Featured - The Efficient Lawyer Archives

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.

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.

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.

Reader Question: How to double indent faster

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.

Easy-to-read file folder labels for trial exhibits using Mail Merge

The last thing you need to be doing during a trial is frantically searching for the right exhibit. Laying your hands on the correct document becomes a whole lot easier when they’re in file folders marked with clear, easy-to-read labels. Here’s how to use Microsoft Word’s Mail Merge feature to transform your exhibit list into a set of labels with the exhibit number in large spot-it-from-across-the-room print.

In praise of text expansion (or, how to keep from typing the same thing 100 times)

If you find yourself stuck typing “Brief in Support of American Amalgamated Consolidated Widget Corporation’s Second Amended Motion for Leave of Court to Conduct On-site Inspection” for the umpteenth time, let me show you how to get out of all that repetitive typing. It’s a concept called “text expansion”, and you don’t even need extra software to do it. Click the link below to learn how to use this feature in Microsoft Word.

Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar

If you want one-click access to the Microsoft Office commands, you need to use the Quick Access Toolbar. Here’s a video showing you two easy ways to add commands so you have quick and easy access to them as you work.

Instantly access boilerplate text with Quick Parts

Don’t keep copying commonly-used blocks of text from old documents – that cut-and-paste routine will inevitably get you into trouble when you forget to edit out client-specific info. Instead, use Quick Parts to store generic text blocks like Certificates of Service, Signature Blocks, etc. Here’s a video to show you how.