Sunday, October 13th, 2013

Use OpenType to Beautify Fonts in Word 2010 & 2013

 

Using OpenType, you can add caps, ligatures, and other styles to your fonts to beautify your text.

To get started with OpenType in Microsoft Word 2010, and in particular if you have the font Gabriola installed, type some text using the font Gabriola. Include some numbers because Gabriola has a particularly attractive range of numbers.

With the text selected from the Font group click the dialog launcher to open the Font dialog and select the Advanced tab.



From the Ligatures dropdown list, select Standard Only and from the Stylistic Sets dropdown list select style 6 and click Ok to apply it to the text. You will see that the text changes to show some attractive swashes on some letters. If you change to a different Stylistic Set you will see that some characters may change. You may need to increase the line spacing to see the full swashes appear.

This OpenType font feature only works for fonts that actually have these characters in them, which include Gabriola, Calibri, Cambria, Constantia, Corbel, Consolas and Palatino Linotype. You must also be working on a .docx format document and not in compatibility mode in Word. If you don’t have access to these font features, choose File -> Options -> Advanced and scroll to the bottom of the screen and click Layout Options. Ensure that the Disable OpenType Font Formatting Features checkbox is disabled.

In Word, if you set the typeface to Gabriola and then start typing you’ll notice that as you type, the characters may change because the position of the characters in relation to other characters around them has an effect on how individual characters are drawn.

Helen Bradley

Monday, September 30th, 2013

Automatic Table of Contents in Google Docs

When creating a long document with many different sections, it’s often necessary to create a table of contents to make navigation easy. Fortunately, Google Docs can generate a table for you almost entirely automatically.

To do this, you must first create section headers using the list under Format > Paragraph Styles. Simply highlight a section title and apply an appropriate heading style for it. Each style grows progressively smaller from 1 to 6. Major sections, such as chapters, should use the largest headings while smaller subsections should use progressively smaller headings.

Once you have created all of your headings, select where you want the table of contents to be in your document and choose Insert > Table of Contents. The table will automatically fill with links to each heading and arrange itself according to the heading styles chosen. Smaller headings will be indented beneath larger headings in the table, indicating that they are subsections.

Helen Bradley

Wednesday, August 28th, 2013

Word 2013 Find only photos or illustrations


Learn how to find only photos or only illustrations when searching Office 2013 online images

In Office 2013 the old Clip Art feature was removed and now you can insert an image by searching for it online at a number of places. One of these is the Microsoft clip art collection which is now stored totally online and not partly on  your computer.

So far, so good.

The problem is that the old task pane feature which let you determine the types of images you want to search for is now gone. So, on the face of it, when you search for something like coffee you get illustrations and photos. In many cases much more than you want or need.

Often, I know ahead of time I want a photo or an illustration so I want my search to return only one type of image. There’s no information at all as to how to do this but you can! Instead of searching for coffee, type coffee photo to find photos relating to coffee or coffee wmf  to find  just  illustrations as these are generally wmf format images.

It isn’t a perfect solution and you will miss out on some images as well as get the occasional illustration with your photos  or vice versa.

However, if you’re not too fussy about missing out on some imagery then using this search format will weed out a lot of the stuff you don’t want and serve up mostly the type of content that you do want.

This tip works in any of the Office 2013 applications – PowerPoint 2013, Excel 2013, Publisher 2013. Word 2013 and more.

Helen Bradley

Friday, August 23rd, 2013

Word 2010 and 2013 Tip – Markup the changes to your document

Keep track of the changes made to your document

Word’s Reviewing tools make it easy to show someone the changes you’ve made to a document.

You can set Word to record the changes before you make them by selecting the Review tab on the ribbon and click Track Changes > Track Changes.

Now, in Word 2007 & 2010, every addition to your document will be underlined and every deletion will be marked with strikeout. Word 2013 defaults to Simple Markup so you will need to choose All Markup to see the changes marked up.

 

These changes are retained when you save the document.

You can apply the changes permanently at any time by selecting Review > Accept or Reject and choose Accept All Changes (or Reject All Changes).

Word 2013 has a new feature which lets you force Track Changes to be enabled. Choose Review > Track Changes > Lock Tracking to enable this feature. Now if you save the document and send it to someone, any changes they make to the document will be recorded in the document. They cannot disable this feature without having the password to unlock the setting and disable it.

Helen Bradley

Thursday, August 15th, 2013

Word 2010 and 2013 Tip – How to sort data in a Word document


Sorting data in Word 2007, 2010 & 2013

In the pre-ribbon versions of Word you would use the Table commands to sort data in a Word document.

In Word 2007, 2010 & 2013 you can’t use the table sort options any longer for plain old text simply because you can’t select the table options if you don’t have a table – it’s a Catch 22 situation.

Luckily, Word now includes a proper sort option for any text – not just table text. To use it, first select the text to sort and then click the Sort button on the Home tab of the Ribbon.


When the Sort Text dialog opens you can choose what to sort such as Paragraph or Field and the type of sort. If you want a case sensitive sort so A is treated differently to a then click Options and check the Case Sensitive checkbox.

Once you are done select the sorting options, click Ok to perform the sort.

Helen Bradley

Friday, August 9th, 2013

Word 2010 and 2013 Tip – Flow text through a document with linked text boxes


How to use linked text boxes to flow text throughout a document automatically

If you’re familiar with using desktop publishing software you’ll know that it is useful to be able to create text boxes and have the text flow automatically from one to the next. You use this feature to start a story on one page of a newsletter, for example, and to have it continue on a later page.

Word 2007, 2010 and 2013 can do this for you too, if you use the built in text box feature. To do this, first choose Insert > Text Box > Draw Text Box and click and drag to draw a text box on the page.

Repeat this and add a second text box on another page in the document.

Now select the first text box, right click and choose Create Text Box Link.

Now click in the second text box to link the two together.

In future, any text which you type into or paste into the first text box and which won’t fit because the box is not large enough to accommodate it, will flow automatically into the second text box.

Helen Bradley

Thursday, August 1st, 2013

Word 2010 and 2013 Tip – Add a time and date stamp to a printed page


Know when your document was printed by adding a date and time stamp to each printed page

Add a date and time stamp all your printouts by placing the current date and time in the document footer so it prints when the page is printed.

To do this in Word 2007, 2010 and 2013 choose Insert > Footer > Edit Footer. Click the Date & Time button and enable the Update Automatically checkbox. From the list of dates and times choose a date or date and time – depending on what you want to see on the page. Click Ok.

Select the text that Word has inserted in the footer and you can now format it to a small font – such as Italic 8 pt. You can also prefix the text with the words Printed On: or something similar, if desired.

Click Close Header and Footer to return to your document. Now the current date and time will be printed in the footer each time the document is printed.

Helen Bradley

Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

Create a one click animation in PowerPoint 2013

Learn how to create a simple animation in PowerPoint. You will add a shape which, when clicked will trigger an image to be displayed. It is a smart animation with lots of potential uses which, once you see how it is done, will be simple to adapt to your own needs.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.

Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create an animation where you click a button to show an image. Before we get started with this tutorial let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re going to achieve.

I have an image here and a shape and when we play the presentation this is what we’re going to see. We’re going to see a slide without the picture and when I click on this shape I’ll see the image displayed. And we’re going to create this animation where we click on a shape and an image appears.

So back in PowerPoint let’s go to a new slide and I’ve already inserted my image. I just chose Insert and then Online Pictures. I searched for an elephant and I’ve just inserted it on the slide. So there’s nothing special about what I’ve done to date. Now I’m going to choose Insert and then Shapes and I’m going to choose my rounded rectangle shape.

And I’m going to add it to my slide and I’m going to add some text to it. And I’m just going to click away from the shape. Now that we have our shape and our image we’re ready to create the animation. To do this I’m going to click the Animations tab on the Ribbon. And I want to animate the elephant so I’m going to click on the elephant image and I’m going to choose an animation for it.

So I could choose an animation such as fade so it will fade in. And then I’m going to open the Animation task pane over here by clicking on Animation Pane because I want the elephant to be animated but I don’t want him to appear on a click and I don’t want him to appear after the slide is opened. I want him to appear when you click this particular shape.

And that’s a different animation. This is the elephant animation so I’m going to right click it and choose Effect Options because that allows me to control how this effect is going to play. And I’m going to click the Timing tab.

And I want this to be triggered by the clicking of this shape so I’m selecting to Start Effect on Click of and I’m going to select Rounded Rectangle and just click Ok. And now this image is going to animate when we click this shape. Let’s close down the task pane and let’s go and test it.

I’ll click the Slide Show. You have to do that because you have to test this slide as it would appear inside a working slide show. And you can see here we have our slide on the screen and just our filled rectangle. I’m gray. I have a trunk. Click to see what I am. The elephant image is not visible yet. However when I click the shape the elephant appears and we would then progress through the slide show.

So this is a simple animation effect that you can create so that you can click a shape and something happens. The animation is all added. All the effects are added to the image itself. You’re going to animate it with some sort of an entrance effect and then adjust its timing so that it is triggered by a click on this shape here.

I’m Helen Bradley.

Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more PowerPoint tutorials on this YouTube channel as well as additional tutorials on other Office applications and Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator.

Visit my website at helenbradley.com for tips, tricks and tutorials on all these applications.

Helen Bradley

Friday, July 26th, 2013

PowerPoint VBA – adding shapes to slides programatically

I’ve been working on a project which involves adding shapes to a PowerPoint slide using VBA.

One big big problem with PowerPoint is that there is no longer any macro recorder. This means you can’t get information about methods and properties by recording the steps you perform to, for example, add a shape to a slide. In other programs you can get a lot of  useful information from recorded macros – in PowerPoint – nada!

So, if you, like me are struggling to make sense of a language that uses such wonderfully nonsensical properties like TextFrame.TextRange then here is the benefit of my research.

Here, in no particular order, is a grab bag of MSDN articles and references for adding and formatting (and adding text to) shapes in PowerPoint using VBA. Enjoy! and if you have any additional useful resources, please add them to the comments to keep us all from going crazy!

Constants to use with the SchemeColor property

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/bb230611(v=office.12).aspx

ColorFormat object

Properties you can use to color an object – eg its fill, font, outline and so on:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/bb265494(v=office.12).aspx

TextRange.font property

How to configure a font for a shape:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff744240.aspx

LineFormat object

How to configure the line and arrowhead for a line or shape with a border
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/aa220968(v=office.11).aspx

Shapes Object

How to create a shape on a PowerPoint slide
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff746621.aspx

Shape.height property

Measured in (Oh so helpful) points (72 to the inch)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff744642.aspx

Shapes members

Some things you can add to a slide:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff745286.aspx

Shapes.AddShape method

How to add a shape to a PowerPoint slide:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff744336.aspx

An explanation of working with text in a shape

aka Microsoft’s attempt to explain why you need to use TextFrame.TextRange to add text to a shape!:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/aa198526(v=office.10).aspx

The MsoAutoShapeType Enumeration

ie how you can find what a shape is called so you can add it to a slide:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa432469(v=office.12).aspx

ParagraphFormat.Alignment property

How to align text in a shape in PowerPoint – :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff744029.aspx

Info on the TextFrame.TextRange property in PowerPoint:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff744793.aspx

Info about the TextFrame members in PowerPoint:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff745830.aspx

Helen Bradley

Thursday, July 25th, 2013

Word 2010 and 2013 Tip – Making shapely images


Crop your image to a shape in Word
It is easy to crop an image to a shape such as a star or a heart in Word by using the Crop to Shape feature.

First add the image to your document then click to select it. From the Picture Tools > Format tab click Crop > Crop to Shape.


Select the shape to use to crop the image to. You can then add a shadow or reflection or other effect to the shape as desired.

Helen Bradley