Because I want you to do less busywork, too!)
Click the link below to learn how.
Ever have the same phrase, sentence or even paragraph repeat over and over in a document you’re typing? Microsoft Word’s AutoText feature can help automate it!
If your law firm does litigation work, you’ve probably prepared lots of discovery. And you may have wondered if there’s any way you can avoid typing the phrase “Interrogatory No. X” in Microsoft Word over and over again and get that X to be an automatically incrementing number. If so, the answer is, yes, you can!
Click through for a complete tutorial on how to use field codes in Microsoft Word to automatically number interrogatories, requests for production, requests for admission, or other legal discovery.
Want to save that “Page X of Y” footer you like instead of having to rebuild it every time you use it? Here’s a little-known trick in Microsoft Word’s Quick Parts: how to save document components so they’re accessible in menus like Footer, Watermark, etc.
If your documents ever need a phrase like “the 15th day of August, 2012” and you don’t want to wait until the last minute to correct it in your document, here’s how you can embed a date that includes a self-updating ordinal date (that “15th” part) and a self-updating month and year. Click through for the demonstration.
Word makes some formatting decisions behind the scenes, some of which (in my experience) tend to get in your way while you work. Here are 5 options you’ll want to re-set in Microsoft Word for a smoother word processing experience.
Even those who have used Quick Styles frequently don’t know that there are lots more Styles available in Word. Getting one-click access to a Style, though, really requires that it be listed in the Quick Styles gallery (that list on the right-hand side of the Home tab). If there’s a particular Style that you always want…
If none of the Quick Styles in Microsoft Word meet your needs, make one of your own! Here’s how.
If you’ve got several phrases that you’re typing over and over in a particular document, save time by learning to use the Clipboard to select and paste each one. Here’s a tutorial on how to display and manipulate the contents of the Clipboard.
Copying text from a WordPerfect document into Word can result in formatting disasters. Here’s how to avoid problems.
Ever wanted one-click access to double-indent a paragraph (like for a lengthy quote)? One reader did, and here are the three methods I recommended.
Have a bunch of dates to type into Excel but hate having to use “/” or “-” to separate month, day and year? Here’s a simple formula for converting an eight-digit data entry into a properly-formatted date.
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