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, it works great, and it may work in some other versions.

Before you can sort by document properties, you'll have to assign those properties. Here's the basic procedure:

1. With a document open in Word, click File > Properties.

2. Click the Summary tab.

3. Enter the information by which you'll later want to sort. For example, you could enter a category, keywords, or a comment.

4. Save the document.

5. Repeat steps 1 through 4 for other documents. Note that you should really do these steps whenever you create a new document. Word can help you with this by automatically opening the Properties dialog the first time you save a document. To activate this feature, click Tools > Options > Save > Prompt for document properties.

You can also assign properties outside of Word by right-clicking a file in a folder and then clicking "Properties" and the Summary tab.

After assigning the properties you want to use, you can sort by those properties in Windows Explorer or any Windows folder. To do so:

1. Open the folder you want to use.

2. Click the View menu and then "Details." You should now see a line of buttons above your list of files. The buttons will have names like "Name," "Date Modified," and "Size." To sort your files by one of these properties, click the button for that property. For example, to sort your files by the date they were modified, click the "Date Modified" button.

3. Now, the good stuff. Take your mouse and right-click that button bar. Wow, look at all the properties you can include on the button bar!

4. For the really good stuff, click "More . . ." at the bottom of the menu.

5. Put a check in the box for the items you want to use, such as "Subject" and "Category." Then click the Okay button. Wow again! Now you can see those properties in your file list. (Note that you can apply these settings to all of your folders, if you like. To do so, click Tools > Folder Options > View > Apply to All Folders.)

6. Click the button for the property by which you want to sort. Pretty slick!

How can you use this feature? Well, how about keeping track of all documents from a particular author? Or maybe you'd want to group chapters that belong to a certain section of a book. How about using the feature as a document database that allows you to group all documents (from a variety of projects) by a particular subject? There are lots of possibilities.

On a Macintosh, life isn't quite so glorious. There's no way (that I know of) to sort by Word document properties in a folder (at least in OS 9.1, which I'm using). You can, however, sort by properties that you assign to files *outside* of Word. To do so:

1. Open the folder you want to use.

2. Click View > View Options.

3. Under "Show Columns," put a check in the box for the properties you want to display and sort. "Comments" and "Label" are really the only customizable properties available here. Note that you can also set these for all folders under Edit > Preferences > Views.

4. Select a file to which you want to assign properties.

5. Press Command + I to bring up the General Information dialog.

6. In the Comments box, enter the text by which you want to sort. For example, you could type a category or keyword here.

7. If you like, click the Label button and assign a category such as "Essential," "In Progress," or "Project 1."

8. Close the dialog to save your changes.

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

William T. Buckley wrote:

When I went to test your instructions in the DOCUMENT PROPERTIES portion of the Editorium for this week--06.11.2003--I found they did not work, at least not on my setup.

I am using Word 2002 (10.4524.4219) SP-2, running on Win2K professional.

After I read your discussion of the usefulness of the document properties capability, I then moved on to your detailed instructions:

* I clicked File > Open.

* I located the "Tools" button on the upper right of the dialog.

* BUT, when I went to look for "Find" under "Tools," there was no such option available in the dialog.

So I am unable to go forward with your instructions. And I'm at a loss to explain why. Is it me, my Word software, my OS, all of the above, none of the above?

I responded that before publishing these instructions, I really should have checked to see how the feature has changed in Word 2002, which now uses the term "Search" instead of "Find." Also, after clicking "Search," it's now necessary to click the "Advanced" tab, which will get you into the fancy features I described in the newsletter.

Thanks to William for his questions and comments.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

Jim Cronin wrote:

Anyone who appreciates acerbic wit will love this screensaver from Deloitte Touche Consultants:

http://www.dc.com/bullfighter

The free Bullfighter program, which roots out consultant-speak, also uses the same biting comments as it diagnoses one's writing.

Thanks, Jim!

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 house, like me, you may not even know this tool exists.

To see the Properties feature in action, open a Word document (or create a new one). Then click File > Properties. The Properties dialog will open, and you'll see five tabs:

General

Summary

Statistics

Contents

Custom

I'm not going to cover all of these tabs or their contents, but I would like to call your attention to the one that looks most useful for document management--the Summary tab.

Most of the items on the Summary tab are self-explanatory, but the important thing to note is that you can enter or modify any of them. In particular, I'm interested in the Subject, Category, and Keywords boxes. Why? Because if I type information into these boxes, I can do two very cool things. One of them is to search for files with a particular subject, category, or keyword.

Here's how:

1. Click File > Open.

2. Locate the "Tools" button on the upper right of the dialog. Did you know that was there?

3. Click "Find." Wow, is that a nifty dialog or what?

4. In the "Property" dropdown list, find the item you want to search, such as "Subject."

5. In the "Condition" list, find the conditions that fit the search you want to do, such as "Includes words" or "Begins with phrase."

6. In the "Value" box, type the words or phrase that you want to find in the property you selected from the "Property" list.

Here's an example. If I wanted to find all my files on the subject of elephants, I'd choose "Subject," "Includes words," and "elephant." Note that this won't find the *word* "elephants" in the text of a document. Rather, it will find all of the files whose Subject *property* includes the word "elephants."

7. Click the "Add to List" button. The search element you just defined will appear in the big box at the top of the dialog.

8. Click the "Find Now" button.

Word will search through your files and display those that match your search. Then you can open the files you want to work on. Note that you can narrow your searches by adding more than one item, that you can save your searches to use again later, and that there are various other features to help you refine your searches. You can learn more about each feature by clicking the Help button (labeled with a question mark) and then clicking the feature you want to know more about.

I mentioned that there were two cool things that can be done with document properties. One of them is searching. The other one is to sort by document properties in Windows Explorer. I'll reveal the details next week.

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

After reading last week's newsletter on using styles in Word 2002 while avoiding the Task Pane, Jim Cronin wrote:

Prior to Word 2002, you could redefine a style by making direct formatting alterations in a paragraph then clicking on the style name in the toolbar's Style drop-down list and pressing Enter twice. This was a lot easier and quicker than using Word 2002's Task Pane. The solution is to click Tools > Options from the toolbar, select the Edit tab and ensure the "Prompt to update style" checkbox is selected.

Romke Soldaat sent some other useful style commands to add to your custom Styles toolbar as mentioned in last week's newsletter:

Apply Heading 1

Apply Heading 2

Apply Heading 3

Style by Example

Modify Style

Redefine Style

Rename Style

Delete Style

Style

Style Gallery

Romke also sent a nifty little macro that you can add to your toolbar. The macro displays Word's Organizer feature, all set so you can organize styles:

Sub OrganizeStyles
With Dialogs(wdDialogOrganizer)
.DefaultTab = wdDialogOrganizerTabStyles
.Show
End With
End Sub

If you don't know how to use macros like that one, you can find out here.

Thanks to Jim and Romke for these great tips.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

I have been sick, sick, sick of my computer running so slow. Then it dawned on me: spyware! I quickly downloaded, installed, and ran Spybot Search & Destroy, from PepiMK Software. Now my computer is back under my control. If you've got similar problems, you might want to check this out:

http://security.kolla.de/index.php?lang=en&page=start

There's no charge for the program, and on my computer it worked well. Your mileage may vary. If you want to try it, be *sure* to read the documentation before proceeding.

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 Style dialog? Or better yet, how about a way to access Word 2002's fancy new Modify Style dialog (which has the most commonly used options right there) without having to drill down through the Task Pane and a couple of other dialogs?

The beauty of Word is that almost anything is possible, and although I'm unhappy with some of what Microsoft has done to increase the "marketability" of my favorite word processor, I'm glad they've had the good sense to leave in (and even add) some great features, even if they're sometimes buried pretty deep.

If you want to get back the keyboard-controllable Style dialog, do this:

1. Click Tools > Macro > Macros.

2. Click the "Macros In" dropdown list.

3. In the list, click "Word commands."

4. In the "Macro name" list, use the scroll bar to find "FormatStyle."

5. Click "FormatStyle."

6. Click "Run."

Wow! There's the friendly Style dialog, ready to be controlled through keyboard commands (or, if you insist, with your mouse). No Task Pane needed!

Of course, you're not going to want to drill down through Tools > Macro > Macros every time you want to use the dialog, so you might as well put the command on a toolbar button, a menu, or a keyboard shortcut, as described here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1707286867

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1707444986

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1713088939

While we're playing around with style commands, there are some others you might want to add to a toolbar, menu, or keyboard shortcut. If you work with styles a lot, you could even create a Styles menu or toolbar devoted entirely to these commands:

* FormatStyleModify (which lets you modify styles)

* FormatStyleNew (which lets you create new styles)

* FormatStyleGallery (which lets you see the styles in your various Word templates)

* FormatStyleVisibility (which lets you hide or display text depending on the style applied; where has *this* been all my life?)

Now are you happier with Word 2002? I know I am.

Note: If you're a Mac user, the procedure should be basically the same in Word 2003.

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

Wordmeister Steve Hudson sent an interesting response to a question about why Word's features sometimes seem to work differently depending on where they are accessed in Word. (His references to Maggie, Douggie, and Mal will mean more if you subscribe to the WORD PC-LIST; for more information, see today's Resource column.) Steve's answer is complex and has to do with the inner workings of Microsoft Word and VBA programming, so if you want to know more about that, Steve's your man. Here's what he had to say:

Word is like this really complex programme beastie, right? I mean HIDEOUSLY complex. If it were a house we could pack it with all the Word PC List users and play a single game of hide and seek that went for WEEKS! So, we go searching for the Queen, Maggie. We find her sensibly hidden in the backwaters of a partial wing known as Table Properties. She is in a long corridor with many doors off it, one of which is labelled Sort, and you have a squizzy down there and see a corridor branching off into a few other corridors.

You know Father Douggy is into macros, so you think you'll look there for him. You backtrack and begin looking. Your wanderings lead you into the room of Macros, off the main wing of Tools. You find the venerable Cardinal Mal, poking around with some suspicious-looking strings attached to a strange object. He is calling it a Guitar and wants to implement a new RocknRoll method. But you still haven't found Douggy yet, so you ask Mal where he is. "Oh, he was with Maggie." You think, "Uh huh! I know he's near here, and he's near Maggie, so I'll look in the Sort Ascending room!"

You go through the door marked Commands, and it opens out into a long, winding corridor full of doors and stairways. You wander along until you come to the Sort Ascending room, and you walk in on the ground floor. No Douggy. Then you look up and realise Douggy is standing on a balcony with no way up for you. You ask, "How did you get there?" He replies, "I came via a different way than you."

So, there's our analogy; let's get a little more "real world" with the next pass, huh? 🙂 Mind you, this all in generality can be applied to many facets of the facade (Word's user interface); it's not just applicable for SortSuspenders.

Word is a complex beastie full of little snippets of code that do things. These snippets are called on by other snippets until we have a facade full of bugs, err features, undocumented or otherwise. My tools are developed in a similar fashion, so this is quite normal. I have really generic routines hiding behind the walls of methods that then present exact instances of their usage.

Let's take a simple example. I write a piece of code to strip styling from a range; I don't care what the range is, just give me a range. Now that's useless to tie to the GUI (graphical user interface); how does the user specify the range? We are much better off giving access to it using sensible ranges that the user scenario requires: one to strip the selection only, one to strip the whole document, and one to strip every document in the folder. All of these call the same backing routine; thus, in a sense, they are wrappers to the hidden method.

A method is just a Sub or Function in OOL-speak (object-oriented language). A Document is an object. It has a Save method. This means there is a Document class definition somewhere that has a little function sitting in it called Save that has the code to do the saving business. This manifests in our IDE (the VBE--Visual Basic editor) as a Document.Save method! Clever, huh? You can build your own classes to play further with this.

So, I write this dialog for dealing with tables. I whack all sorts of extra smarts into it to give a nice user experience. These smarts then finally end up calling the basic routines to provide the functionality--such as Sort. My first attempt, I don't bother selecting the whole table, and the support phone starts ringing like someone whose spouse is two days late home from the pub. "I keep getting an error when sorting," they all say. Moron users. What do they know? But I have to do something with my time other than keep the coffee machine empty, so I include the smarts to select the whole table if pressing the button through the smarty dialog. I do not alter the base function at all.

I then sit down and have a caffeine-free moment and realise, hang on, what if some GENIUS dudes, like me, come along and want to sort just bits of a document? I know, I'll write a quick wrapper to give them access to the sort function. I have no idea what their data will look like, so I can't provide any trickery; that's all up to them as I have a pizza to order. You have to order pizza early, otherwise it is still warm when you go to eat it.

So now we have two different ways to get at the same underlying functionality. One way has all sorts of extras chucked in. The other doesn't. They are both merely wrappers to get to the routine that actually does the sort work; one is fancier but less flexible than the other.

Thanks to Steve for his comments.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

The WORD PC-LIST is, in my opinion, *the* place to go for expert online advice about using Word:

To join, send an email message here:

mailto:word-pc-subscribe-request@liverpool.ac.uk (no subject or command text required)

You can read the list archives here:

http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/word-pc.html

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

1 2 3 4 5 I use keyboard shortcuts and avoid reaching for the mouse.

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1703361394

1 2 3 4 5 I use spell check as a way to catch typographical errors.

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1700310413

1 2 3 4 5 I use AutoCorrect and AutoText to speed up text entry.

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705865120

1 2 3 4 5 I use find and replace, including wildcards, to fix repetitive errors and inconsistencies.

http://www.editorium.com/ftp/adancedsearch.zip

1 2 3 4 5 I use customized templates and styles to format documents.

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1700934923

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705536230

1 2 3 4 5 I customize Word's menus, toolbars, and keyboard shortcuts to fit the way I work.

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1707444986

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1707286867

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1707100224

1 2 3 4 5 I record macros to perform repetitive tasks.

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706651129

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706748016

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706832239

1 2 3 4 5 I use other macros and add-in software to provide features not available in Word alone.

Using "Found" Macros

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1707012536

1 2 3 4 5 I consciously seek to learn more about editing in Microsoft Word.

http://www.editorium.com/euindex.htm

http://www.mvps.org/word/

Scoring

Total the scores for all of the questions. Then find your ranking:

10-20 Clueless newbie. Review the information available through the links above.

20-30 Typical editor. Review the information for any items you rated 3 or below.

30-40 Editing expert. Review the information for any items you rated 3 or below.

40-50 Word guru. To reach the ranks of the truly elite, learn to *program* Word macros using Visual Basic for Applications. You can get started here:

http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/MacrosVBA/VBABasicsIn15Mins.htm

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

After reading last week's article "What's Your Handle," an anonymous reader wrote:

As a veteran of many find-and-replace operations, I enjoyed your article about "handles" and I thought that that's a very good way of explaining the concept. However, in this particular example, if I had been doing it, I would have first selected all the text in the document and made it all Body Text. In this way, I wouldn't have had to do your last step.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

Holy smoke! Look at all the online reference works at Bartleby.com!

http://www.bartleby.com/reference/

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 to do. For example, a few weeks ago I was faced with a 500-page manuscript that had no style formatting for its different text levels--something I'm sure your authors would *never* give you.

Basically, the text looked like this (but there was a lot more of it, of course):

This Is a Heading

This is some text. And more text. And more. And really several paragraphs more.

JML

This Is a Heading

This is some text. And more text. And more. And really several paragraphs more.

ED

This Is a Heading

This is some text. And more text. And more. And really several paragraphs more.

CBD

So there I am, badly needing styles to be applied and yet not wanting to do it by hand. The first thing I looked for was a handle--some regularly occurring pattern that I could find and then replace with itself but now with a style applied. Since this author, like most authors, was utterly ignorant of the proper way to put line spacing in front of a heading (by modifying "space before" in the heading style), he'd inserted two extra carriage returns in front of every main heading--and nowhere else. There was my handle!

So, after calling up the Replace dialog (Edit > Replace), I typed this into the "Find What" box:

^13^13^13(*)^13

And I typed the Find What Expression code, surrounded by carriage returns, into the "Replace With" box:

^p1^p

Incidentally, you can learn more about all of the wildcards in this article in my paper "Advanced Find and Replace in Microsoft Word," which you can download--free!--here:

http://www.editorium.com/ftp/advancedfind.zip

After typing in my find and replace strings, I clicked the More button to display the other Find and Replace options. I clicked the Format button, then "Styles," and then "Heading 1" so the replaced text would be formatted with that style. I put a check in the "Use Wildcards" checkbox. Then I clicked the "Replace All" button.

Ta-da! All of my main headings (and author attributions) were now formatted with the Heading 1 style.

So, how about those author attributions? There sure were a lot of them--each on its own line at the end of each short article. And each one was simply the author's initials--JML, ED, CBD, and the like. There was my handle--two or more capital letters preceded and followed by a carriage return.

In the "Find What" box I typed this:

^13([A-Z]{2,})^13

And in the "Replace With" box I typed this:

^p1^p

Again, I clicked the Format button, then "Styles," and this time "Heading 2" so the replaced text would be formatted with that style. I made sure the check was still in the "Use Wildcards" checkbox. Then I clicked the "Replace All" button, which formatted all of those authors' initials with the Heading 2 style.

The final thing I needed to style was the paragraphs between each occurrence of Heading 1 text and Heading 2 text. There were no obvious handles associated with that text, but it did have those styled headings above and below it. Could I use those for my handles? Yes, but first I'd need to mark them with some arbitrary codes. Why? Because there's no way to find Heading 1 *and* some text *and* Heading 2, all in one pass. So here are the searches (this time with "Use Wildcards" turned *off*) that I used to mark those headings:

Find What:

Heading 1 formatting

Replace With:

^&

Find What:

Heading 2 formatting

Replace With:

^&

That left me with an

code at the end of each Heading 1 (really, at the beginning of the paragraph following it) and an

code at the beginning of each Heading 2. Excellent handles indeed!

My final step was to search for those codes and the text between them, removing the codes and styling the text as Body Text. Piece of cake:

Find What (with "Use Wildcards" turned on):

(*)

Replace With (formatted with the Body Text style):

1

And that did the job. I still had some cleanup to do (like eliminating double carriage returns), but by looking for the handles in the text I was editing, I was able to style a 500-page document in less than five minutes.

The next time you're faced with a similar chore, don't just slog through the document doing everything by hand. Instead, see if there are some handles that will let you automate the whole process. You won't always find them, but you'll find them often enough to make the effort well worth your while. Please note that you should always back up your documents and run your find and replace routines on some test documents before proceeding with the real thing.

If you spend much time doing the kind of thing this article describes, you really should try our RazzmaTag program, which will automate a whole raft of complex find-and-replace operations over a whole raft of documents. You can learn more here:

http://www.editorium.com/razzmatag.htm

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

Eric Fletcher wrote:

Late last year as part of a message I sent you regarding styles, I mentioned my use of Word 2002's Task Pane. I've been using it a lot and have found it to be an extremely useful tool in more ways than I'd thought. But don't rely on the built-in Help: it is particularly sparse and almost makes it look like the feature was added at the last moment. Here are some of my observations in no particular order.

1. I've made a tool button to be able to pop the Task Pane up whenever I need it. I have two monitors, so I float the task pane (and other toolbars) in the second one most of the time. However, on my wife's single monitor, a button makes it easier to be able to hide and restore the Task Pane (instead of the View | Task Pane menu). You can use a preset button or make your own.

2. The Clipboard panel holds up to 24 elements as you cut or copy. A 25th pushes the first off the stack. You can paste any item by clicking on it, but be aware that a right click lets you delete a clipboard item. This is handy when you need to cut something in a series of copies, or if you inadvertently copy something you don't really need. The feature has the utility of the old "spike" function but lets you manage the contents in a way Spike never did. Excel users should note that the Word and Excel task panes share the same content, so copying between the two is easy. (Very handy for ad hoc copying of addresses from Excel to Word when a mail merge is too much bother!)

3. The Styles and Formatting panel (S&F) has some very useful features for cleaning up document formats. If you've ever examined a Word file in a text editor, you may have noticed how all formatting is collected at the end and each different instance has pointers back into the text where it is to be applied. S&F appears to use this to great advantage: each different instance of any type of formatting can be listed in the S&F panel depending on what you choose to show via dropdown at the bottom of the panel.

The feature is not particularly intuitive, so open a document and try it. Consider a document with a few levels of headings and some manually applied formatting. Bring up the Task Pane and set it to the S&F panel. When you click on a subhead--say Heading 3--in the text, the S&F panel will display the style name at the top. If the selection is a variant of the defined style, the difference(s) will be noted: for example, "Heading 3 + Garamond" when I set a Heading 3 to the Garamond font. But click to the right side of the box and pull down the list to see the options:

Select all XX Instance(s) lets you select all instances within the document but also gives you a *count* of how many there are. (This is very useful if you need to do a count of instances of a particular style: how many bibliographic references are there in this document? Is this the only time I used a Heading 5?)

Clear Formatting removes formatting from the selection.

New Style brings up the dialog to make a new style based on the selection.

Modify Style lets you change the style definition.

Reveal Formatting switches to a different panel to give you all the specific formatting details.

But with the selection still in the modified Heading 3, scroll down and look at the options available for the "Heading 3" style: "Update to match selection" lets you modify the defined style to match the selection in one step. Very useful!

The other different option is Delete. This removes the style definition but doesn't delete the formatted content. In fact, it appears to have the same effect as the "Clear formatting" style selection. Particularly if I am in the process of preparing a template, I like to go through and remove any unnecessary style definitions before finalizing it.

3. When there has been a lot of "fiddling" done to make pages fit, a document can often have numerous variations on style (for example, "Body Text + Condensed by 0.1pt" or "Body Text + Before: 4pt"). If you need to re-use such copy, these variations can create headaches later. Use the S&F panel to browse through and eliminate all such variants. (I use it to remove all extraneous variations to prepare copy for conversion to HTML since I then don't have to deal with manually removing all the code Word prepares for me.)

4. Use the "Show" dropdown in the S&F panel to manage what formatting is displayed. The "Formatting in use" shows only the formatting used within the document (styles and variants of them); "Available formatting" adds the styles defined for the currently-applied template; "Available styles" lists only the styles and without the variants; and "All styles" displays the styles from the current template plus the names of Word's "built-in" styles. This latter option is lengthy, but you can pare it down by choosing "Custom . . ." and selecting which styles you want to have displayed.

Use the Custom pulldown to define what variants should be displayed (font, paragraph, bullet & numbering) and to add the "Clear formatting" option to the style list (which also puts it at the top of the style toolbar pulldown, incidentally). The selection of styles to make visible or not changes by the category selected. Finally, you can save the options in the template so it is set for other or later use.

5. The Reveal Formatting panel (RF) shows all the details about the format of the current selection. If you select "Distinguish source style" at the bottom of the panel, the display shows the underlying style and any differences--showing the detail much as the variants are shown in the S&F panel. The pulldown options for the selection let you clear formatting, choose all other similar formatting in the document, but also change the format to match the surrounding text. I'm not entirely sure what rules are used for this: a word set with French language was set to English but only if I selected the whole word; but a word set in green was changed to black when the selection was within the word.

Select something and then turn on the "Compare with another selection" checkbox. A second box appears, and when you make a second selection, the panel itemizes the differences.

My documents are cleaner and smaller since I've incorporated the Task Pane into my set of Word tools.

Many thanks to Eric for these useful revelations.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

Jean Hollis Weber has done it again with her article "Escape from the Grammar Trap," now available on the TECHWR-L site, here:

http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/magazine/writing/grammartrap.html

The article explains why editors too often focus on details and not the bigger picture; how much attention they should pay to formal rules of grammar, punctuation, and usage; and how they can distinguish between essential and nonessential rules. I've worked with many editors and proofreaders who could benefit from Jean's words of wisdom.

Like the article? Be sure to check out Jean's books, newsletter, and other goodies at her Web site, the Technical Editors' Eyrie:

http://www.jeanweber.com/

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 Text code or the Find What Expression code, which you can learn more about here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1703525514

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706365638

Let's say you've got a document that has revision tracking turned on (Tools > Track Changes), and in that document is a numbered list, like this:

1. First

2. Second

3. Third

Let's also say you want to use a wildcard Find and Replace to change the list to this:

(1) First

(2) Second

(3) Third

You should be able to do it like this:

1. Click Edit > Replace to bring up Word's Replace dialog.

2. In the "Find What" box, enter this:

([0-9]@)(. )

3. In the "Replace With" box, enter this (with a space after it):

(1)

4. Put a checkmark in the box labeled "Use wildcards."

5. Click the button labeled "Replace All."

But it won't work. What you'll get is a list that looks like this:

1() First

2() Second

3() Third

How frustrating!

The problem is a bug in Word's wildcard Find and Replace engine. The easy way around the problem is to turn off revision tracking before doing the Find and Replace. So there you go!

If you *need* the changes to be tracked, however, you're in trouble. I know of one possible solution:

1. Keep a backup copy of your original document.

2. Do your Find and Replace with revision tracking turned off.

3. Use Tools > Track Changes > Compare Documents to mark the differences between the changed document and your backup copy.

If you're interested in trying this approach, you might want to know that Compare Documents has been much improved in Word 2002. For example, let's say Document 1 contains a bunch of parenthetical figure references, like this:

(Fig. 8)

Let's also say you want to use a wildcard Find and Replace to put bold tags around each one, like this:

(Fig. 8)