Word Hacks [Electronic resources]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.