Author Archives: Jack Lyon

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Most Microsoft Word users who need to use bold or italic just press CTRL + B or CTRL + I and go blithely on their way, not thinking any more about it. But at some point, they’ll run into problems. For example, their directly applied formatting may disappear when they apply a paragraph style over […]

Several readers have written to complain about Microsoft’s “enhancements” of various features in Word 2002. Most notably, the Comments and Revision Tracking features are broken. I’ve written about these here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1710381892 http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1711737396 Reader Ned Humphrey suggested starting a campaign to get Microsoft to reverse itself on such “disimprovements,” which I thought was a great idea. […]

I’ve occasionally mentioned this in passing, but based on recent questions from readers, it seems worth making a fuss about: Yes, you *can* use a carriage return in a wildcard search. People who use Microsoft Word often get stymied by this. They try doing a wildcard search with a string like this one: ^pSee(*)^p What […]