13 Things You Didn't Know About Word: Paragraph Styles

Some people really make a lot of work for themselves when it comes to headings. It seems straightforward enough: just select the text you want to use for the heading, and make it bold, underlined, bigger or whatever takes your fancy. The trouble really starts when you decide you’d like to change the way the headings look. And even if you are happy with their appearance, you’re still missing out on a load of other good stuff.

The thing about formatting each individual heading is that you’re, erm, only formatting each individual heading. How much better it would be to work on all the headings of a particular type at once.

Well you can, simply by assigning codes known as “paragraph styles” to the heading. The top heading, eg for the chapter or document title, will be Heading 1. The next level of heading will be Heading 2, and so on.

There are three main ways of assigning paragraph styles to a piece of text:

1. Click anywhere in the text and press Ctrl-Alt-1 for Heading 1, Ctrl-Alt-2 for Heading 2 or Ctrl-Alt-3 for Heading 3.This method won’t work for any other headings styles.


2. Click anywhere in the text, and then select one of the paragraph styles shown at the top of the screen, if you have Office 2007 (if you  have an earlier version, you should see a drop-down menu of heading styles at the top of the screen).


3. Alternatively, format the text the way you’d like it to look, then click on the downward-pointing arrow to the right of the strip of styles (shown here highlighted in yellow), and then click on the Save as quick style option, give it a meaningful name, and click on OK.

If you opt for the third of these methods, you’ll discover that your new style will appear at the left-hand end of the styles strip, making it easy to use at any time.

There are two great things about using paragraph styles as far as formatting is concerned.

Firstly, you can save a lot of time formatting the text in the first place. Suppose you’re writing a story for children, and there are two main characters: the hero, and the villain. The hero’s speech is in blue, and the font is Arial.

The villain’s speech is in red, and the font is Old English MT.

Think of how much time it would take to go through the document formatting the text appropriately. Using paragraph styles, it’s simply a matter of clicking in the paragraph you want to change, and then clicking on the paragraph style.

Secondly, should you wish to change everything, such as the hero has green speech and the villain has purple speech, just click on that arrow again (see above), choose the Modify option, and make the changes you need. Once you’ve clicked on OK, every piece of text formatted in that style will change at once.

Generate some random text and try it for yourself!

But that’s not all you can use paragraph styles for. They also make it easy for you to create an outline view of your document, and to generate a table of contents with just a few clicks of the mouse. The next two articles in this series will cover those.

How To Write Upside Down On a Computer

I am not sure when it would be useful to be able to write upside down on a computer, but should you wish to do so, here’s how you do it:

1. Go to http://www.writeupsidedown.net/


2. Type your text into the uppermost box


3. Select the text in the bottom box and copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl C on a PC)


4. Paste the text into your document or web page.

Easy!

This is what it looks like (based on the above text):

¡ʎsɐǝ
˙ǝƃɐd qǝʍ ɹo ʇuǝɯnɔop ɹnoʎ oʇuı ʇxǝʇ ǝɥʇ ǝʇsɐd ㄣ
(ɔd ɐ uo ɔ ןɹʇɔ) pɹɐoqdıןɔ ǝɥʇ oʇ ʇı ʎdoɔ puɐ xoq ɯoʇʇoq ǝɥʇ uı ʇxǝʇ ǝɥʇ ʇɔǝןǝs ᄐ
xoq ʇsoɯɹǝddn ǝɥʇ oʇuı ʇxǝʇ ɹnoʎ ǝdʎʇ ᄅ
/ʇǝu˙uʍopǝpısdnǝʇıɹʍ˙ʍʍʍ//:dʇʇɥ oʇ oƃ ⇂
:ʇı op noʎ ʍoɥ s’ǝɹǝɥ 'os op oʇ ɥsıʍ noʎ pןnoɥs ʇnq 'ɹǝʇndɯoɔ ɐ uo uʍop ǝpısdn ǝʇıɹʍ oʇ ǝןqɐ ǝq oʇ ןnɟǝsn ǝq pןnoʍ ʇı uǝɥʍ ǝɹns ʇou ɯɐ ı

Some uses for this facility could be:

• Book covers.


• Novelty items.


• Special effects in a story.


• Greetings cards.

Yes, you could simply enter the text in the usual way, and then turn the page upside down, but that doesn't allow you to mix normal and upside-down text in the same document.

An alternative might be to create a document in the normal manner, and then scan it into the computer as an image, which you can then insert upside-down into an ordinary document. However, not only is that a whole ton of hassle, the quality of the text in the picture will almost certainly not be as clear as the ordinary text.

So, it looks like for producing upside-down text on a computer, that upside-down website is your best bet.

13 Things You Didn't Know About Word: Random Text

In this series I’m looking at 13 features of Microsoft Word that you may not have come across, but which can be incredibly useful. Today’s topic is how to generate random text.

First, though, why would you wish to do so? Blogger Doug Woods recently joked that you could use the random text feature to bulk up a report in order to fool your boss into thinking you’ve been putting in loads of effort! But there are more serious reasons you might want to do so.

Random text is usually used to experiment with different formatting or page layouts. You could do so with your actual document, of course, but no matter how careful you might be, saving it as a different name altogether, backing it up onto a USB stick first, you cannot get away from the fact that to mess about with your precious work is to tempt Providence. Far better to experiment all you like with a block of text which is dispensable. If you mess it up beyond repair, it won’t matter.

There are several ways of generating random text in Word. The basic way, of course, is to type it in. This is a waste of time. Yes, you can type one sentence and copy and paste it several dozen times, but that’s also a waste of time. Let’s hear no more about it.

The Rand command

Type the following, and then press the Enter key:

=rand()

As you can see, several paragraphs of Help text have been generated.

You can control how many paragraphs there are, and how many sentences you have in each paragraph. If you’d prefer to watch how to do this instead of reading about it, look at the very short screencast below.

 

 

Rather than typing =rand(), you can type =rand(x,y), where x is the number of paragraphs and y is the number of sentences in each one. Try it now, with low numbers that enable you to see what’s going on, such as =rand(1,6), which will produce one paragraph with six sentences, or =rand(6,1), which will give you six paragraphs with a single sentence in each.

If you need to check things like pagination, just type a number high enough to give you lots of paragraphs and sentences, and therefore several pages. For example, typing something like =rand(30,6) should do the trick.

The old Rand command

Until Office 2007, the rand command generated several paragraphs of that tried and traditional random text, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.I have to say that I preferred that, because it contains every letter in the English alphabet. If that’s your preference too, then type =rand.old() instead of =rand(). Again, to control the number of paragraphs and sentences, use the format =rand.old(x,y).

Lorem ipsum etc

If you’re a traditionalist, you may prefer to use the quasi-Latin text Lorem ipsum and so on. No problem! Simply type =lorem(). Again, to control the number of paragraphs and sentences, adopt the =lorem(x,y) variation.

I hope you found this useful. Next in the series is paragraph styles.

13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word

A lot of people use Microsoft Word, but it’s said that most of them use only a few of the features available. The aim of this series is to introduce to you some of the features in Word of whose existence you may not be aware, but which you will almost certainly find useful.

It doesn't ALL have to be done by hand

A lot of people use Microsoft Word, but it’s said that most of them use only a few of the features available. The aim of this series is to introduce to you some of the features in Word of whose existence you may not be aware, but which you will almost certainly find useful.

Here’s what will be covered:

1. Random text


2. Paragraph styles


3. Outlining


4. Table of contents


5. Comparing documents


6. Reviewing


7. Commenting


8. Autosave


9. Autocorrect


10. Properties


11. Erase formatting


12. Sorting


13. Repeating yourself

The order chosen is not entirely random. We’ll need some text to work on for most of the features explored, so it makes sense to start off by generating some random text. The alternatives are to work on some existing text – not advisable in case you do irreparable damage – or to type in text from scratch – fine if you have, to quote Mae West, nothing to do and plenty of time to do it in. Generating text with just a few keystrokes makes a lot more sense.

Next on the list is paragraph styles, a tremendously useful feature which, from my own observations, seems to be almost universally ignored. Becoming acquainted with paragraph styles will allow you to quickly view the structure and key points in the document, and to generate a table of contents should that be appropriate.

Comparing two versions of a document to see what changes have been made can be made much easier than “manually” comparing them. It’s also possible to add comments and make change changes which can be accepted or rejected subsequently, meaning that you don’t have to “ruin” the document by making permanent, and subsequently unwanted, changes to it.

It’s not a great idea to leave saving your work till you’ve finished the writing session, which could be several hours. On the other hand, breaking off from a creative streak in order to save the document is an unattractive proposition. Take advantage of the Autosave option so you don’t have to remind yourself to save the document or interrupt the flow.

The Autocorrect feature lets you replace some text with other text. You can take advantage of it both in terms of having your common typos corrected as you type, or to save time when entering text.

Learning about document properties is a good idea, because you can ensure that your name is embedded in the document, making proof of ownership potentially easier. Only recently I came across something of mine on a website, unacknowledged, and was able to prove it was mine because I’d put my name inside it in the document’s “hidden” properties.

Have you ever experienced the annoying situation in which however much you try, a particular piece of text stubbornly refuses to look the way it should, insisting on remaining as a heading, for example? We’ll look at how you can deal with that quickly and easily.

Sorting text into, say, alphabetical order is a lot easier and quicker than physically moving bits of text around, as you’ll see when we come to look at the Sort tool.

Finally, there’s a nice way of repeating the last thing you did without actually having to go through all the steps again!

I hope that’s whetted your appetite! If you don’t wish to miss one of these “episodes”, why not subscribe to the RSS feed? This article explains all about it in case you’re unfamiliar with how it can help.

Review of The Well-Fed Writer

The Well-Fed WriterThe book is, in effect, a marketing manual for the would-be serious freelance writer. Thus there is much about how to choose products and services (free is not always second-rate compared to exorbitant, it turns out), and how to approach potential clients. There is good advice about website design and what you should provide on the site, a wealth of websites to explore, and guest sections by other writers (including a few I've come across in the blogosphere, and whom I respect as writers).

There are a couple of niggling things. One is that although Bowerman makes it clear that social networking is very important in today's economy (schools that ban them, please take note), he admits that he himself isn't a member of any of them. That is disappointing because he may have been able to distil into a few bullet points the best way of making contacts in such spaces from his own first-hand experience.

As far as I can tell, there is no information about print-on-demand. Given that writers can be their own publishers these days, a section on that would not, I think, have gone amiss. There was a section about it in his companion book, The Well-Fed Publisher, in which he disparages the use of PoD (although at that time Lulu had only just appeared on the scene, and Bowerman himself had not used it yet).

However, given the readability of the book, such annoyances can be overlooked. Although the jocular (in parts) tone can start to sound a bit forced occasionally, it more often has the effect of making you want to look up that website or read such and such a blog.

Bottom line:

Full of hidden gems and a cornucopia of resources. Buy it.