13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Sorting

One nice feature of Word is the Sort feature. If you have a list, and you’d like to sort it into alphabetical order, this is what you do:

1. Select the list.


2. Click on the Sort icon.


3. You'll see this dialog box:
   
   
   
   
   


4. Click on OK.

If you wish to sort a table into alphabetical order, do the following:

1. Click anywhere inside the table.


2. Click on the sort icon.


3. Make sure the Header Row option is selected.


4. Select the field (ie the column heading) on which you wish to sort.


5. Click on OK.

You can sort in descending order, and sort on numbers too if appropriate, or even date.

The handy thing about this feature is that you can type a list in any order you like, as things come to you, and sort out the order of the items later.

Finally, if you want to change the order of the items, but not in alphabetical, numerical or date order, you can easily move items up or down as follows:

1. Click on a line.


2. Hold the Ctrl and Alt keys down, and press the up or down arrow to move the item up or down.

13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Erase Formatting

*!@#^ #~*&%! Blast! If that sounds like you when you can’t seem to change what a piece of text looks like, don’t fret: there is  a solution. You know what I’m talking about: for no apparent reason, a headline stays as a headline, big and bold, no matter what you do to it. Stubbornly resisting all your attempts to bring it down to size, it soon has you swearing, stamping your feet and ranting about Microsoft.

OK, take a few deep breaths, make yourself a strong cup of tea and listen carefully: here’s what you do.

First, highlight the offending text.

Next, click on the format eraser, which looks like this in the Home menu:

Problem solved. So now you can get back to writing – no excuses!

13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Properties

Like other Office software, Word includes a feature which isn’t exactly obvious, but potentially very helpful. It’s the Properties section.

“Properties” refers to the attributes of a document – what some people call the “metadata”, ie the data which isn’t necessarily part of the document content, but which describes the document in various ways. Thus, the name of the person who wrote the document is an example of a property, as is any keywords you might use to describe the document.

So, click on the Office Home button, which looks like this:

Then click on Prepare—> Properties.

There are more Properties options not shown here

So why is this feature useful? Two reasons. Firstly, it makes finding the document a lot easier. If you’re anything like me, you sometimes forget the name by which you’ve saved the document. Well, if you remember, for example, that it was about Word, or it was a how-to document, you could look for the document using one of those terms. So you would obtain a result like this:

(It’s more reliable if you know where to look, by the way.)

Secondly, it can help you establish ownership. A month or so ago I was looking for something on the internet, and came across a document which looked rather familiar. I looked in the Properties, and sure enough, there was my name! I was able to email the website owner and ask him to remove it, which he did.

It takes a few minutes to fill in the Properties data, but it’s definitely a useful habit to cultivate.

13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: AutoCorrect

Here’s a feature which you may have noticed, perhaps without thinking about it. Type a smiley face in “text speak”, ie :-), and you will notice that it immediately converts into a smiley face. (Incidentally, if you didn’t want that to happen, just press Ctrl Z right away, ie hold the Ctrl key down whilst pressing the Z key once.)

It does that because it’s part of the built-in AutoCorrect feature. You may have also noticed, when carrying out a spell-check, that one of the options is to add the correction to AutoCorrect. That’s pretty handy if you keep making the same typo over and over again.

For example, I often type “teh” instead of “the”; adding it to AutoCorrect means that it will automatically correct itself after I’ve entered the incorrect word.

 

The great thing about AutoCorrect is that you can sort of hijack it to enable you to type long bits of text by typing an abbreviated version.

For example, suppose you often write formal letters which end something like this:

Thank you for your kind attention in dealing with this matter. I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully

your name

That’s a lot to type. How much easier it would be if you could type just one word, and have the whole lot appear. Well you can!

First, type the text you wish to assign to an abbreviation, and then highlight it, like this:

Next, go to the AutoCorrect settings. If you’re using Office 2007, you do this by clicking on the Office Home button, which looks like this:

and then clicking on Word Options and then Proofing.

Next, click on AutoCorrect Options, and you’ll see something like this:

Enter the abbreviation you wish to use. In my example, I have used the abbreviation “letterend”. Bear in mind that it’s important to to not use a real word or name!

Then click on OK, and then do so again.

So, next time I am typing a letter, when I come to the end I type letterend:

and, like magic, my standard end-of-letter text will appear:

Maybe you don’t write letters that often, but what about other text? How about if one of the characters in your latest novel is “Fred Bloggs, King of England and Emperor of All of the Dominions of the Known World”? Fancy having to type in that mouthful every time!

Or what if you simply wanted to make sure a standard copyright text is inserted at the end of each article you write?

AutoCorrect is perfect for all these situations, and more.

13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: AutoSave

A few days ago I switched the light on in the kitchen, there was a pop, and all the lights went out. Everything electrical was as dead a dodo. It could have been a major disaster, as I’d just finished doing several hours’ work. Fortunately, it was merely a minor inconvenience, thanks to the magic of AutoSave.

As its name suggests, AutoSave is a facility that allows you to save your document automatically every so often. Quite frankly, now that I’ve told you about the feature you’d be completely nuts not to use it! But the key thing is to set the frequency to a sensible time interval. The way I look at it – and this is only a personal preference – I can live with losing 10 minutes’-worth of work. I wouldn’t want to lose more than that, because it would be too frustrating for words. In any case, I might not remember everything I’d written over the last quarter of an hour or more, but I can easily handle ten minutes.

So why not go the whole way and save it every one minute? Well, sometimes change things as I go along, and one minute doesn’t give me enough reflection time. I’ll write a paragraph, take a slurp of tea while I read over the paragraph, and then say “Nah, don’t like that”, and rework it. If I autosaved every one minute then I’d save the wrong version.

Also, the AutoSave operation does slow things down for a couple of seconds while it does its stuff. If you had it set to one minute intervals, this would drive you mad (take it from one who has tried it).

OK, so how do you set it? Just go to the Options menu, which in the recent versions of Word may be found by clicking on the Office button, which looks like this:

Then click on Save, and you’ll see the following dialog box:

Set it up the way you like, click on OK, and your efforts are much less likely to be lost in the event of a disaster.

Of course, though, it’s still a good idea to save your work manually every so often. I tend to do so either each time I take a break, or even at the end of each paragraph, depending on how important the document is.

13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Commenting

Making changes to a document, albeit provisionally, is something you can easily do in Review mode, which has been covered in a separate article. But that can easily become unwieldy, especially when more than a couple of people are involved: we all know the old saw about too many cooks.

A reasonable compromise is to invite people to make comments on the document, within the document itself. Just highlight he bit you want to comment on, click on Add comment (inside the Review section), and you’ll be able to say your piece. If you use the default display option, of having “balloons” in the margin rather than having the comments inline, it will be easy to read everyone’s comments as they will be stacked on top of each other.

We know who you are...You will be able to tell who has said what, because their initials will appear in the comment (unless they have logged in anonymously, of course, or under someone else’s name).

To remove comments, right-click on them and select Delete Comment, or click on Delete Comment—>Delete All comments. You can also leap from one comment to the next by clicking on the appropriate menu options, which is handy if they happen to be separated by several pages.

You can also change the appearance of comments, such as highlighting a word in one of them, by selecting the word or words in the comment you wish to change and then using the right-menu formatting options.

Play around with this feature, and the way it appears in the document. It's a useful way of keeping the clutter to a minimum, without risking mislaying or forgetting about a comment if it was made in a a covering email or something like that.

Clear Communication

This classic sketch illustrates the importance of clear communication. Although it’s spoken, not written, there are interesting lessons to draw from it.

For example, contextual information helps make the meaning clear, and it also means that you can’t rely on automated proofing tools such as the spell-checker to correct errors. Like the notice I saw at the gym yesterday, which reads “Hand in you’re ticket to the front desk.”

Anyway, enjoy!

How Tech-Savvy Are You?

JRNHY9797BXF This is a terribly unfair question, but hey! Life is unfair! I've decided to use the question below as a proxy for the question in the title of this post. I'm not sure if it's a good proxy, but it should achieve a few things:

1. I'm afraid I can't tell you the first benefit because that will give the answer away, pretty much.


2. If you don't  know the answer perhaps it will arouse your curiosity.


3. If you  do know the answer perhaps it will remind that you should have done the same.


4. If you have done the same it may leave you with a nice warm glow of smugness :-).

You see, everybody wins!

The question

What’s the code at the beginning of this blog post for?

I will reveal the answer in the fullness of time.

Have Bottle, Will Travel

I think the title of this article probably gives the impression that I’m an alcoholic, but those who see me at conferences or meetings know that I always have a bottle of water with me.

I also always carry a camera.

So when I happened upon the product seen in this video, I thought “Wow! That’s just what I need!”.

I don’t know if it’s any good in practice, or just a novelty item that you’re not supposed to take seriously, but at first glance I think it looks great. Anyone had any experience of using this?

Have Digicam, Will Travel

When I was much younger I had an interest in photography. The only problem was, I was no good at it.

When I presented pictures that I thought were ok to the tutor at the youth club I attended, I would be told that the composition was no good, or that the contrast was lacking, or that I needed to sort my f-stops out (hey -- no need to get personal). So it will come as no surprise to learn that after years of this sort of psychological abuse I turned my back on photography. Until just about 12 years ago, when digital became doable.

My trusty friendA digital camera can't turn a lousy photographer into a good one, but it did mean not having to spend tons of money on processing a film of 36 snaps only to find that just 3 were usable. And now that prices have come way down, and quality soared, there is really no reason not to have one, because it definitely has advantages for the writer.

First of all, it's dead easy to take snapshots to remind you of scenes or events, and then write about them when you get back home.

If you maintain your own website, you don't need great quality pictures either -- in fact, high quality also equals higher download times. And to be honest, even if the picture is slightly blurred, if it’s small (what’s called a “thumbnail”), it might not even be noticeable -- you can get away with a lot on the web.

If your photographic skills are as good as mine, you can take a picture, review it, delete it and then take it again, ad infinitum, until you get it just right.

Writers thrive on libraries and reference books: why not picture libraries too? I find it much easier to find pictures if they are on my computer system or online than stashed in an album or a filing cabinet.

If you illustrate your own work, why use clip art when you can use your own pictures? Clip art is so ubiquitous that I can't be the only person around who can look at a leaflet and tell you where the illustrations came from with about 95% accuracy. Yawn.

Alternatively or additionally, you can use other people’s photos as long as they’ve made it clear that that’s permitted through, say, a Creative Commons licence. Use this search engine to easily find the pictures you can use.

If you don't illustrate your own work, you can still provide the graphic artist with the photographic equivalent of roughs -- in other words, pictures that give an idea of the kind of thing you would like to see in your book or on the cover.

Right. Now that I have convinced you to think seriously about going digital, what should you look for in a camera?

I’m not an expert, but I’ll tell you what’s worked for me. I think the single most important aspect to pay attention to is the lens quality. After that, unless you will be solely concerned with low quality work, I should recommend that you look at cameras that can take high megapixel pictures. Mega in this context means million, but don't worry about the jargon. All you have to remember is: the bigger the number, the higher the quality of the picture, the higher the price, and the higher the amount of storage capacity you will need. But the good news is that storage media such as SD cards is incredibly cheap these days.

The battery can be a pain. Imagine that you're just about to take the photo that will be bought by every newspaper in the world, and then ping! Your battery dies on you. Make sure you always have a fully charged spare one. Go for a camera that either contains a rechargeable battery, or that comes with a battery charger as standard, and buy a spare battery so that you always have one fully charged and at the ready.

Other features are a matter of choice. A zoom can be quite handy: optical zoom is better than digital zoom, as a rule, because it’s sharper.

Some cameras will also take short video clips and a set of sequenced shots. That latter option is probably useful if you'll be doing a lot of sports-related stuff. or taking photos of wildlife like birds. Being able to take video is nice so that you can capture something like a brief interview with someone and then use it as an aid-memoire later or even upload it to your website. 

Over the last couple of years there has been a convergence of the technology, by which I mean that pocket camcorders can now take decent still pictures, and still cameras can take reasonable videos. Nevertheless, in my opinion you get the best still picture results from a device whose primary function is to take stills, and the best video results from a device designed mainly for that purpose.  However, at least these days you don’t have to carry more than one device around with you. In fact, if you use a modern cell phone that will probably suffice for most purposes.

Some cameras also come with a voice memo facility so you can record what the picture is actually of at the time you take it. A fantastic feature, spoilt for me only by the sad fact that I always forget it's there.

A really essential feature, however, is the facility to take photos without using the digital display: that uses up battery power like nobody's business. If you can switch it off and use an ordinary viewfinder instead, you'll save a lot of money, not to mention frustration at running out of juice at just the wrong moment.

Another handy feature is the ability to decide whether or not to have the flash go off. You'd be surprised at how well pictures taken in dark-ish places come out, and how quite often the flash spoils it by "whiting" everything out.

And if you are really photographically-challenged, or pushed for time, or just plain lazy, use the automatic setting or one of the scene presets, which a lot of cameras have nowadays. 

Make sure it comes with a case too.

It's not just the camera, or hardware, that's important: software is important too. One of the benefits of having a digital camera is being able to mess around with the pictures afterwards. Not only for boring stuff like getting rid of red-eye, but for more creative things too. For example, you can crop unsightly parts of the picture, combine different pictures, add text to a photo, adjust the brightness, contrast and colours and even the angle. If you run your own website, you can reduce the size of the photos, and convert them into a form acceptable to web browsers. In fact, it's hard to think of something that you can't do.

If the camera is brilliant but the software that comes with it is no great shakes, just get hold of Paint.Net. That's a free program that can do all the things I just mentioned.

So are traditional cameras as dead as a dodo? The answer is a resounding "no". You can still get ordinary pictures into your computer either by scanning them, or by having them put onto CD-ROM when you have them processed. But there are some areas where digital cameras are much better for writers: convenience, aide-memoirs, picture proofs, "clip art" and a graphics library.

As in so many areas in life, it's not really a question of one rather than another, but choosing the right tool for the job at the time.

The original version of this article first appeared in Writing World, and a couple of years later it was updated and published on the original ICT in Education website. So if reading this has given you a distinct feeling of déja vu, that’s probably why!

13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Reviewing

Here’s the wrong way of reviewing a document: make the changes you think necessary, and save the document with a different name. Sounds sensible enough, doesn’t it?

Trouble is, after this has happened several times, neither your nor the person whose document you’re reviewing will know which version is which.

Moreover, if you have AutoSave on, or you inadvertently use the Save command instead of the Save As command, you’ll make the changes irrevocable to all intents and purposes.

The point to bear in mind when it comes to reviewing is that you’re either only suggesting changes or marking the document up for someone else to change. If the former, then you want to have the choice about whether the suggested changes are actually implemented, or whether you just say “Forget it”.

The solution is to use the Reviewing mode. This lets you make changes to the document in the same way that a professional proof-reader would. For example, when you delete a word, it isn’t really deleted, it is simply struck through, like this.That makes it easy for you to see what the text was before you made that particular change. So it gives you, and the author (which may be yourself, of course), the chance to mull it over and then, if you prefer, revert to the original wording.

OK, let’s get started.

First, go the Review menu, and select Track Changes.

Next, decide whether you wish to show the suggested changes inside the body of the document, or in “balloons” in the margin. You do that by clicking on the Balloons tab.

If you like, you can also decide how your changes will appear. Click on Track Changes—>Change Tracking Options.

Now make changes to the document in the secure knowledge that, until you click on an option in the the Accept or Reject menus, none of your alterations will be permanent – although I always think it’s a good idea to save the document with a slightly different name

before you get started. I usually use something like original name – TF Review.docx.

Using the Reviewing feature is also handy when you have several people reviewing the document, because you can see who made particular changes, just by hovering your mouse pointer over an amendment:

You can even make life easier for yourself by going to Show Markup—>Reviewers and then deselecting the people whose comments you do not want to see at this time.

And if you’re concerned that someone will delete or change some key text which is sacrosanct, such as a quotation or a legal statement which has to remain unaltered, click on Protect Document—>Restrict Formatting and Editing, and you will be able to define the areas of the document in which changes are permitted.

There’s a lot more which is beyond the scope of this introductory article, such as setting up a list of approved reviewers. Why not explore and play around with the various options?

13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Comparing Documents

It’s enough to make a grown man cry. You receive a second version of a document from a colleague, with no indication in the covering email about what’s changed. So what do you do? Print out both documents and pore over them till you’re cross-eyed?

No need: Word has a built-in document comparison feature that will highlight the differences for you. It’s a subsection of the Reviewing feature, which will be covered in a separate article.

So here’s what you do:

Step 1Go to the Review menu, and then select Compare. The option you then want is Compare, not Combine.

Select the original article, and then select the version you wish to compare it with, and click OK.

I always like to click on Show Source Documents—> Show Both, as I find that gives me a better overall picture of what’s going on. But everyone’s different, so play around with the different options until you find the one you like best.

Step 2As you can see (Step 3), the changes will be indicated quite clearly. You then have the choice of whether or not to save the list of comparisons. I rarely do because I find that just seeing them on the screen enables me to focus right in on the changed bits, which I can then evaluate straight away.

Step 3This is a great time-saver when you’re trying to determine what exactly has changed between two versions of a really long document. If you’re an editor or proof-reader, I’d say this tool is a must-have for sure – and the good news is, if you use Word, you already have it!

13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Table of Contents

When does a document need a table of contents? I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule about this, but let’s think about it from the other end: the reader. Is your document going to be challenging to navigate? Are there sections in it which people are likely to want to refer to or likely to wish to return to, and which they can’t see at a quick glance? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, I’d say that a table of contents is imperative, even if the document is only two or three pages long.

Oh, but what a chore, having to go through the document pulling out all the section headings! Well, not really, if you’ve formatted the headings with the built-in paragraph styles. So, assuming that’s what you’ve done, here’s what you do:

Firstly, type the heading “Table of Contents” at the top of the document – but don’t format it as a heading. Not just yet, anyway, because if you do it will be included in the table of contents itself, which is somewhat self-referential.

Then press the Enter key in order to make room for the table of contents.

Next, select the Insert Table of Contents command, which is in the References menu, not the Insert menu in Word 2007. You’ll notice that there’s a whole bunch of fancy formats, but if you just want the most straightforward one, which happens to show all the options, go almost right to the bottom of the menu and select Insert Table of Contents. You’ll be presented with a dialogue box that looks like this:

You could choose the defaults and just click on OK, but there are a couple of circumstances in which you would probably wish to override them. In particular, if you have a very long document with lots of headings and sub-headings, it may not be a bad idea to include only headings of level 1 and 2, otherwise the table of contents may seem to go on forever. This may not be a problem, so you have to decide for yourself. For example, in one booklet of resources I produced, each page comprised the name of the resource as the main heading, and then generic headings such as “Age range” and so on. Given that these headings were the same on every page, it would have been pointless to have included them in the table of contents.

Another situation is where you are formatting the document for conversion to an ebook. In almost any format except PDF, the concept of page numbers is irrelevant, so you’d be better off choosing to use hyperlinks, with no page numbers showing at all.

Once you’ve inserted the table of contents you can continue to add more text. To update the table of contents, click anywhere in it and press F9, to see the following:

Once you’re sure you’ve finished the document, press F9 to update the table of contents one last time, and then format the heading “Table of contents” as a heading, ie with one of the paragraph styles. (If you need to add another section to the document after doing this, just reformat the heading as a normal paragraph temporarily, update the table again, and then reinstate it as a heading.)

To use the table of contents on a computer, hold the Ctrl key down and click on an entry. If you convert it or save it to a PDF, you don’t need to use the Ctrl key, just click on an entry. If you’re going to be printing the document, or think others may, don’t forget to include page numbering! Use the Insert –> Footer –> Page number option to do so.

What An Insulting Site!

Listen, thou fobbing clapper-clawed clotpole! The internet is useful for more things than mere facts. Take the Shakespearian Insult Generator for example. This does exactly what it says on the tin, and generates Shakespearian insults at random.

Usefully, most insults cite the source – most, but not all, leading me to think that some of them are invented, made up from Shakespearian-era words.

I have no idea what some of the terms mean, and hope that any I use are not actually obscene. That possibility aside, it’s all good fun, and goes to show there’s more to internet-based research than cross-checking references.

13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Outlining

Do you ever get to the point, when writing a long document, where you can’t see the wood for the trees? I know I do. Should I put that section right at the start? What would it look like if I made it the second section rather than the first? Would the whole document still flow, would the structure be wrong?

Quite often people, faced with this sort of indecision, will resort to printing out the whole thing to read it through, or write down the headings on post-it notes and move them around to see what it looks like. There is nothing wrong with either of these, and they can be useful things to do in their own right – but you don’t have to do them if all you want to so is see the structure of your document at a glance. Enter (ta-da!) the outline feature.

The outline feature lets you view just the headings in your document. That’s not all: it will also allow you to move whole blocks of text from one pace to another just by moving the heading, which is very handy when you need to move a few pages of text from the end of the document to somewhere near the beginning. Not only is it quicker, it’s safer as well: less chance of losing it in transit. But before you can use it you will need to format your headings with paragraph styles, as described in the article on, er, paragraph styles. If you haven’t read that yet pop over there now – don’t worry, I’ll wait.

The screenshots are based on Office 2007, but if you have a different version of Word don’t fret: look in the View menu. OK, here goes.

Here’s my document, which is about one of my favourite subjects: tea.

Hard to see the wood for the treesAs you can see, there’s quite a bit of text, and some headings. The whole document is 8 pages long. You can tell from looking at the screenshot that it would be hard to get an idea of the structure of the document just from the normal view, so what I’m going to do is look at only the headings. Here’s what we do.

First, click on the Outline icon or menu item.

Next, click on the arrow next to the label “Show Level:”, and select Level 2 (that’s because all my headings are formatted with the Heading 2 paragraph style).

Here’s what those 8 pages look like now:

Quite a bit different, yes?!

If I decide that Fennel Tea is so important that it needs to be nearer to the beginning of the document, I just click on the plus sign next to it, and drag it up to where I want it to go, like so:

Here’s what the structure of the document looks like now:

Finally, to return to the normal view, I just click on the Close Outline View icon, or on Normal view, and I can then get back to my writing.

Although I think I’ll have a cup of tea first!