Category Archives for "CTA – Basic Skills – Hacks & Settings"

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:

When Microsoft Word 2007 came out, users lamented the introduction of the Ribbon. Replacing the familiar menu system of Word 2003 with a newfangled, visually-oriented system of buttons and drop-downs went over like the proverbial lead balloon. It all came down to one thing: "How am I ever going to find anything on here?"

Nobody wants to waste time scrolling through a menu system looking for commands or functions they use frequently. Here, I'll show you three methods for keeping your most common commands within easy reach so you can create documents faster and with less frustration.

One reader recently took up my challenge to not run screaming from macros ... and was a little disappointed in the results.

I defined a macro successfully [to insert "Page" and the page number], with a button on the Quick Access Tool Bar. It works until I log off. After re-entering and trying the macro, I get an error message “Run Time error 5941 The requested member of the collection does not exist.” Any suggestions?

A macro that only runs until you log off. Well, that's a puzzler.

As I told him in our email exchange, I've noticed that in Word 2010, macros are sometimes spotty in picking up settings from actions you take in the Ribbon. (It used to work fine — not sure what's changed.) I myself had a similar problem with a macro I tried to do for a watermark.

I suspected he was attempting to embed the page number command using Word's Insert Page Number command from the Header/Footer Tools contextual ribbon menu:

Want one-click access to the commands you use most in the ribbon versions of Microsoft Office? Then you need to be taking full advantage of the Quick Access Toolbar!

The Quick Access Toolbar really lives up to its name: it provides one-click access to virtually any command you want. All you have to do is customize it.

And one of the great things about the Quick Access Toolbar (or QAT) is that it's virtually the same throughout Microsoft Office. Sure, the commands vary according to the application, but the way you update it is the same across the Office Suite.

Here are two ways to add your favorite commands to the QAT:

A reader wrote me this past week with a little problem, one that they were taking a few too many steps to solve:

We often have to decide whether to capture data in Excel or in a Word document using a "table" format. We usually like the look and editing function better in Word because we are mostly tracking text entries with some date columns, not large amounts of numerical data. Am I correct that if we use Word, the data in the cells can't be re-sorted within the document, say by date and then by last name? Assuming that's correct, we often need to use Excel. Is there a simple way to take the data from an Excel spreadsheet and plunk it into a Word document where it will look better?

Good news: it's really very easy to sort tabular data in Microsoft Word, so there's (usually) no need to use Excel as an intermediary step.

There's a whole host of ways you can make the various Microsoft Office applications easier to use. In fact, most users don't take full advantage of the options for customizing these applications to make the Office suite work better for them.

Today, we're going to talk about one of the easiest customizations: the Status Bar. Look at the bottom of any Office application and you'll see a bar just above the Windows Taskbar at the bottom (like this example from Word 2007):

Most users don't know they can change the information listed on the task bar in any Office application (except Outlook, unfortunately). And it's really easy:

Have you ever been typing along, looked back at what you typed and discovered that something weird happened? Like, you typed a few dashes, hit return, and now 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), 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.