MS-Word Tips
revised 6 Apr 2008
Copyright © 2003–2008 by Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems
and select Edit Wrap Points. A
dotted red border will apperar around the picture and you can click
and drag to create a polygon of any desired complexity.Contents:
See also: Microsoft Word Tips by Graham Mayor
See also: What Files do I Need to Back Up? by Dave Rado and Brenda Hutton
See also: The Remove Hidden Data tool for Office 2003 and Office XP
Because the default normal.dot is vulnerable to reinstallations, and is hard to share with others, best practice is to store customizations — macros, keyboard shortcuts, auto text, and such — in a global template other than normal.dot. (You can't usefully store styles in global templates.) A global template will load automatically if it's in your Word startup folder, which you can locate or change with Tools → Options → File Locations.
Charles Kenyon has a step-by-step guide, Moving (Sharing) Customizations in Microsoft Word. There's also a companion page, Template Basics in Microsoft Word, that explains the principles, including how Word resolves conflicts and how to add or remove tabs in File → New.
(September 2005)
Almost certainly the toolbar is added by an add-in; see "How to find out whether any Word Add-ins have been installed".
source: Suzanne Barnhill in microsoft.public.word.customization.menustoolbars, (eNV$jS6dFHA.3620@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl, 2005-06-22)
(September 2005)
This will list all of Word's built-in keyboard shortcuts:
source: documentation for Chris Woodman's Shortcut Organizer
(September 2005)
In Word 97 and later, you can press Ctrl, Alt, and numeric keypad + all at the same time. The cursor will change to a four-leaf clover. Then you can press any key combination (or click any toolbar button) and the Customize dialog will come up with the name of the associated command or macro. This works for your own custom keyboard shortcuts as well as those built in to Word.
source: documentation for Chris Woodman's Shortcut Organizer
(September 2005)
According to How to customize the My Places bar in both the Open and the Save As dialog boxes in Office 2003, you can add up to 256 items to "My Places". Follow these steps:
You can reorder the items in the Contents pane by right clicking and selecting Move Up or Move Down.
For examples, see How can I customize the Places Bar in Office XP?.
(September 2005)
For an overview essential to understanding how things work, see Graham Mayor's Changing Word Envelope Layouts and his Alternative Return Addresses.
(September 2005)
In the Envelope wizard, click Add to Document. Leave the cursor in the return address (which is regular text), and click Insert → Text Box. Draw a box in the lower left, then put the desired text in the box. Then File → Print and select Current Page.
source: Jay Freedman, in microsoft.public.word.docmanagement, (lo7s60hp7igcb5pae0f6lgck6bvib4b6n9@4ax.com, 2004-04-02)
(September 2005)
Install and run this VBA macro from Microsoft. Or use this one from Dave Rado.
(August 2005)
Use a macro posted by Thomas Ferguson in microsoft.public.word.printingfonts (OXFYMV6KFHA.732@TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl, 2005-03-18)
Another way "is to open the document using 'Recover Text from Any File' as the file type. The font list is toward the end. Be careful not to save in this format, and if you have Word 2000 or earlier, be sure to set the file type back to Word Documents or All Word Documents", according to Suzanne Barnhill in microsoft.public.word.newusers (Od4L3jDWFHA.2124@TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl, 2005-05-13)
(September 2005)
Insert the picture, change the wrapping style to "Tight" on
the Layout tab. If the Picture toolbar doesn't come up, select
View → Toolbars →
Picture. Then click on the and select Edit Wrap Points. A
dotted red border will apperar around the picture and you can click
and drag to create a polygon of any desired complexity.
source: the thread Map of Texas — Shape in microsoft.public.word.newusers
(September 2005)
File → Save as Web page. To avoid having Word downgrade the picture resolution, in the Save window click Tools → Web options Pictures and choose the largest screen resolution and 300 pixels per inch. You can then resize the image in a decent editor if necessary.
source: Extract Images from a Word Document by Graham Mayor
(September 2005)
In Word 2000, 2002, and 2003, when you save a file into RTF or Word 6.0/95 format, and the file contains an embedded (not linked) picture, the file can become very much larger than the picture and text sizes. To prevent this, open the registry and go to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Office\ 11.0\ Word\ Options
Set the value ExportPictureWithMetafile to 0 (zero). (If it isn't there already, create it as a String value.).
Once that's done, you can shrink existing files by first saving them in current Word format and then re-saving them in RTF or Word 6.0/95 format.
source: Small Pictures Become Huge Documents in Word By Neil J. Rubenking
(September 2005)
Insert → Symbol is inconvenient because it requires leaving the keyboard for the mouse, possibly scrolling, and lots of clicks. If you know the four-digit hex Unicode number for a character, you can type it and then hit Alt-X. Here are some that I use frequently:
(March 2007)
Use Insert Symbol for some fractions, or an EQ field for any fraction (including non-numeric fractions). See Suzanne Barnhill's How to create fractions in Word.
To make fractions with a slanted virgule (requiring less vertical space), use Steve Yandl's Fraction Macro.
You can roll your own with a slanted fraction bar, using an EQ field like this:
EQ \s\up(5)/\s\do(16)
Format the font to about half the size of the surrounding text.
source: Halves and Quarters in Microsoft Word
What looks best to me, for the amount of effort involved, is to type the virgule (2044 then Alt-X), back up and type the numerator superscripted (Ctrl-Shift-+), then front and the denominator subscripted (Ctrl-=), then Ctrl-space and continue typing. (Suzanne Barnhill's document, menioned above, also covers this under "Formatted Font Characters".) Graham Mayor has automated this in a nice macro available for download.
(updated September 2005)
Press Ctrl-F9, then between the braces type
EQ \x \to(sometext)
Press Shift-F9 to display the result.
This and other techniques can be found in this page of WordTips.
Suzanne Barnhill's Creating Overbars is excellent, with lots of details and alternative methods.
(updated July 2005)
Use a field (Ctrl-F9) of type "=" with a switch like \*DollarText, \*CardTex, \*Ordinal, or \*OrdText. For numbers over a million, use two fields, the first one containing a division by a million and the second using the MOD function.
source: Display Numbers as Text in Word, and Display BIG Numbers as Text in Word, by Neil J. Rubenking
(September 2005)
Occasionally you may have a need to turn one or two pages of a portrait document into landscape orientation, but you still want the headers and footers to be consistently placed with the rest of the document. See How to Put a Portrait Page Number on a Landscape Page by Bill Coan, Suzanne Barnhill, and Dave Rado; or for a different viewpoint this Microsoft knowledge base article.
(September 2005)
Do Insert → File as a link, or use an IncludeText field. See How to Use IncludeText Fields, which recommends them sa a substitute for the broken Master Document feature.
(September 2005)
This long-standing error was introduced in Word 2000: the NUMPAGES field in a header or footer just echoes the current page number, so that you get Page 1 of 1, Page 2 of 2, and so forth. Supposedly, it's been fixed by updates to Word 2000 and later versions.
Make sure, under Tools → Options → Print, that you have Update Fields checked.
There are a number of workarounds if you still have the problem. One possibility is to switch into Print Preview and out again, twice if necessary, before printing. For more, see "Page X of Y" gives wrong numbers.
(September 2005)