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Those of you who don’t use Microsoft Word on a regular basis can skip this week’s tech tip. A lot of people though, and especially writers like myself, use it pretty much daily, and there should be at least one or two titbits in here to save such folks some time and aggravation. Many of these tricks will also work in other Microsoft Office applications.

Paste Special – When you are in a Word document and pasting something you have copied from another document, or from a web page or other source, more often than not you want the formatting to match the destination document rather than the source. From the Edit menu, use Paste Special instead of Paste. The Paste Special window that opens gives you several options. Choose Unformatted Text to have your pasted content take on the formatting of the paragraph it’s pasted into. If you have Word 2002 (in Office XP), pasting is even more flexible. In this case the choice you want is called Match Destination Formatting.

Stop Auto This ‘n That – Sometimes Word is a little too helpful. For instance, I often write about PCs, which Word obligingly changes to Pcs because it knows only the first letter of a word should be capitalized. Here’s another example – whenever you type in a URL or e-mail address, Word automatically turns it in to a hyperlink, in blue and neatly underlined. That may sometimes be useful if your content is going on-line, but otherwise it’s just a nuisance. To handle either of these conditions, pull down the Format menu and select AutoFormat, then click the Options button.

On the AutoCorrect tab, unclick the box to Correct TWo INitial CApitals. Yes, it’s really written with two capital letters in every word. Isn’t that cute? So this takes care of changing Pcs to PCs. On the AutoFormat tab, uncheck the box that says Internet and Network Paths with Hyperlinks to disable the automatic hyperlink. While you are here, look over the various tabs and see all of the other ‘conveniences’ you can disable.

Now, what if somebody sends you a document for editing and they didn’t know these tricks? Consequently every URL in the document is now a hot link and if you click on one, Word will open your browser and away you go. What if the URL was misspelled and needs to be corrected? Talk about frustrating! Fortunately, if you right-click the hyperlink and select Hyperlink from the pop-up menu, you can then edit the link, or change it back to regular text by selecting Remove Hyperlink.

Quick-change – How often have you opened a document only to find it was something obsolete, or the filename that you thought was so clever last year now causes you to confuse it with something else? Well, you don’t have to leave Word and go to My Computer to delete or rename the file. First close the file, since you can’t take these actions on an open file. Next, click the Open icon on Word’s toolbar again. When the Open box appears this time, highlight the file and right-click. The pop-up menu will let you do a wide selection of actions on that file, including delete or rename.

Screen Tips – Most of the commands in Word have a keyboard shortcut, and there are many good thick manuals to tell you what they are. Or, you can learn them faster by turning on Screen Tips, which will show you the keyboard counterpart each time you exercise a command from the toolbar. Go to Tools, Customize. On the Options tab, check the boxes for Show Screen Tips on Toolbars and Show Shortcut Keys in Screen Tips. Both boxes must be checked to make this work.

File List – You probably know that the File menu has a list of the last four documents you worked on, which lets you open one of them with a quick mouse click instead of having to track it down. If just four doesn’t do it for you, go to Tools, Options, and on the General Tab is an item called the Recently Used File List where you can select the number of entries to show, up to a maximum of nine. Word won’t immediately show them all, but it will lengthen the list by one entry each time you modify another document, until it reaches the limit you set. After that, it will knock the oldest entry off the list whenever it adds a new one.

Work List – Here’s another scenario. Maybe you work with just a few Word documents again and again, but in between you open other documents. Next time you want one of your favourites, it’s been bumped off the list by these interlopers. What you really need is a list of those few documents that you use repeatedly. This is called a Work List, and you can create one rather easily. Go to Tools, Customize and select the Commands tab. Click on Built-In menus, and then scroll the list on the right until you find Work. Highlight this and drag it to the Word menu bar. You now have a new menu called Work.

To add a document to this menu, first open the document you wish to add. While you are in that document, pull down the Work menu and select Add to Work Menu. Your document will now be added to the list. Thereafter, anytime you are in Word and want to open that particular document, pull down the Work menu and click on the document name. To delete a document from the Work list, click Ctrl-Alt-Hyphen, which will change the mouse pointer to a large hyphen. Pull down the Work menu, and click the item you wish to remove.

This Ctrl-Alt-Hyphen procedure, by the way, can be used to delete any command on any menu. Two tips within a tip – First, you must use the hyphen that shares a key with the underline. Don’t use the minus sign from the number keypad. Second, if you Ctrl-Alt Hyphen and then change your mind before deleting any menu commands, just hit the Escape key.

Goodbye – That’s it for another week. For the coming weeks, if there are any tech tip topics from the last year that you would like to see repeated or expanded on, send us a note. That goes for new subjects too, if you’ve been waiting patiently to see a particular topic and we haven’t gotten to it yet. Thanks.

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