Why won’t Word single-space my text?
One of the most frequent distress calls I get from Word users is, “Why won’t Word single-space my text?” If that’s what’s tripping you up, here’s what’s really happening.
Import contact lists into Outlook
Outlook contact groups can be a handy way to organize groups of recipients like a case’s email service list or an organization mailing list. If you don’t already have your proposed contact group’s email addresses in your Contacts folder, here’s a way to import them quickly.
How to schedule an outgoing Outlook email
What if you want to send an email but control the day and time it goes out of your Outbox? You can do that with Delay Delivery in the Outlook desktop client and the
The four dates you can embed in your Word documents
One of the most fun discoveries that new Microsoft Word users make is the self updating date. If you’ve already uncovered this, you know exactly what I’m talking about: you click a couple of times, and suddenly you’ve got today’s date embedded in your document, and it will update itself every time you open the document. But what if what you want isn’t necessarily today’s date? What if you need the document to reflect the date it was last saved, or printed, or created? The good news is, you can get any of those with a couple more mouse clicks and a little know-how.
Inserting a highly-customized Table of Contents
Carol wanted an automatically-updating Table of Contents in her document. But she couldn’t use Styles (the preferred and easiest method) to populate it because of some formatting issues. I showed her how to use TC fields to get around those limitations, and now I’ll show you (with step-by-step video).
Why most law firm Word training is a waste of time
Most law firm training is pretty ineffective. But why? Here are the erroneous beliefs that drive ineffective training, and what you can do about them.
Hate Word? Change it
Frustrated by how Word is laid out? Can’t find your most frequently-used commands when you need them? Features not working how you’d like? Chances are, if you know where to look, you can change it.
Why your headings don’t match your Table of Contents
While you can format your Heading Styles any way you want, that Style’s formatting doesn’t necessarily carry over to your Table of Contents. Here’s why.
The 6 Best Reasons to Use Styles
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.
Table of Authorities – The Ultimate Guide
From markup to insertion to fixing TOA formatting and entries, here’s a comprehensive guide to Table of Authorities in Microsoft Word.
Copying vertical columns of text in Word
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.
Formatting Autocorrect Entries
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.
Make up for your bad typing with AutoCorrect
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.
Using Autotext to deal with repetitive text
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!
Reader Question: How to automatically number your discovery requests … in 5 keystrokes
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.
Building reusable Microsoft Word footers
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.
Want that “15th day of August, 2012” to self-update? Here’s how
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.
How To Add a Style to Quick Styles
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…
Creating new Styles in Microsoft Word
If none of the Quick Styles in Microsoft Word meet your needs, make one of your own! Here’s how.
Using the Clipboard to Multi-Paste
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.
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