If you’ve ever had information typed up like this:
… and only needed to copy the stuff out of one column, you’ll love this tip.
Say, for example, you needed to just get the dollar amounts 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 amount separately.
Au contraire. Trust me, you’ll love this trick!
You know how I’m always telling you that the best way to get your old WordPerfect text into a new Microsoft Word document is to just copy it over? Well, that’s not always the case. Sometimes Microsoft Word doesn’t “translate” WordPerfect text into just the right Microsoft Word equivalent.
Take, for example, the problem posed by this reader:
When using footnotes in a document, if I copy footnotes from WordPerfect and insert them into a Word document, the numbers do not change. Is there any way to make the numbers follow the number sequence in the document. Sometimes there are as many a 100 footnotes with dozens of different numbers — which need to be dealt with individually. Is there any way to make the numbers change and follow sequence at one time? I’ve tried everything including Ctrl-A (in the footnote draft, in the body of the document), but nothing works.
It took me a few minutes of experimenting, but I came up (I think) with the perfect solution. It’s one you’ll need in your toolbox if you ever have to copy footnoted content from old briefs, etc.
As I mentioned in the Part 1 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 (in the Ribbon versions, 2007 and later) and under the Tools menu in version 2003.
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.
Like before, we’ll cover the Ribbon-based versions of Word first, then cover versions 2002/2003.
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 →This week: Stop wandering around Microsoft Word’s Ribbon looking for commands and do some strategic double-clicking instead, why putting an ampersand in your Excel header or footer yields a weird result (and what to do if you really, really want that “&” to show up in your header or footer), and more news about an exciting iPad application that lets you edit Office documents. That’s right … it’s the Weekly Roundup!
Now that it’s past the annual holiday season here in the US (Santa brought me a way-big monitor!) it’s back in the saddle again for the Weekly Roundup. This week: Microsoft Office blog does its own list of most popular posts (including a couple of issues that continually plague legal Office users), a quick-and-dirty Excel tutorial on printing title rows, and an exciting rumor for iPad users.
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:
Oops.
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?”
But even for those who worked in Microsoft Word for years, this feature can be a little hard to find. Some of the problem stems from Microsoft’s habit of moving this feature around between versions of Word. (I think I even remember it being under the Format menu in one long-ago version. It’s moved twice since then!) So we’re going to look at the process in both the Ribbon-based version and the “classic” menu-based versions.
Along the way, I’m going to show you not only the “textbook” way of doing envelopes, but my own preferred method, which I think makes creating an on-the-fly envelope (on pre-printed letterhead) a lot easier (but that’s for you to judge).
In this week’s Roundup: doing the Quick Step in Microsoft Outlook, what to do when your Microsoft Word headers suddenly disappear, and Microsoft’s Outlook blog finishes up its “Best Practices” series.
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.
Fortunately, Microsoft has saved me the trouble of addressing the question of how to adjust the footnote separator—they’ve posted a great video on their support site about how to change the footnote or endnote separator. (To summarize: using the draft view you can access from the View Shortcuts on the Status Bar, double-click the footnote to edit it, then choose Footnote Separator (or Continuation Separator, or Continuation Notice, if you want to change those too) and edit it like text.)
Note: You may need to install Microsoft Silverlight to view the video on their site.
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.
To sort the table, select the entire table by clicking on the plus sign that shows up in the upper left-hand corner of the table whenever you hover your mouse over it:
On the Home tab in Word, you’ll see a button in the Paragraph section that looks like this: 
Click that to bring up the Sort dialog:
Usually, if your cursor is anywhere in the table, Word will sense that and adjust this dialog box accordingly (i.e. sense which columns have dates, etc.). You will, however, want to be sure the right radio button under “My list has [Header row] [No header row]” is selected so it won’t sort your header along with the data. (That also will pick up the header field names, as you can see above.)
But what if your data isn’t already in a table? If it’s a pretty straightforward list of first names and last names, for example, then that’s pretty easy too (with some limitations):
(Note: To view full-screen, click the button in the lower right-hand corner of the video player.)
How can you use this sorting feature? Let me know in the comments below.
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):
(If you need to see the above a bit bigger, click on it for a full-sized version. Go on — I’ll wait here.)
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:
1) Right-click your mouse anywhere on the status bar.
2) Select the option(s) you want (check marks on this example from Word 2007 indicate the option is already selected and showing up on the Status Bar):
I recommend, for example, always turning on the Track Changes indicator, and I personally think the Word Count is a handy piece of information to have. Feel free to experiment with adding or deleting features — you won’t mess up your document!
3) Once you’ve made your choices, click elsewhere on the screen to close the Customize Status Bar menu and save your changes.
That’s it! (That may be the easiest Word task you’ll do all day!)
Now, why is this important? Here are some scenarios to consider:
1) Someone’s sent you a document to review/revise and left Track Changes on, so when you start typing, Word starts redlining the document. With the status bar set to show the status of Track Changes, you can simply click on that section once to turn it off. That’s much simpler (and faster) than going to the Review tab, dropping down the Track Changes menu, and turning it off there.
2) You’ve imported some text from WordPerfect and notice that the headers and footers mysteriously change mid-document. Why? The status bar gives you a clue: the section numbers at the left keep changing. (Text imported from WordPerfect often embeds random section breaks into a document, which can affect the headers and footers.) How much time would you have otherwise spent trying to troubleshoot that problem?
3) Ever wanted to get a quick sum or count of highlighted cells in Excel without creating a formula? Change the status bar to show Count and Sum. You can also get quick calculations of Averages, Minimums and Maximums in the status bar.
So, what items would you want to see in the status bar? Tell me about ’em in the comments below.
If you’ve ever decided (or been told) after you’ve already typed something that what’s in lowercase letters now needs to be UPPERCASE, or vice versa, you don’t have to retype a single letter. No, no, no. You just need to use Microsoft Word’s Change Case feature.
On the Home ribbon, go to the Fonts section and click the arrow next to the Change Case button.
As an example, here’s what various types of text look like before changing case:
Before ...
And this is what it looks like after each type of change:
... and After
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!)
Stumbled across this while doing some research this weekend … Microsoft’s official list of keyboard shortcuts for Word 2002, Word 2003, and Word 2007. (The list for Word 2010 is here. Be sure to click the plus sign next to “Show All” before printing it out.) If you prefer to keep your hands on the keyboard and off the mouse while typing, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to memorize the ones for functions you use a lot (bold, italics, centering, etc.). In any event, it’s a handy reference.
With a hat-tip to Susan Harkins at TechRepublic.com, I’m going to show you one of the neatest Word tricks I think I’ve ever seen … and exactly how I’m going to put it to use to solve a long-standing problem: getting something to show up in the footer on every page except the last.
Around our office, we do a lot of wills. A lot. And the attorneys who do them like for their clients to initial all of the non-signature pages whenever they execute the will itself. (It keeps anybody from getting cute later and substituting a page before taking it to the Probate Judge. People are sneaky that way.) So we put “Initials: _______” in the footer on the right margin so it prints on every page.
I always thought my preferred solution, using Section Breaks, was the last word in solving the problem of how to get that footer text to not show up on the last page. But noooooo. Susan’s got a better idea: embedding a custom function in there.
Here’s the video demonstration: