Word Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 1 Tweak the Interface

Take charge of toolbars, menus, and screen real
estate with a few trips to the Tools menu.

Simple adjustments to
the Word environment can save you lots of
time. The gateway to tweaking your toolbars and menus is the
ToolsCustomize command, which brings up the dialog shown in
Figure 1-1. Whenever this dialog is active, your
menus and toolbars no longer perform their regular dutiesthey
become adjustable elements of the interface that can be moved,
modified, renamed, or even deleted.

Figure 1-1. The Customize dialog lets you quickly customize your workspace

The big kahuna of the Customize dialog
is the Commands tab, which we'll explore in the
following two sections. But the other two tabs, Options and Toolbars,
are also important for understandingand hackingWord.

Some of Word's more elusive options live on the
Options tab, shown in Figure 1-2. For example, you
can uncheck the "Always show full
menus" box to turn off that
unholy
"Adaptive Menus" feature that
displays only some commands on each menu. You can also tell Word to
stop displaying font names in the fonts
themselves, which can speed up
the display on a slow machine. And the "Show
shortcut keys in ScreenTips" setting can help you
learn the shortcuts for toolbar buttons you use regularly.

Figure 1-2. The Options tab of the Customize dialog

Use the Toolbars tab to manage your toolbars,
reset their default arrangements, or delete custom arrangements
you've created but no longer need. You can also
create new toolbars and make the Shortcut Menu toolbar [Hack #3]
visible for modifying.

Use the Keyboard button (available on all
three tabs in the Customize dialog) to add, remove, or modify
keyboard assignments.

To print a list of active keyboard assignments in the current
template, select FilePrint and choose "Key
assignments" from the "Print
what" drop-down list.

Now, here are a few simple hacks to get your feet wet.

1.2.1 Replacing a Toolbar Button

The Standard toolbar includes a button for creating multiple
text columns, which is illogically located next to the buttons for
inserting tables and Excel worksheets. A more sensible neighbor for
those buttons would be the Sort command, which usually requires a
trip to the Table menu.

The Sort command also works on text not included in a table, such as
a list of names you want to alphabetize.

Here's how to replace the Columns button with a Sort
button.

First, select ToolsCustomize. With the Customize dialog
open, drag the Columns button off the Standard toolbar.
(Don't worry; you can always restore it in a snap.)

Next, click the Commands tab in the Customize dialog and choose
Normal.dot from the "Save
in" drop-down list at the bottom of the dialog. If
you select this setting, any customizations you make will affect all
of your documents (whenever you're working in Word,
even if you're working on a document based on
another template, the Normal template is still present).

To save changes you make to the Normal template, you must close Word.

In the Categories column (on the left), select All Commands. In the
Commands column (on the right), scroll down and select TableSort, as
shown in Figure 1-3. Drag it to the Standard
toolbar, next to the Insert Excel Worksheet button.

Figure 1-3. Find the TableSort command

By default, a command you drag to a toolbar appears with its name,
not its icon, displayed. To change this, with the Customize dialog
still open, right-click your new Table Sort button and select Default
Style, as shown in Figure 1-4. The new button will
be active after you close the Customize dialog.

Figure 1-4. Change the Table Sort button to display an icon without text

1.2.2 Modifying a Menu Item

Many Word users frequently
insert footnotes. But as of Word
2002, the Footnote command was moved to a new submenu on the Insert
menu, called Reference (see Figure 1-5).

Figure 1-5. Finding the Footnote command on the Insert menu

Here's how to move the Footnote command to the top
of the Insert menu and make it more accessible.

First, select ToolsCustomize, click the Commands tab, and
make sure you save the changes in Normal.dot
(see the previous section "Replacing a Toolbar
Button").

Next, select Insert from the Categories list and then select the
Footnote command from the list on the right (Word 2002 and 2003 users
will find it on a submenu). Drag it to the top of the Insert menu, as
shown in Figure 1-6.

Figure 1-6. Relocating a menu item

The Footnote command will work from its new home as soon as you close
the Customize dialog.

1.2.3 Activating Important Viewing Options

To reliably control (or
even understand)
Word's features and formatting, you need to set a
few important options.

A Word document offers more than just words (even if it lacks fancy
pictures or tables). For example, a multitude of special nonprinting
characters control how the words in a document are formatted.

To view some of
these
characters, select ToolsOptions, click the View tab, and
check the following items:

Paragraph marks

Tab characters

Bookmarks

Also, set field shading to "Always."

None of the characters that you can now see will print, and you can
always select FilePrint Preview to view your document
without them.

The value of these characters will become more apparent as you work
with the other hacks in this book, but here's one
quick example.

Say your boss asks you to add some project background to her report
and to format it with centered headings. The document contains only
plain text, as shown in Figure 1-7.

Figure 1-7. Some standard text in need of formatting

You want to center the first line as a heading, then add bullets to
the next two items. With the heading selected, you press the Center
button on the Formatting toolbarbut the paragraph below the
heading moves too, as shown in Figure 1-8.

Figure 1-8. Unexpected formatting can be an unwelcome surprise

Yikes! After you press the Undo button, you decide to switch tactics.
You select the second and third paragraphs and press the Bullets
button on the Formatting toolbar. You start to sweat profusely when
Word applies the Bullets style to the heading and not the second
paragraph, as shown in Figure 1-9.

Figure 1-9. Bizarre bullet results

What's going on here? With paragraph marks showing,
as in Figure 1-10, the problem becomes clear. The
first and second lines are actually part of the same paragraph. Your
boss inserted a "soft" return after
the heading (by pressing Shift-Enter) to force a line break without
starting a new paragraph. So even though they appear as two separate
paragraphs, they act as one. You can avoid similar headaches if you
get into the habit of working with formatting marks showing.