• Change Word Font Size and Formatting Quickly

In Word, do you ever want to change the font, size or formatting quickly?
• Character formatting in Microsoft Word
Restore character formatting with help from this tip.
• When There's Too Much HTML
Word 2000 is promoted as having full HTML compatibility but there are times
when full HTML fidelity is a pain in the neck.
• White Text On Black
Put white text on the black background in Word.

• Word's Status Line Explained

"What do all those grayed out sets of the letters at the bottom of the Word
screen mean? I've never seen most of them active."
• Insert Dates In Word
"How can I insert todays date on the right hand side of the page like my
English teacher taught me many years ago?"
• ALTernative Tip For Word
Use this ALTernative tip for Word.

• Repeat a Find in Microsoft Word

Don't let the dialog box get in the way of your search.
• Pattern Matching In Word
There's a very powerful way to find text in Word called pattern matching. It's
been around for many versions of Word - but it sadly underused. Kudos to
WOWser, Robin Trew for this summary of what's possible.

• Capitalization Tips
The difference in Word between changing the case of a word using the
Change Case command and the All Caps option in Format | Font.
• Quick Typing with AutoCorrect
Learn how this Word feature can save you time and keystrokes.
• Thesaurus Shortcut In Word
Look for a better word? The Thesaurus is only a shortcut away.
• Autocorrect Exceptions
"I'm trying to create some exceptions to the initial caps and capitalize first
letter actions. But sometimes as I enter the exception the 'OK' button is greyed
out. Why?"
• Find Grammar or Spelling Errors in Word
Here's a quick way to find spelling or grammar errors in your Word document.
FONTS & FORMATS
Change Word Font Size and Formatting Quickly
Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, September 13, 2000

In Word, do you ever want to change the font, size or

formatting quickly? Highlight the text then try this
shortcut:

Ctrl + D

This shortcut is the same as choosing Format | Font

from the menu—but faster. You can make the changes
you want and click OK to get back to work.

Character formatting in Microsoft Word

Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, February 28, 2001

Restore character formatting with help from this tip.

Unlike paragraph formatting, character formatting is stored with the

character itself. The method for restoring character formatting to a bunch of
screwed-up characters differs, depending on whether you're using Word
2000 or not.

If you're using Word 2000, simply select the characters and, in the Style
drop-down box, choose Default Paragraph Font--the first choice on the list.
In any version of Word, you can also use the Ctrl-spacebar key combination
to restore the characters to their default font.

No matter how you do it, Word will remove all formatting from the selected
characters and return the characters to the format defined by the paragraph
style. Even if some of the characters have a unique style, Word will remove
the character style completely and impose the style defined for the
paragraph.

When There's Too Much HTML in Word

Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, April 05, 2001

Table of Contents
- When There's Too Much HTML in Word
- What You Didn't Want to Get
- Solutions?

Word 2000 is promoted as having full HTML compatibility but there

are times when full HTML fidelity is a pain in the neck.

When you copy some text from Word to an HTML editor like Frontpage,
Word does its best to send with it exactly what you had in the document.
The same fonts, spacing—the works.

Sometimes that's what you want—but often you just want the basic
formatting (bold, italics etc) plus the raw text. What Word sends with the
copied text is a set of class settings, span statements and XML tag
placements.

When There's Too Much HTML in Word

What You Didn't Want to Get

Table of Contents
- When There's Too Much HTML in Word
- What You Didn't Want to Get
- Solutions?

Try copying a few paragraphs from Word to Frontpage then look in

the HTML view—you'll see things like:

• "<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>"

this is just for two or more spaces!
• 'class="MsoBodyText"'
this is the name of the original Word style with 'Mso' in the
front of it.
• "<o:p> </o:p>"
apparently these are XML placeholders. They are everywhere
in Word copied text but serve no useful purpose in most
cases.
• '<:span style="font-size:9.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier
New' color:black">'
span statements like this bring across the exact character
formatting in Word.

All this extra code can severely bloat the size of a HTML page,
making it slower to download and display. Worse it can confuse the
page editor if they don't realize the tags are there.

Solutions?

Table of Contents
- When There's Too Much HTML in Word
- What You Didn't Want to Get
- Solutions?

Sadly there's no direct solution—Microsoft had its focus so directly

at HTML compatibility that it ignored the more practical
possibilities. Thankfully you can identify most of the surplus Word
stuff because of the liberal use of 'Mso' in the tags.

One solution is to use Paste Special and choose the

'Normal Paragraphs' option. That will remove all
formatting codes, including fundamental ones like bold
and italics etc. The same happens if you select text in
FrontPage and choose Format | Remove Formatting; all
the formatting is lost.

You can go through manually and remove the excess.

Because Frontpage has such a basic replace function
(compared to Word) that's a tedious process.

The only direct solution we've found is expensive but

effective. Dreamweaver 3 from Macromedia has a
feature specifically designed to remove the HTML crud

White Text On Black In Word

Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, April 05, 2001

"How can I put white text on the black background in Word ?"

White text on a black background is an effective heading - it was always

possible in Word, but got easier as versions changed.

Put simply, type in your text, highlight it and choose Format | Borders and
Shading | Shading. Change the shading color to Black.

In later versions of Word this is enough because the default text color is
'Auto' and will change automatically to a contrasting color when the
background changes.

Otherwise you have to choose Format | Font (or Format | Character) and
alter the font color to 'White'.

In earlier versions of Word there can be a problem with the printer drivers
when you try this - you may get only a black box on the printed page.

Here are two things to try if this problem hits you:

• Go to your Printer setup (File | Print | Properties or File | Print setup

depending on your version of Word) and uncheck the 'Print
TrueType as Graphics' selection.

• Otherwise try the old favorite solution - update your printer driver.

SPELLING & GRAMMAR

Insert Dates In Word
Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, April 05, 2001

"How can I insert todays date on the right hand side of the page like
my English teacher taught me many years ago?"

You can do it using two simple shortcuts. Firstly, right align the current line:

Right Align Ctrl + R

Then insert today's date:

Insert date Alt + Shift + D

Insert Dates In Word

Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, April 05, 2001

"How can I insert todays date on the right hand side of the page like my
English teacher taught me many years ago?"

You can do it using two simple shortcuts. Firstly, right align the current line:

Right Align Ctrl + R

Then insert today's date:

Insert date Alt + Shift + D

ALTernative Tip For Word

Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, April 05, 2001

While using the mouse to adjust tabs, indents, columns and margins
on the ruler, try holding down the Alt key. Holding down the Alt key
displays the ruler and the changing distances between settings as you
move the marker. This is handy for precise placement of your work
upon the page.

SEARCHES
Repeat a Find in Microsoft Word
Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, April 05, 2001

Don't let the dialog box get in the way of your search.

If you're looking for each instance of some text in a document so you can
edit the parts around it, there's a fast way to do it without the Find dialog box
getting in the way.

Press Ctrl + F to open the Find window, enter text to search for and click on
Find. This will jump to the next instance of that text in the document. Then
close the Find window by clicking on the X in the top right corner. The Word
insertion point will stay with the found text and you can edit it as usual.

To find the next occurrence of the text press Shift + F4, you can do that as
many times as you like and edit the document in between each search. Shift
+ F4 won't work when the Find window is open.

Find Ctrl + F
Repeat Find Shift + F4
Pattern Matching (Searches) In Word
Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, April 05, 2001

There's a very powerful way to find text in Word called pattern matching. It's
been around for many versions of Word - but it sadly underused. Kudos to
WOWser, Robin Trew for this summary of what's possible.

Word's Find & Replace uses two entirely separate search engines. The
more familiar engine is adequate for very specific or very general targets
("Massachusetts" or "*"), but the lesser known engine is much more
powerful, and can track down and modify subtler targets such as any date,
any time, or any dollar value.

To toggle between the two, check or uncheck Find & Replace | More | Use
Wildcards. For documentation, read the help-file page entitled "Examples of
search wildcards" (in the Word97 help file search index, look for
"Searching", choose the subtopic "Wildcards", and then click the "How"
button under bullet 4). For key differences between the two engines, see
Microsoft's Web site.

DETAILS
All you need to know: just four types of pattern-matching brackets

[] A pair of square brackets matches any of the characters which it

encloses. To find any vowel, in upper or lower case, enter
[AEIOUaeiou] in the find box . There are a couple of useful
abbreviations which work with the square brackets :

1. Negation with "!". To find any kind of character except

for lower-case vowels, enter [!aeiou] (The exclamation
symbol is an abbreviation for "anything except")

2. Ranges with "-". To find any digit, enter [0-9]. [a-z] finds
any lower case alphabetic character. [!0-9A-Za-z ] finds
any character (such as punctuation) which is neither
numeric, nor alphabetic, nor a space character). [.?\!] finds
any full stop, question mark, or exclamation mark. (The
backslash enables you to search for characters which have
a special pattern-matching meaning.)
{} Curly brackets enclose instructions to look for a certain number
of the preceding type of character. [0-9]{ 2 } will find any
sequence of two digits. [0-9]{2,6} will find any sequence of
between two and six digits. ^t{2,} will find any sequence of two
or more tab characters. An optional abbreviation for {1,} is @. So
^t{1,} and ^t@ will both find any sequence of one or more tab.
<> Opening and closing angle brackets match the beginning and end
of a word respectively . [aeiou]> will find any vowel at the end of
a word. <[!AEIOUaeiou0-9]{2} will find any pair of consonants
at the beginning of a word. <1[89][0-9]{2}> will find any
nineteenth or twentieth century year.
() Most powerful of all, plain brackets enable you to define groups
which can be referred to in Replace operations. To correct all
millennium-bugged dates of the form 05/03/00 to the form
05/03/2000, you could enter ( [0-3][0-9]/[01][0-9]/)([0-5][0-9]) in
the Find box, and \120\2 in the Replace box. \1 refers to the first
 bracketed group and \2 refers to the second bracketed group.

MISC.

Capitalization Tips
Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, April 05, 2001

"What's the difference in Word between changing the case of a word

using the Change Case command and the All Caps option in Format |
Font?"

For many versions of Word there's been both a Change Case command
and an All Caps formatting option. While both give the same display on the
screen and the printed page, they behave differently.

All Caps is a character formatting option like Bold, Italic, Strikethrough etc.
The underlying letters remain unchanged (upper and lower case) but a
formatting property is imposed on top of the basic letter to change their
display.

Change Case actually changes the underlying letter. For the techies among
you, the Unicode or ASCII value for the character is changed.

All Caps Ctrl + Shift + A

Small Caps Ctrl + Shift + K

Both these shortcuts are toggles. Press them a second time to reverse what
was done.

Quick Typing with AutoCorrect

Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, April 05, 2001

Learn how this Word feature can save you time and keystrokes.

We all know that Word's AutoCorrect can fix your typing errors; converting
"teh" to "the" is the favored example. But there's more to AutoCorrect than
just fixing your typing mistakes. You can also use it to type phrases you use
all the time.

For example, let's say you're writing about the Olympics and have to type
"International Olympic Committee" over and over again. Sometimes you can
abbreviate it to IOC, but other times you can't.

You can set AutoCorrect to swap a keyword for a longer phrase. In our
example, you can't use IOC as the short phrase because you'll want that to
appear alone at times.

We use the common acronym plus the letter F (for full) afterwards. So when
you type "IOC" it is unchanged but when Word sees "IOCF" it's converted to
the full name.

Some people prefer a different ending character. You can choose the tilde
(~), asterisk (*) or whatever character you like. We prefer the letter F
because it keeps your fingers on the main keyboard.
To add a phrase to AutoCorrect, type in the phrase, then highlight the text
(make sure you don't select the ending paragraph mark). From the menu,
choose Tools > AutoCorrect and you'll find the highlighted text already
inserted. Enter your keyword into the left-hand box, then click the Add
button.

Thesaurus Shortcut In Word

Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, April 05, 2001

Look for a better word? The Thesaurus is only a shortcut away.

There's no need to select the word, just put the insertion point before,
after or inside the word and hit the shortcut.
Thesaurus: Shift + F7

Autocorrect Exceptions
Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, April 05, 2001

"I'm trying to create some exceptions to the initial caps and capitalize
first letter actions. But sometimes as I enter the exception the 'OK'
button is greyed out. Why?"

In Word 97 and 2000 you can put in exceptions to the general action of
AutoCorrect — to 'fix' cases where it would otherwise try to put a capital at
the start of a sentence, or remove the capital letter from anything but the
first letter in a word.

For example, if I type "approx." Word 97 would normally assume that the
period is an end of sentence marker and try to capitalize the first word of
what it thinks is the sentence. Having "approx." in the exceptions list stops
that.

Similarly, typing "ZDNet" would normally get wrongly converted to "Zdnet"

by AutoCorrect — putting "ZDNet" in the exceptions list prevents it
happening for that word.

All the AutoCorrect controls are at Tools | AutoCorrect. Under the

AutoCorrect tab you'll find an Exceptions button.

AutoCorrect exceptions only work for single words. The program can't
recognize multi-word exceptions. Because of that design limitation, as soon
as you press a spacebar in the entry box it realizes it's an invalid exception
and greys the Add button until you fix it.

Of course, it would be more helpful if the program gave some clue as to why
the button is greyed. Maybe in Word 2010?

Find Grammar or Spelling Errors in Word

Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan, April 05, 2001

Here's a quick way to find spelling or grammar errors in your Word

document. As long as the "Check spelling as you type" option is selected
(Tools > Options > Spelling & Grammar) so you get the red and green
squiggly lines under the offending items.

ALT+F7
Find the next spelling or grammatical error

Not only will you jump to the next error, the right mouse menu will open up
to show any suggested fixes.