If you've ever had information typed up like this:
... and only needed to copy the stuff out of one or two columns:
... then you'll love this tip.
Say, for example, you needed to just get the dollar amounts and the names and copy them someplace else. If you've got a whole list of these, you might think you'll either have to type this up again, or copy-and-paste each piece of text separately.
Au contraire. Trust me, you'll love this trick!
As I mentioned in the previous post on Envelopes, even though formatting and printing envelopes and labels is a really basic word processing function, Microsoft Word inexplicably hides it from users on the Mailings tab.
Fortunately, if you're using labels from a major label vendor like Avery, you don't have to bust out the ruler and define the label format from scratch. But knowing how to choose which label format to use can be a bit tricky.
Remember typewriters? (Those of you too young to remember those, just skip this part. Please.) Every time you heard that little ding when you approached the right-hand margin, you knew you needed to reach up, hit that bar over on the left side, and return the platen to the left margin to start a new line.
Yes, it was a pain in the neck compared to typing on a word processor. But at least then you had total control over where the line break was. These days? Not so much.
But you can still stop awkward breaks — hyphenated words or other groups of words that need to appear together on a single line — with a quick three-key combination.
It ought to be pretty simple, really. Even though Microsoft Word, by default, sets left tabs every half inch (at least in the U.S. version – elsewhere may vary), sometimes you need something different. Even if only for a particular part of your document. So, how on earth do you set tabs in Microsoft Word?
Keep reading →If your law office is like most of the ones I’ve seen, you’ve got a lot of paper. A ton of paper. Probably more paper than you know what to do with.
Even with all that document digitizing we’ve all been doing in recent years – scanning, e-filing, case management databases, etc. – law firms still do an awful lot of printing. Even so, all those calls for firms to “go paperless” are starting to gain traction.
That said, it’s still true: we do so love our paper. And even the most digital-savvy among us has to admit that hard copies have their advantages. It’s tough to choose.
But what if I said you could have your cake and eat it too? Print as many pages as you want and still use less paper? Keep reading →
I received an interesting email from a reader last week, and it was a variation on a theme I'd covered on this blog quite a while back: how to use autonumbering for court exhibits.
I say "variation" because, unlike my original post, this reader wanted to embed the automatic exhibit number in a footer rather than in the main document:
I am able to enter sequential exhibit numbers on the main parts of each page of my document by inserting the AutoNum category in Field codes. Is there a way to do the same in a footer/header?
If you've never actually tried to use certain field codes like AutoNum in a header or footer, you've probably never found out (the hard way) that not all of field codes work in the header/footer. Certain field codes will throw an error if you try to use them in headers and footers:
So, if you can't use the automatically incrementing AutoNum field, what can you use?
One of the most basic functions in Microsoft Word is printing envelopes and labels. You'd think that such a basic function would be pretty intuitive. It's not. One of the most frequent questions I get from longtime WordPerfect users is, "Where on earth are the envelopes (or labels) in Word?"
An attorney reader (whose employer is using Word 2003) contacted me about a curious macro problem:
I have created a macro for my signature for e-filing, etc., and it works in any document I open. I want to create a couple of other macros to automate some typing I have to do in documents before saving them. I have created the macros numerous times, and they work just fine to begin with, but they will not work once I have restarted the computer! It’s like I can’t figure out how to save the new ones permanently. I’ve been unable to make heads or tails of the help from Microsoft either.
This is not the first time I’ve heard of macros not saving, but this was a little different. After doing a bit of digging, I suggested these items for him to check:
That whole “block and copy” thing is probably one of the first word processing skills you learned. In fact, you’ve been working with it so long, you probably think there’s nothing else to learn.
Au contraire, my friend. If you want to speed up your document editing time, my guest post over at Lawyerist (yes, this is a regular thing for me now) shows you several more text selection tricks, including that neat one about selecting a vertical column.
Click here to read the whole post.
(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/3049692026/)
A reader recently asked me if I had any "solutions or helpful hints for footnotes that simply do not fit on the page due to placement or length of the footnote itself." Well, the placement question (if I understand her correctly) got answered in the post about fixing footnotes that drop down to another page. But I'd never gotten around to addressing the problem of lengthy footnotes.
A footnote of a certain length will split to appear on two different pages, each with its own separator (the line that appears between the end of the main text and the beginning of the footnote). The continued footnote on the following page has its own distinct separator to give you a visual cue that it's a continuation. You can edit both of those separators and the continuation message as follows:
Unless otherwise noted, all instructions and screenshots are from Microsoft Office for Windows.
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.
Here’s a quick tip: Ever open up your Microsoft Word document first thing in the morning, after having worked on it all day yesterday, and have trouble finding where you left off last time?
Don’t worry — you won’t have to wait for your morning caffeine to kick in. As soon as you open up your document, press SHIFT-F5. Word’s “Go Back” feature will take you back to your last edit. (In fact, if you press Shift-F5 repeatedly, it’ll take you through your last four edits.)
That’s it! (Don’t you love it when something’s that simple?)
(Photo credit: Aprilzosia at Flickr)
Edit: Well, this is embarrassing. Apparently, this feature disappeared briefly in version 2007, but it’s back in version 2010. Thanks to an alert reader for the heads-up (and shame on me for not keeping better notes on my testing!)
As anyone who gets my weekly e-newsletter can attest (you do, don’t you?), I invite readers to submit questions and problems (either via email or my Ask the Guru page). Here’s one I received this week:
Microsoft Word is very slow starting up, finding documents and shutting down. How do I speed it up?
Ever get tired of creating the same document type, over and over, from scratch? Then don’t. Build a template instead. A template will have all the basic elements of your document in it (a signature block, a custom header/footer, whatever you need), saving you repetitive effort every time you create a new document.
What’s that? You don’t know how to create a template? You’re in luck. I’m about to build one for myself. And I’ll even let you watch over my shoulder while I do it.
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 stuff 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.
Ever needed to be able to change the page numbers in the middle of a Microsoft Word document (an appellate brief, for example)? Like, switching from Roman numerals to Arabic numerals or just not having page numbers at all?
Don't tear your hair out, my pretty. Help is here!
The secret to doing this is found in the Word feature called Sections. Sections will (among other things) allow you to have distinct headers and footers on different pages of the document. So, using that appellate brief as an example, you can have no page numbers showing up on your cover page, those little lower-case Roman numerals (you know, i, iv, ix, etc.) on the pages with the table of authorities, etc., and start yet again with regular Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) when the main part of the brief starts.
If you've ever been working in a document (particularly one that's been constructed with a lot of "cut and paste" from other documents) and wanted to make this paragraph (or this line or this heading) look just like that other one, here's a simple trick.
Super easy — here’s how you do left-justify, right-justify, center, and full-justify in Microsoft Word (either with your mouse or your keyboard).
One question I get asked a lot is, “What’s the best way to convert an existing WordPerfect document into Word?”
There are a lot of ways of doing this — some better than others. Here, I rate the choices from worst to best.
While this isn’t a common need in law offices, it’s such a cool trick, I just had to share.
Have you ever seen a sentence that started with “Lorem ipsum …”? That’s placeholder text that web and print designers use to show how text will be formatted in a document. And it’s easy to insert automatically in Word.