We’ve all done it — there’s already a WordPerfect document that you need some text out of (a letter addressee, a section out of a brief, whatever), so you decide to cut-and-paste from WordPerfect into your current Word document.
And the formatting in your Word document goes totally … WAAAAAAHHHH!
Here’s how to avoid that:
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.
Hands-down, the number one complaint I get from former WordPerfect users is, “But Word doesn’t have Reveal Codes!” And, to a point, that’s true.
But as my ongoing (really, never-ending) research in the wonderful world of Microsoft Office plug-ins (a.k.a. add-ins or extensions) has shown me, it’s often a case of “seek and ye shall find.” Because there are a lot of enterprising programmers out there adding heretofore unavailable features to Microsoft Office.
Specifically, for Reveal Codes, there’s CrossEyes. And if you want to get a gander at what this plug-in can do, click here to read my review on Lawyerist.
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?"
I love nice, neat, fully-justified text in documents (really, who doesn’t?). It’s one of the great advantages word processing has over the ancient typewriter. But it can introduce some problems into your documents when the spacing between words (or even within words) isn’t quite right. Calculating that extra spacing is apparently still a real challenge for Microsoft Word. Sometimes, however, we as users unwittingly introduce problems that make it even more of a challenge.
For instance, if you’ve been known to copy text from your old documents into your new ones, you’ve probably seen this happen:
What on earth is going on with that last line? You know there aren’t really a bunch of extra spaces between the words. What else could be causing this, though?
Before you resign yourself to setting all your paragraphs to be left-justified, let me show you a little tip that’ll save you the trouble.
A friend of mine was about to tear her (expensively and enviably coiffed) hair out the other day — she’d copied over some text from an old Wordperfect document into Word to start a new document, but for some reason couldn’t get rid of the DRAFT watermark.
It’s not like she didn’t know how to delete watermarks in Word; all you have to do (in Word 2007, which is what she’s working with) is go to the Page Layout tab, click on the Watermark button, and choose Remove Watermark at the bottom of the menu.
But she did that … and there was STILL this big ol’ word DRAFT stuck behind the text! Like so:
If you’ve either retrieved or copied your old WordPerfect documents into Word as a conversion method (something I suggested in an earlier post), you may have run across a similar situation. Here’s why it’s so messed up.
One of the tactics I regularly recommend to users when transferring content from an old WordPerfect document is to use Paste, Special, Unformatted Text instead of just the plain Paste or CNTRL-V commands:
The advantage here is that Paste Special clears out all of the formatting so the newly-pasted text doesn’t mess up your nice Microsoft Word document.
The disadvantage? Well … it clears out all the formatting. And this can be a pain to re-do, particularly if you’ve got a long document with lots of case citations, etc.
What to do? Here are three tricks to keep in your Microsoft Word skills arsenal.
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.
The most common complaint I hear from legal professionals who’ve started using Word is, “I miss Reveal Codes!”
Yes, that ALT-F3 command was genius. No doubt about it.
But what most users don’t know is there’s something similar in Word. In some ways, it’s better. (Intrigued?)