http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Word-Processing A listing of the most recently indexed works about Word Processing in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Word-Processing http://tc.eserver.org/35783.html http://tc.eserver.org/35783.html A short article that discusses how to use the bulk export feature of Google Docs to back your work up to your computer. http://tc.eserver.org/35718.html http://tc.eserver.org/35718.html Most people don’t know what the AutoCorrect feature in Word really does. I use to correct the document AS I WRITE and to enter long strings of text automatically. http://tc.eserver.org/35570.html http://tc.eserver.org/35570.html You have an existing table in a Word 2007 document. It’s pretty plain and you want to jazz it up a little. Here’s how to quickly change the styles applied to your table. http://tc.eserver.org/35579.html http://tc.eserver.org/35579.html Quick Tables are a quick and easy way to insert a pre-formatted table. However, the default tables are probably not what you want, so you need to know how to add your own. http://tc.eserver.org/35370.html http://tc.eserver.org/35370.html I needed to make some macros available to all Word documents I opened. I wouldn’t need the macros for every document, but I would need them for many documents. The documents I was working on used different templates, so adding the macro to each template was not an option. http://tc.eserver.org/35304.html http://tc.eserver.org/35304.html This document summarizes the differences in use between OpenOffice.org Writer 1.1.x and Microsoft Word (various versions). http://tc.eserver.org/35302.html http://tc.eserver.org/35302.html If you’re working in a long or large document, Word’s background pagination can become a productivity killer. While it’s occurring, you can’t work as fast as usual, and sometimes, you can’t work at all until the paginating stops. You can turn off this background pagination, but only in certain view modes in Word. http://tc.eserver.org/34864.html http://tc.eserver.org/34864.html I am well aware of the irritating, hair-tearing frustration Word gives you when it won’t do what you want it to. Here’s a series of mini-articles showing you how to ‘get a grip’ on the program and make it do what you want, not what it ‘thinks’ you want. http://tc.eserver.org/33981.html http://tc.eserver.org/33981.html The OpenDocument Format ("ODF") shows promise for bringing the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to the common desktop PC of the future as the native file format for office documents in the next-generation office suites including OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice, Workplace, Writely and others. An ODF Plugin for MS Office -- currently under development by the OpenDocument Foundation -- can deliver this promise to the 450 million legacy Windows desktop PCs already in place. Sam Hiser, an officer of the OpenDocument Foundation, will discuss the origins and design objectives of the Foundation's ODF Plugin. He will also discuss the strategic goals of the Foundation's ODF Plugin while showing how the Plugin effort is already influencing the development of the ODF standard itself at OASIS. An audience of general business people and software developers will leave Hiser's presentation with a clear understanding of the ODF Plugin, its context of relevance and development, and how it can alter the landscape for XML. http://tc.eserver.org/33984.html http://tc.eserver.org/33984.html In this session, three panellists and audience members will discuss creating XML documents using two familiar word processors: Microsoft Word and OpenOffice. Paul Bernard will introduce some real-world examples of how publishers are using Microsoft Word in XML workflows, and how Office 2007 and OpenXML will affect those processes. Jon Parsons will discuss XML, Office 2007, and content management for document integration in the middle tier. Lisa Richards will discuss XML authoring in OpenOffice. http://tc.eserver.org/33908.html http://tc.eserver.org/33908.html This session will provide a technical description of the new Microsoft Office Open XML formats that will become the default XML based formats of the coming version of Microsoft Office (Office 12). The Microsoft Office XML formats provides a great Open and standard-based XML format for Office Documents that enables new XML document scenarios that were not possible before. http://tc.eserver.org/33870.html http://tc.eserver.org/33870.html Part of the appeal of Google's suite of web-based productivity applications is the integration between them -- Gmail can send events to Google Calendar, Calendar sends reminders and note to Gmail and so on. Lately Google has extended that integration to make working with Google Docs a little bit easier. http://tc.eserver.org/33613.html http://tc.eserver.org/33613.html If you've ever worked document with more than one person, then you've likely had to deal with this type of nonsense: Sally likes to emphasize text by making it 13 point and bold, Sam prefers to change the font and italicize it, Billy used Emphasis Style, and on, and on. Because of this, not only do you have to work to make the language in your co-authored document consistent, but you've got to deal with formatting inconsistencies as well. http://tc.eserver.org/33614.html http://tc.eserver.org/33614.html Have you ever wanted to make some text in your document look like other text in your document? Or maybe you made a picture look just right in last week's status report and really don't want to start from scratch on the picture in this week's status report. Either way, this week's tip will save you some time. http://tc.eserver.org/33615.html http://tc.eserver.org/33615.html Field codes provide a way to customize your Word document manually. That sounds like hard work, but the field codes also give you an inside look at some of the ways that you can customize a page number or a table of contents. (Really—those are fields.) http://tc.eserver.org/33616.html http://tc.eserver.org/33616.html How you can be like a super secret CIA agent and encrypt documents using Word 2007. http://tc.eserver.org/33617.html http://tc.eserver.org/33617.html In all previous versions of Word the Document Defaults were hardcoded into Word. That is, you couldn't change them. This means that the way you would change the default properties applied to your documents would either be to change the Styles within the Template used to create the document, or to write a macro that went through all documents and updated the properties defined by the Normal Style (the paragraph Style applied to text by default). In Word 2007, you can certainly still do the former, but should know the following before you do the later: by default, the Normal Style is empty. http://tc.eserver.org/33618.html http://tc.eserver.org/33618.html In Word, a style defines a set of formatting properties that are indirectly applied to characters, paragraphs, list, or tables. Instead of directly applying bold, then 14 point font, and then red to text, you can use a style to indirectly apply these three things in a single click. This is useful because you can quickly and consistently apply rich formatting, and can later change the definition of the style all the text the style is applied will change. http://tc.eserver.org/33619.html http://tc.eserver.org/33619.html To Word, comments, the body of your document, footers, etc. are basically the same. And this is good because if a feature works in one story, there's a very good chance it works in all stories. This is why you can track changes in not only the body of your document (i.e., "main story"), but also in headers, footers, endnotes, text boxes, etc. Put simply, this common story architecture enables as much Word goodness in as many places in Word as possible. http://tc.eserver.org/33620.html http://tc.eserver.org/33620.html There are only three possible behaviors when pasting tracked changes. The one you get depends on whether Track Changes is on or off in both the document you copied from [source] and the document you are pasting into [destination]. http://tc.eserver.org/33610.html http://tc.eserver.org/33610.html Building Blocks are reusable chunks of a Word document. They can contain any thing a Word document can contain, including pictures, shapes, fields, and even other building blocks. http://tc.eserver.org/33611.html http://tc.eserver.org/33611.html Table of contents and the Document Map are designed to work best with documents that use styles. Styles not only apply a look and feel to a document, but also provide semantic structure. For example, applying a Heading 2 style to some content that exists under a Heading 1 style implies hierarchy within a document. http://tc.eserver.org/33219.html http://tc.eserver.org/33219.html Is today's OpenOffice good enough for the enterprise? For most jobs—word processing, presentations or spreadsheets—the answer is yes. Compatibility with Microsoft Office isn't a problem unless sophisticated macros are involved. Interoperability, the greatest hurdle to conquer on the way to adoption, is almost a nonissue. OpenOffice even offers features missing in Microsoft Office, like PDF or Flash data exports. http://tc.eserver.org/32933.html http://tc.eserver.org/32933.html If you've been having trouble with Word lately, this could be the reason why! http://tc.eserver.org/32631.html http://tc.eserver.org/32631.html First and foremost, Microsoft Word is a solid piece of software, and the 2007 version is untouchable at present. It pretty much sets the standard. It's also in no way evil in and of itself. That said, it's unfortunately not free, so here are some alternatives that are. http://tc.eserver.org/31968.html http://tc.eserver.org/31968.html This guide to dealing with the trials and tribulations of Master documents is virtually guaranteed to save whatever fragments of sanity you may have left as you deal with Master documents. http://tc.eserver.org/31819.html http://tc.eserver.org/31819.html One complaint I often here when teaching my courses is that I use computers too much. "What do computers have to do with writing?" students ask. "All I need is a pencil and some paper!" Well, that may have been the case a few decades ago, but now writers are expected to type their documents using a professional word processing program (Microsoft's Word, Corel's Word Perfect, Sun's Open Office Writer, or perhaps Abiword.) Though these programs each have their differences, they perform the same tasks. http://tc.eserver.org/31735.html http://tc.eserver.org/31735.html Although MS Word can generate XML, it should not be considered any kind of a robust XML authoring tool. Instead, its XML features are best for use with other Microsoft Office applications. However, because XML authoring is gaining in popularity, new XML authoring software tools and utilities are coming to market. In this article, Scott Abel looks at using MS Word for XML and takes a closer look at one alternative XML solution from a Microsoft partner that uses Word's familiar interface. http://tc.eserver.org/31189.html http://tc.eserver.org/31189.html This tutorial is based on the PC version of Microsoft Word 2003, but the principles explained here should be similar for older versions of the program and for Macs. http://tc.eserver.org/30364.html http://tc.eserver.org/30364.html These are some formatting/word processing tips for Microsoft Word. http://tc.eserver.org/30365.html http://tc.eserver.org/30365.html Below are some tips for formatting tables or reports. Your formatting should be consistent throughout your document. http://tc.eserver.org/29795.html http://tc.eserver.org/29795.html The era of desktop publishing is over, and I must bid Microsoft Word and several other desktop applications good-bye. In case you think I'm singling out Microsoft, it's not just MS Word, but also OpenOffice, GoogleOffice, or any application that makes what we used to call 'documents'. Nowadays, I'm simply using a wiki for collaborative information sharing and a blog for online reporting. http://tc.eserver.org/30281.html http://tc.eserver.org/30281.html Too much of the information on new technology tools is of little value to the scientific communicator. This session provides topic overviews and discussion of three topics: SGML, electronic networks, and specialized word processing software. Please note that these discussions are introductory; other ITCC presentations cover SGML and the Internet in more depth. http://tc.eserver.org/29383.html http://tc.eserver.org/29383.html Buried within Word are lots of cool tricks that not too many people have discovered. These are small things--shortcuts that, in some cases, may not look much more efficient than pulling down a menu and heading for the dialog box you need. But if you perform a certain task a thousand times a week, being able to bypass some steps or automatically slap a change into a document without having to stop and think about it can be a welcome convenience. The techniques included here include things like making vertical text selections, creating a shortcut to launch Word using a specified template, placing the Calculate command on a toolbar for quickly adding numbers, and duplicating text and objects with the mouse. http://tc.eserver.org/29343.html http://tc.eserver.org/29343.html Microsoft Word 2002's Handwriting Recognition feature allows you to use a pen and electronic tablet or a mouse to add a signature to your documents. Find out how you can start adding this feature to all your letters. http://tc.eserver.org/29302.html http://tc.eserver.org/29302.html In addition to being open source, saving as XML makes OpenOffice truly open. Aside from being open source, XML's self-documenting nature allows us to dive into the document format without having to dive into C++. And more significantly, XML allows us to use simple, free tools to manipulate the documents themselves. In this article we will examine the structure of the format. http://tc.eserver.org/29303.html http://tc.eserver.org/29303.html What if you want to load XML versions of a large collection of Word files, Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint files into an XML-aware database where you can query the collection? http://tc.eserver.org/29054.html http://tc.eserver.org/29054.html This article examines the concept of the efficiency with which text is entered into a word processor from the perspective of effective use of keyboard shortcuts (sometimes called hot keys or accelerator keys ). The article makes reference to the Autotext facility which is available in Microsoft Word. The article illustrates how the possibility for productiveness offered by shortcuts, available through the use of features such as Autotext, are often under-utilized by many word processor users, academics being no exception. The method involves constructing a word list from a corpus of one s own writing. This word list can then be taken as the basis for a personalized set of shortcuts of the most frequent words in an individual s writing. http://tc.eserver.org/28849.html http://tc.eserver.org/28849.html David McNamee presented on Vista and Office 2007 to the Suncoast chapter in May 2007. This is a recording of his presentation. He talks about how the purpose of Vista and Office is to help you create, find, and share information more efficiently. http://tc.eserver.org/28632.html http://tc.eserver.org/28632.html The home of the Office Users Group, built to provide some very unique help for users of the Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. We've built the site to be independent and a constant source of up-to-date information and assistance. http://tc.eserver.org/28618.html http://tc.eserver.org/28618.html Acronyms Master is a free utility for MS Word that automatically creates acronyms table in the document. http://tc.eserver.org/28548.html http://tc.eserver.org/28548.html In this week's Tech Writer Voices podcast, Heidi and I talk about some innovative research from Microsoft, Word 2007, convincing upper management you're not a cost, focusing on information users actually want, tool versus industry experience, the curse of knowledge, the slow movement, and a tip for handling your e-mail inbox. http://tc.eserver.org/28544.html http://tc.eserver.org/28544.html This tutorial presents a brief overview of how to achieve interesting, effective designs for your pages using the basic features of your word processor. Specifically, it introduces you to important design principles to consider as you design a document and helps you analyze the design of sample documents. Although the design principles presented here apply to both print and online documents, the primary focus is on design strategies for paper documents. http://tc.eserver.org/28153.html http://tc.eserver.org/28153.html WebWorks AutoMap is an extremely useful tool for performing unattended documentation builds. Out of the box, AutoMap can generate reasonable documents. By adding the power of scripting, the results can be amazing. http://tc.eserver.org/27707.html http://tc.eserver.org/27707.html When Microsoft announced a week ago Monday that it had decided to open up its Office 12 XML file formats and had submitted the formats to be considered as a formal open standard by ECMA International, Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft's Information Worker Strategy, said, 'The new license that will accompany the Open XML format with the standards organization will go well beyond traditional standards licensing and will be very positive for the vast majority of developers, even open-source developers.' But. The only difference between Microsoft's November 2003 open and royalty-free license for the Office 2003 Reference Schemas and today's Office 2003 license, according to the company, is that 'Microsoft is offering a covenant not to sue for the Office 2003 Reference Schemas.' http://tc.eserver.org/27708.html http://tc.eserver.org/27708.html Microsoft has stated on numerous occasions that they believe in and support open standards. But from my experience, they do this not by joining existing open standards efforts, but instead by creating entirely new, parallel (and arguably redundant) 'open standards' efforts around their own technologies. And often it seems these new standards efforts are around new, untested, and immature technologies that began life as proprietary to Microsoft--introduced into the standards process when a pre-existing open standards effort already exists, and exists around proven and shipping technologies which were developed in the open with lots of input from a variety of expert stakeholders. http://tc.eserver.org/27234.html http://tc.eserver.org/27234.html Whenever I insert a graphical object (picture, drawing object, etc.) into a Word 2000 table cell I lose the vertical formatting. The text is always aligned at the top of the cell, instead of being centered or at the bottom of the cell. Why, and what can I do about it? http://tc.eserver.org/27237.html http://tc.eserver.org/27237.html You can use the old Word 2 command: WordBasic.ToolsBulletsNumbers Replace:=0, Type:=1, Remove:=1 This command is particularly useful for removing manually typed numbering from Headings in a document you have been emailed, prior to applying List Numbering. http://tc.eserver.org/27243.html http://tc.eserver.org/27243.html The most reliable way of creating numbered paragraphs is to use paragraph styles to apply the numbering. This makes all paragraphs with the same numbered style belong to the same numbered list, and numbering is continuous through the whole document. http://tc.eserver.org/27238.html http://tc.eserver.org/27238.html If you want to update the style definitions of a document with the style definitions in its attached template, you can manually select Tools + Templates and Add-ins, check the box which says 'Automatically update document styles', click OK; and then, because that setting is sticky (and most of the time, undesirable), immediately select Tools + Templates and Add-ins again, deselect the 'Automatically update document styles' box, and click OK. http://tc.eserver.org/27241.html http://tc.eserver.org/27241.html Publishers call the preliminary pages in a book the 'front matter.' They aren’t always numbered separately—some books start with the title page as page 1 and are paginated continuously throughout—but when there is a significant amount of front matter, it’s conventional to number it using lowercase roman numerals. http://tc.eserver.org/27242.html http://tc.eserver.org/27242.html If you insist on doing this – and if you do, don't say I didn't warn you! – then the best procedure is as follows. http://tc.eserver.org/27239.html http://tc.eserver.org/27239.html If you have applied the latest service release for your version of Word, and you still have the Page X of Y problem, any of the solutions mentioned below will work for you. http://tc.eserver.org/27233.html http://tc.eserver.org/27233.html Word 2000 can be a nightmare when it comes to positioning shapes – Word 97 was much more predictable. http://tc.eserver.org/27240.html http://tc.eserver.org/27240.html Word 2002 will display 0 for all page numbers in headers or footers, and all page numbers in a Table of Contents, in the following circumstances. http://tc.eserver.org/27235.html http://tc.eserver.org/27235.html Because Word is a WYSIWYG application, it will always try to represent on screen the result you will get if you print on the printer that is selected as the default. Changing printer drivers will almost always change the layout at least slightly and sometimes radically. There are a number of ways to minimize the changes. http://tc.eserver.org/27236.html http://tc.eserver.org/27236.html Numbering in Word is difficult to understand because Word attempts to hide 'complexity' from us. In many cases, it provides insufficient detail in the explanation of features. Regrettably, a simplistic explanation does not help understanding of a complex subject. It fills our heads with loose ends, which makes the problem worse! http://tc.eserver.org/27220.html http://tc.eserver.org/27220.html If you can't understand a program, then you can't debug it. Even with code that you have written yourself, if you come back to it six months or a year later, you may find yourself wondering “Why on earth did I write that? What was it for?” It doesn't take long to forget the details of a program when you aren't working on it any more. Make life easier for yourself, and write programs as clearly as possible. Also, provide such defences as you can against the possibility that VBA might change between versions of Word. http://tc.eserver.org/27214.html http://tc.eserver.org/27214.html The ease of copying and pasting text from Web sites and email greatly simplifies many tasks in Word, but problems often arise in making the pasted text conform to the style of the document into which it is pasted. One of the most common chores is getting rid of excess line breaks, which cause the text to wrap short of the right margin. There are several ways to work around this problem. http://tc.eserver.org/27217.html http://tc.eserver.org/27217.html Word's macro recorder can help you acquaint yourself with macros and with Office 97's VBA programming language. http://tc.eserver.org/27228.html http://tc.eserver.org/27228.html The first questions is – why do you need to know the index number? http://tc.eserver.org/27227.html http://tc.eserver.org/27227.html There are two ways to use Automation (or OLE Automation) to programmatically control another application. http://tc.eserver.org/27229.html http://tc.eserver.org/27229.html There are two Help topics in Word VBA Help that are required reading to get you started with built-in dialogs: 'Displaying built-in Word dialog boxes' and 'Built-in dialog box argument lists'. Unfortunately, in the latter article, Microsoft listed the arguments you can use but forgot to mention what the arguments mean or what values they can take! Fortunately, the dialog box arguments are almost identical to the arguments of the commands of WordBasic, so if you know one, you can work out the other. Therefore, the WordBasic Help file is at present by far the best resource for programmers wanting to use the dialogs. It is an absolute must-have. http://tc.eserver.org/27218.html http://tc.eserver.org/27218.html I can't turn you into a VBA expert but I can suggest a way to explore VBA that you may find helpful. Below, I've listed 22 steps that can be completed in approximately 15 minutes, assuming someone is kind enough to read them to you as you sit at your keyboard. If you have to read them by yourself and turn your attention alternately to the keyboard and back to the steps, then you may need a half hour or longer to complete the steps. Either way, the steps should give you a feel for what it's like to program in Word. http://tc.eserver.org/27216.html http://tc.eserver.org/27216.html Do you re-use some of your documents over and over again, making slight changes just before you print, fax, or email it each time? Do you, for example, send the same basic letter to each new customer, but edit the letter each time so that it refers to the specific product purchased by that customer? Starting with Word 97, there's an easy way to add a pop-up list of choices to any Word document. This new feature lets you point at a word or phrase and simply right-click the mouse to switch to some other word or phrase. http://tc.eserver.org/27219.html http://tc.eserver.org/27219.html This example will step you through the process of creating a template that contains an autonew macro which, when you create a new document from the template, will cause a Userform to be displayed, into which you can enter some information that you want to appear in the document. http://tc.eserver.org/27230.html http://tc.eserver.org/27230.html Supposing you frequently need to add Multiline Text Boxes to your UserForms, with the EnterKeyBehavior property set to True. Or let's say you want to drag a 'Next' button straight onto your userform and not have to change the text in it to say 'Next', and not have to change the dimensions of the button. http://tc.eserver.org/27223.html http://tc.eserver.org/27223.html Most of us write routines that do similar operations more than once. It makes your code much less cumbersome and much easier to follow if you hive off all such repetitive chunks of code into separate subroutines or functions. The difference between a sub and a function is that a function can return a value. Within the function itself, you can treat the function name like a variable, and give it a value and then you can call the function and get that value. http://tc.eserver.org/27215.html http://tc.eserver.org/27215.html Word's sorting capability is fairly rudimentary, especially for those migrating to it from WordPerfect (though it's surprising how many people don't realize Word can sort paragraphs, not just tables – or maybe not so surprising, given where the item is in the menus! The ability to sort on word 2 in field 3 would certainly be very useful (in Excel as well). But there are various things you can do in the meantime. http://tc.eserver.org/27231.html http://tc.eserver.org/27231.html If you want a macro to be fired whenever any document is opened, regardless of which template the document is attached to, the simplest way is to write an AutoOpen macro and store it in Normal.dot. http://tc.eserver.org/27224.html http://tc.eserver.org/27224.html When Microsoft released Word 97, a new programming language VBA replaced the WordBasic language that had been available in earlier versions of Word. For most things, VBA is a much more powerful and flexible programming language than WordBasic, but there are a few very useful WordBasic commands which have no direct equivalents in VBA. Fortunately, VBA includes the WordBasic object, which gives access to most of the old WordBasic commands. http://tc.eserver.org/27225.html http://tc.eserver.org/27225.html The rules are confusing concerning the use of parentheses to enclose argument lists. I have even seen MS Knowledgebase articles that have got it wrong. The rules are as follows. http://tc.eserver.org/27222.html http://tc.eserver.org/27222.html Almost all Microsoft Word variables should be dimensioned as whatever they are (Dim MyRange As Range, Dim MyString As String, etc.). http://tc.eserver.org/27226.html http://tc.eserver.org/27226.html The most important thing you need to know when working with bookmarks in Word is that there are two 'types' of bookmarks: 'placeholder' bookmarks and 'enclosing' bookmarks. http://tc.eserver.org/27195.html http://tc.eserver.org/27195.html Microsoft Word supports many file formats which can be used as a Data Source for a mail merge. This article covers specifications and frequently asked questions on the most commonly used Data Sources, along with how to set up a Data Source in Word. http://tc.eserver.org/27200.html http://tc.eserver.org/27200.html This article tells you how to create a template to produce a software manual. http://tc.eserver.org/27204.html http://tc.eserver.org/27204.html Wildcards are like the blank pieces in Scrabble, or like the Jokers you can use in some card games to stand in for any card. http://tc.eserver.org/27203.html http://tc.eserver.org/27203.html How to find text that has particular formatting and replace it with different text, but without changing the formatting. http://tc.eserver.org/27190.html http://tc.eserver.org/27190.html Many Word users don't realize how easy it is to insert special characters. There are at least four ways to do it: through the Symbol dialog, using shortcut keys, automatically with AutoCorrect, or by direct keypad entry. http://tc.eserver.org/27207.html http://tc.eserver.org/27207.html Saving when resources are low can cause corruptions. If you notice Word start to slow down noticeably it's always best to quit and restart Word immediately; to close any other applications that are open; and to clear the clipboard, by selecting any character and copying it. http://tc.eserver.org/27201.html http://tc.eserver.org/27201.html The Microsoft Word Help suggests that you can automatically generate an index. Sorry, but you can't (the 'result' looks like an index, but the reader can't use it). You can automatically mark index entries: however, the amount of work required to edit the result into a usable index is usually double the effort required to manually mark the index entries one-by-one. http://tc.eserver.org/27202.html http://tc.eserver.org/27202.html Word's page numbering scheme isn't directly obvious but it isn't needlessly complex, either. Indirect might be a good term for it. Once you understand how it works, all sorts of possibilities open up. Unfortunately, the built-in tools that simplify the insertion of page numbers also happen to make it more difficult to tell what's really going on. So, for the moment, forget everything you've learned or think you know about page numbers. http://tc.eserver.org/27194.html http://tc.eserver.org/27194.html Mail merge is for simplifying repetitive documents and tasks. Mail merge can be used for creating many documents at once that contain identical formatting, layout, text, graphics, etc., and where only certain portions of each document varies. Mail merge is also used for generating mailing labels, envelopes, address lists, personalised training handouts, etc. As well as hard copy mailshots, it can be used to generate multiple emails and electronic faxes. And it can even be used to create a 'friendly' front-end to spreadsheet or database information. http://tc.eserver.org/27208.html http://tc.eserver.org/27208.html Notice how this article starts off with the cheerful assumption that you want to 'recover' a Master Document? I bet you were hoping that we would tell you how to 'fix' one! We can't. If you are having a problem with a master document, the problem is the master document. Any attempt you make to repair one will inevitably make your problem worse. http://tc.eserver.org/27186.html http://tc.eserver.org/27186.html Word's Outline View is wonderful for long documents and – used properly – can cut the time taken to write a typical report, proposal, thesis, or dissertation by as much as 50%. http://tc.eserver.org/27206.html http://tc.eserver.org/27206.html WordPerfect considers a document to be a 'type stream.' If you picture WordPerfect sitting on the end of the printer cable, sending characters one-by-one, and every now and again inserting a COMMAND to change what the printer is doing, you'll get the idea. For example, WP sends the commands for 'Arial' font and 'bold'. It then expects the printer to print every character that way until it tells the printer to do something else. Word, on the other hand, considers a document to be a 'container.' Within this container are more containers and, within them, still more. Into each of these containers, Word inserts objects. The objects can be bits of text, or bits of pictures, or complete files created by other applications. http://tc.eserver.org/27205.html http://tc.eserver.org/27205.html There is nothing in Word directly comparable to Reveal Codes in WordPerfect. There is a very good reason for this. WordPerfect can be thought of (and I understand is) basically a text stream with codes interspersed (for more on this, see John McGhie's article on Word vs. WordPerfect). This is what you see when you Reveal Codes. You have codes or markers that turn on and off certain formatting characteristics. Word, on the other hand, is a series of nesting containers, characters inside words inside paragraphs inside sections inside documents. The formatting of these is by styles and by pointers at the beginning and end of the document. http://tc.eserver.org/27196.html http://tc.eserver.org/27196.html Almost any mail merge will work better if you use IF fields, as the frequently used scenarios discussed below attempt to illustrate. http://tc.eserver.org/27185.html http://tc.eserver.org/27185.html If your problem manifests with just one document (or a specific subset of documents), but not with all documents, it is probable that you’re suffering from document corruption. Symptoms may include weird page numbering (drag the thumb down the right vertical margin and watch the page number counter – it will go crazy when you pass a corruption) infinite repagination, incorrect document layout and formatting, unreadable characters on the screen, hangs or crashes when you load or view a particular file. Such corruption is generally carried in the very last paragraph mark in a document, which is the marker for a hidden container in which Word stores all document properties including formatting information. http://tc.eserver.org/27191.html http://tc.eserver.org/27191.html If you work for a company of any size at all, then simply getting your staff to use the ruler properly will save them many hours every week, and significantly increase your company's profitability. http://tc.eserver.org/27188.html http://tc.eserver.org/27188.html This list doesn't attempt to be comprehensive, but is a list of the shortcuts which save me the most time. http://tc.eserver.org/27192.html http://tc.eserver.org/27192.html When you open a new blank document in Word, you begin typing at the left side of the screen/page and continue typing to the right margin, where Word wraps your text back to the left so you can start again. All your lines of text are full width. But sometimes you need to divide your text into two or more columns. http://tc.eserver.org/27184.html http://tc.eserver.org/27184.html If you have no clue what is causing your problem with Word, work through The Basics and all the General Troubleshooting topics. Beyond the basics, probably 70% of the problems in Word are caused by a corrupt Normal template or corrupt Preferences. http://tc.eserver.org/27197.html http://tc.eserver.org/27197.html Purists might argue that the power it gives ordinary users isn't necessary because they should use Access queries for this sort of thing and link the merge to the query. But in my experience, many people who are very comfortable working with Word and Excel find Access (or any full-fledged database application) very difficult to work with, and can get the job done far more quickly and easily using a combination of Word and Excel. At the end of the day, getting the job done is what matters. The vast majority of the world's databases (in terms of number of databases, rather than in terms of amount of data) are stored in Excel spreadsheets. http://tc.eserver.org/27199.html http://tc.eserver.org/27199.html In one form or another, Word is ubiquitous. If you buy a new computer, chances are good that it will come with some version of Office or Works Suite (which includes Word) installed. Word is a powerful word processing program that incorporates many of the features of a page layout application, but there are times when a page layout or desktop publishing application is what is needed. If you are using the Small Business Edition of Office 97 or Office 2000 SBE, Professional, or Premium, you have such a program: Microsoft Publisher. http://tc.eserver.org/27198.html http://tc.eserver.org/27198.html The macrobutton field can be used as a text marker within a template, or, as the name implies, it can be used to run a macro. http://tc.eserver.org/27187.html http://tc.eserver.org/27187.html Occasionally a new user of Word is alarmed to discover that his previously pristine document is full of strange symbols – dots, arrows, paragraphs marks, and the like. For experienced users, the usual reaction of such a user seems almost comical because experienced users know how invaluable the display of nonprinting characters can be both in formatting and in troubleshooting documents. http://tc.eserver.org/27209.html http://tc.eserver.org/27209.html The complete explanation would be a book in itself. For now, it is enough to know that a Word document is a great big 'list' of objects. An object can be anything you can put in a Word document. Each of these objects has many, many 'properties' that determine how it appears and how it behaves. http://tc.eserver.org/27189.html http://tc.eserver.org/27189.html Word has a built-in command ListCommands, which produces a table of all the Word commands with their current key and menu assignments. However, it does not list the commands using their actual names; nor does it include descriptions of what the commands actually do. http://tc.eserver.org/27193.html http://tc.eserver.org/27193.html When you delete a section break, or move an entire section to another part of the document, you get what seem to be very strange results. For instance, deleting a Continuous section break causes the preceding Next Page section break to convert to a Continuous one, or deleting a section break causes an important Header to disappear from the document, or causes the entire document to become landscape. http://tc.eserver.org/26753.html http://tc.eserver.org/26753.html Large documents often require several page number formats in the same document. In this article, we describe how to setup different page numbering formats. http://tc.eserver.org/26752.html http://tc.eserver.org/26752.html A macro is an action, or a set of actions, that automate tasks. Macros are recorded in the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language. You can use the macro recorder to record a sequence of actions as a macro, or write VBA code in the Visual Basic Editor. http://tc.eserver.org/26751.html http://tc.eserver.org/26751.html Microsoft Word will 'lose' documents in certain situations. For example, it may lose a document if Word is forced to quit unexpectedly, if your computer has a power interruption while you're writing, or if you close the document without saving changes. In this article we explain different ways to recover these lost documents. http://tc.eserver.org/26746.html http://tc.eserver.org/26746.html Bloated file sizes are a real problem. No-one will deny this. But, in the course of creating some long documents in MS Word, I've learned a few small secrets. http://tc.eserver.org/26750.html http://tc.eserver.org/26750.html Word can be very unforgiving! Once a document becomes too unwieldy, it starts to stagger and then collapses, wiping out all the formatting in the process. In some cases, you can recover the raw text but, as a rule, the layout and presentation is destroyed. However, there are several ways that reduce the likelihood of this occurring. http://tc.eserver.org/26749.html http://tc.eserver.org/26749.html When you insert a graphic into your Word document, it increases the file size automatically as Word has to ‘store’ (i.e. duplicate) a rendering of the graphic in the document. To avoid this happening, you can reduce the file size by storing only the links to the graphics and not the actual graphic itself. http://tc.eserver.org/26748.html http://tc.eserver.org/26748.html Word can be very frustrating. Take, for example, when it refuses to open a file that you have worked on only a few minutes earlier. You know you closed the file correctly. There were no error messages when you exited. So, why does this happen? http://tc.eserver.org/26747.html http://tc.eserver.org/26747.html Even if you do everything right, sooner or later one of your documents will become corrupt. Sometimes word will even open the file, but before you can do any work, it crashes! How can you retrieve the document? http://tc.eserver.org/26476.html http://tc.eserver.org/26476.html One possible outcome: Microsoft Office gains support for the OASIS OpenDocument format, either from Microsoft or from the open source community. Another outcome: Microsoft tweaks its Office XML licensing to conform to the definition of openness that governments are rightly insisting on. http://tc.eserver.org/26248.html http://tc.eserver.org/26248.html Word processing programs have come a long way since I first used WordStar on an old DEC CP/M machine back in the 80s. But despite the drastic difference between then and now, there is so little difference between today's offerings and those of three years ago. Word processing programs have more or less stagnated, and that has given small companies and open-source projects the advantage they needed to create excellent low-cost or free alternatives to the ubiquitous Microsoft Word. http://tc.eserver.org/26113.html http://tc.eserver.org/26113.html When you first switch to Writer, this claim that Writer beats Word may seem hard to swallow. And no wonder; you're too busy learning the new menus to get beyond the fact that everything's only half-familiar. And if you're an unsophisticated user who has yet to learn (to steal the title of Robin Williams' book) that the PC is not a typewriter, you might never notice. However, if you're an advanced user for whom style, structured text and long documents are all part of word processing, then the claim soon becomes self-evident. http://tc.eserver.org/26105.html http://tc.eserver.org/26105.html Experienced users of Microsoft Word may take awhile to discover how to do common tasks in OOWriter, because some of the menus and the terminology are a bit different; in a few cases no direct equivalent method is available. This series of pages summarizes my research and experiments with OOoWriter 1.1 on Windows ME. You may find some differences if you're using another operating system or version of OpenOffice. http://tc.eserver.org/26106.html http://tc.eserver.org/26106.html I'm happy to report that OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 does a very good job of converting Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP files to OOo files -- much better than the previous releases I tested. Most of the problems I had noticed with conversions done by OOo1.0.2 did not appear when I converted the same Word files using OOo1.1.0. Some conversion problems remain. Most of these are probably due to OOoWriter not having any counterpart to some features of Word. http://tc.eserver.org/26110.html http://tc.eserver.org/26110.html This page is an excerpt from Taming OpenOffice.org Writer (no longer available). A variation of this material is in OpenOffice.org Writer: The Free Alternative to Microsoft Word. Yes, master documents do work in OpenOffice.org Writer. However, you need to have a very disciplined approach to make sure they work correctly and reliably. http://tc.eserver.org/26107.html http://tc.eserver.org/26107.html I've now discovered that you can indeed do cross-references between documents, if they are both subdocuments of a master document. The method is obscure, and the help file (although giving a clue) wasn't much help. http://tc.eserver.org/26117.html http://tc.eserver.org/26117.html This section will show you how to insert text, symbols, and special characters; select characters, words, and paragraphs; and copy and paste text. This section also covers methods of automatic text entry, including AutoCorrect and AutoText. http://tc.eserver.org/26115.html http://tc.eserver.org/26115.html Fields are extremely useful features of Writer. This article describes how to use fields to solve common business and technical writing problems. http://tc.eserver.org/26111.html http://tc.eserver.org/26111.html If you are using any word processor or editor in a group situation, such as a technical writing team, or an office, then it will probably be in your interest to set up templates for authors to use to ensure consistency, reduce effort, and help automate conversation of documents between formats, such as building web pages from office documents. If you are also trying to store and manipulate content in XML but want to use a word processing environment for authoring, then well-crafted templates are even more important. http://tc.eserver.org/26109.html http://tc.eserver.org/26109.html Many people want a facility in OOo to enlarge or reduce the size of all fonts in a document at once, preferably by clicking on an icon. Although I do not know any way to do that, I have found a workaround that provides a similar result. It takes a bit of setting up but otherwise works quickly and easily. http://tc.eserver.org/26108.html http://tc.eserver.org/26108.html Follow these instructions to start the page numbering in a document at a number greater than 1. http://tc.eserver.org/26116.html http://tc.eserver.org/26116.html All of the contents in an OpenOffice.org Writer document is one of three things: text characters, fields or objects. Objects is a large category that includes formulas, drawing objects and so-called OLE Objects, but it is represented most often by graphics. All objects are added to Writer using a frame, and most of the time, it is the frame that you are editing. The object itself sits sublimely above your changes, its appearance in the document altering but not the object itself. http://tc.eserver.org/26101.html http://tc.eserver.org/26101.html When OpenOffice.org (www.openoffice.org) reached version 1.0 in May 2002, I did my journalistic duty and had a look. It wasn't what I expected. At times, the duplication of MS Word in OpenOffice.org seemed to extend to the faults, but the first impression is misleading. While MS Word users can be comfortable in OpenOffice.org within minutes, OpenOffice.org's interface is by far the tidier. More importantly, OpenOffice.org not only matches MS Word almost feature for feature, but often exceeds it, and provides working versions of features that have been broken or overdue for overhaul in MS Word for several releases. http://tc.eserver.org/26102.html http://tc.eserver.org/26102.html When I first tried OOo, it was at around version 1.0.0 or 1.0.1. The help files were pathetic in those days; I described them at the time as 'badly written, badly organized, badly indexed, and frequently wrong.' To be fair, the help has improved a great deal since then, though the indexing still needs a lot of improvement. http://tc.eserver.org/26103.html http://tc.eserver.org/26103.html All OpenOffice.org applications use XML-based file formats. All applications (except Math) use the same format as defined in the specification. The Math component uses the package structure and format, but uses MathML inside the package. http://tc.eserver.org/26118.html http://tc.eserver.org/26118.html This section shows you how to use Word’s spelling, grammar, and research tools. You also learn how to hyphenate documents, print envelopes and labels, and work with XML. http://tc.eserver.org/26123.html http://tc.eserver.org/26123.html Word performs many behind-the-scenes actions that some people hate and some people love. You already learned about AutoRecover, which saves files in the background every few minutes. Word offers three other big automated features: AutoCorrect, Smart Cut and Paste, and background spelling and grammar check. http://tc.eserver.org/26104.html http://tc.eserver.org/26104.html OpenOffice.org Writer provides many ways to write, edit, review, and comment on documents. This chapter covers some of those techniques, plus some other tips. http://tc.eserver.org/26072.html http://tc.eserver.org/26072.html Even if you're the most dedicated OpenOffice.org (OOo) user in the world, sooner or later you'll be asked to share files with someone using Microsoft Office. Some free software advocates refuse outright, or suggest outputting to HTML, PDF, or RTF formats, but these aren't always options -- especially if your boss is the one doing the asking. However, with a few preparations and a sense of what works and what doesn't, you can usually share files with Microsoft Office users with a minimum of headaches on both sides. Here's how.