Category Archives: Editing

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 […]

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 […]