Author Archives: Jack Lyon

In the Open, Save, and Save As dialogs in recent versions of Word, there’s a large vertical toolbar on the left-hand side of the dialog. The toolbar has buttons on it that make it easy to get to such places as My Documents and Desktop. Appropriately enough, the name of the toolbar is “My Places.” […]

Maybe I’m just dense, but I’ve found another Word feature that I’ve been wanting but didn’t know existed–document preview. If you’ve read the past couple of newsletters, you know I’ve been spending a lot of time poking around Word’s Open dialog, and this is my latest discovery. To use the feature: 1. Click File > […]

Last week’s newsletter introduced the idea of using Microsoft Word to search for Word documents to which you’ve assigned certain properties, such as categories or keywords. This week we’ll look at how to sort by those properties in a folder. I’ve learned, however, that this will not work in Windows 95 or 98. In XP, […]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about document management–that is, how to keep better track of all those Microsoft Word files I have floating around my computer. One tool I’ve neglected is Word’s Properties feature. If you work in a law office, you probably know all about it. But if you work in a publishing […]

The Styles and Formatting Task Pane in Word 2002 is a useful feature, but, keyboard junkie that I am, I just hate reaching for the mouse every time I need to create or modify a style–and the Task Pane doesn’t seem to work with the keyboard. Isn’t there a way to get back Word’s old […]

This week, just for fun (and for review), I’ve created a quiz. Use it to rate your skill in editing on the computer, using 1 as the lowest level (“I never do this”) and 5 as the highest (“I always do this”): 1 2 3 4 5 I use styles and eschew manual formatting. http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1711522967 […]

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 […]