Monthly Archives: April 2003

What's Your Handle?

When faced with a situation requiring a complex find and replace in Microsoft Word, many people have no idea even where to begin. If you’re one of those people, here’s the secret: Find the handle. What do I mean by “handle”? Something your find and replace routine can grab onto to do what it needs […]

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Wildcard Searching with Tracked Changes

Have you ever put together a clever wildcard Find and Replace routine that you *know* should work, but when you run the routine, you end up with something unexpected? You do it all the time? So do I, but that’s not quite what I meant. I’m thinking specifically about routines that use the Find What […]

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Unlinking Headers and Footers

If you work much with headers and footers in Microsoft Word, you’ve probably noticed that when you insert a section break, it’s automatically set to “Same as Previous.” For many Word users, especially in the publishing world, this is an annoyance. If I’m creating a new chapter in a book, I want my headers to […]

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Automatic Dashes

Helpful as always, Microsoft Word will automatically insert em dashes for you–but with an interesting twist. I’ll tell you what it is in just a minute. But first, here’s how to turn on those automatic dashes if you want to use them: 1. Click the Tools menu. 2. Click “AutoCorrect.” 3. Click the tab labeled […]

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Word in Your Pocket

About a year ago, after much back-and-forthing, I finally broke down and bought a Pocket PC–an AudioVox Maestro. Much to my surprise, I loved it, although I was vastly disappointed in the pocket edition of Microsoft Word. Sure, it could open the Word documents I was editing on my desktop computer, but it stripped out […]

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