I received a message from a reader earlier this week that went something like this:

I have a question about table of contents. ... I just want to know if you can wrap table of contents entries in the table of contents so that if they're multi-line entries, [they end up with an] equal amount of text on each line. I know that there's the indenting but I don't know ... if that will work to get an equal amount of text on that, on different entries. So kind of complicated question for me.

It IS kind of a complicated question, because the answer depends on which method he used to create the TOC.

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 stuf 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.

A Legal Office Guru reader wondered how to print a document excerpt without having to figure out which page numbers to print.

There are several different ways to print a document excerpt. Let's look at the Print dialog:

A reader emailed me a question recently about how he could create reciprocal hyperlinks within his Word document:

As I said in my reply to him, this is similar to the behavior in a Kindle book: when you click on a footnote number, it takes you to the footnote, and when you click on the footnote number inside the footnote, it takes you back to where you were in the book. The footnote numbers (both of them) are reciprocal hyperlinks; each takes you to the other location (demo below).

My initial response was to tell him this is a perfect place to use hyperlinked bookmarks and cross-references, because cross-references can be hyperlinked to take you back to the bookmark. Once I did a little experimenting, though, I discovered the "reciprocal" part of the hyperlink equation took a bit of finagling. So I did a little research and found there's more than one way to create a hyperlink within Word:

Many of you practice in courts that require you to use a format called pleading paper. Those are you who are familiar with it are probably groaning right now. Those of you who don't probably will once you see this example:

Yeah. It's line numbers all the way down (like a court reporter's transcript). Plus, regardless of the format has 24, 25, 28 or 32 lines, the lines have to track exactly with the text. Pain. In. The. Rear.

But one student in my Create Your Own Pleading Paper course said her line numbers didn't appear on the second and subsequent pages. Puzzling, but I knew what was probably wrong. (Hint: it has to do with how headers/footers are set up.)

If you already have my Fast Formatting Fixes Guide, you've seen one of the "nuclear options" that I recommend clear all formatting is CTRL-SHIFT-N. I describe it as returning the selected text to Normal formatting (according to whatever the Normal Style for your document is). After all, that's what Microsoft says that command does.

However, some of you tell me it doesn't quite clear all formatting. In fact, it seems to work a bit randomly. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you why that is. I'll also show you how you can use CTRL-SHIFT-N in particular situations and a different command to substitute.

My friend Karen called me in a panic. "Bryan's got this contract he's editing [read: recycling] for a client. He's added a new numbered paragraph, but it's not showing up in the Table of Contents."

So, since I can't always diagnose Word problems blind (I'm good, but I'm not THAT good), and I go to her desk and see something that looks a bit like this:

I suspect the document he was working with had been recycled over and over. He was just taking a contract that had worked pretty well for another client and customizing it for a new client.

How did I figure that out? One clue was the way his Table of Contents was constructed (look at those codes above). Another was that the paragraph numbering was completely manual - no automatic paragraph numbering at all.

So what had happened here is that, because he didn't know how the Table of Contents was originally constructed, he couldn't automatically add a new paragraph to the TOC.

So rather than reconstruct his entire TOC based on Styles (a newer, more flexible model) and automating his paragraph numbering, I sat down to help Karen get that paragraph added and renumber the following paragraphs (thank goodness, not that many).

And I was immediately flummoxed.

Have you ever noticed that long list running across the Home tab? That's called the Style Gallery. It's where all the Quick Styles (the most accessible Styles) are kept. (Those aren't the only Styles Word has. There are actually over 200 of them!)

But you may not necessarily want to use all of them, and some of them are just in the way. (Like, "No Spacing"? When am I going to use that?) That's the situation one reader found herself in.

Jennifer has been working her way through my Styles course and came across a recurring problem:

I've tried removing certain styles from the Style Gallery menu, but
they come back when I open a new document. Is there a trick I'm
missing?

Does your court require you to not only conform to word number requirements in your filings but to certify the number of words, either within the filing itself or in a separate certificate? Here's how to meet that requirement without tripping over some sneaky Microsoft Word limitations.

Since the Styles course opened, I've gotten questions from students about specific situations they're seeing. Here are a couple of interesting questions and my answers:

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 me to know exactly what happened. A lot of times, there's a pretty easy File > Options tweak that could prevent similar snafus from happening again. (And don't even get me started about why you need to learn to use Styles.)

But in my experience, most people aren't particularly interested in trying to figure out how it happened. They just want to fix it and move on.

So for that crowd, I've put together a two-minute video on the four fastest ways I know to basically nuke your formatting so you can start over. You can basically choose among these:

I've been trying to solve a personal problem for a long time.

No, this blog hasn't suddenly turned "confessional". No TMI here.

The problem I'm referring to is this:

See that "3" that's boxed in red above? That's my problem. I wouldn't say it's the bane of my existence, but it still bugs me.

You see, I do a lot of Answers to Complaints in my day job. And I don't know how you do it where you practice, but in our area, there are always sort of "catch all" paragraphs in the Complaint that we just answer with a standard "yeah, we're just going to repeat our answer to all the above paragraphs without actually repeating it" statement.

That paragraph in the answer always starts with a reference to Paragraph 1 and ends with a reference to the immediately preceding paragraph. And if I'm using automatic paragraph numbering, that ought to be a breeze, right? If those paragraph numbers are driven by fields (which is all automatic paragraph numbering is), then I should be able to calculate "current paragraph number minus 1". I've learned how to insert the current paragraph number into a paragraph. Why not the previous one?

Except ... no. At least not according to the Microsoft MVPs I spoke to: