Monday, June 4th, 2007

Word Toolbars your way

I use the £ and ¢ symbols a lot but they’re not on my keyboard. However they’re on my toolbar, thanks to the ability to customize Word’s toolbars.

Right click Word’s toolbar and choose Customize and then the Commands tab. Click the All Commands option in the Commands list and locate and click the Symbol: entry. Drag and drop it onto a toolbar and, when the symbol dialog appears, click the symbol to attach to the button and click Ok.

The toolbar button displays the font name and the symbol number. To make it look prettier, right click the button and type a different name for it. If the symbol can be typed using the keyboard by pressing the Alt key and typing out the numbers then do this. Alternately, click the Edit Button Image button and draw the symbol to create your own icon.

And, if you’re curious, the £ symbol is Alt + 0163 and the ¢ symbol is Alt + 155 – so now you know.

For more tips and tricks and helpful Office columns, visit Projectwoman.com

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:06 pmNo Comments links to this post

Monday, April 2nd, 2007

Checkboxes in Word

Stuck and need a checkbox in a Word document? Simple!

Click where the checkbox is to go and choose Insert, Symbol, Symbols tab. From the Font list choose the Wingdings font. You’ll see at character positions 113 & 114 are two checkboxes. Click the one you want and choose Insert and then Close. If you’d use it a lot, create an AutoText or AutoCorrect entry for it so it’s only a word away.

For more tips and tricks and helpful Office columns, visit Projectwoman.com

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 10:22 pmNo Comments links to this post

Monday, February 5th, 2007

Using special characters in Word documents

I write for UK magazines so I often have to use pounds symbols and my mum’s and brother’s surnames have an ‘e’ with an accute accent – unfortunately neither is on my keyboard. So, to make things easier to write, I use a macro to convert a word to a typed character.

Here’s a sample you can use and adapt. It converts the words cents, pounds, degrees and division to their character equivalents and you can use it to replace almost any word or character with another single character, word or phrase of your choosing:

Sub ConvertText()
FindAndReplace “cents”, “¢”
FindAndReplace “pounds”, “£”
FindAndReplace “degrees”, “º”
FindAndReplace “division”, “÷”
End Sub

Sub FindAndReplace(FindThisWord, ReplaceWithWord)
Set EditRange = ActiveDocument.Content
EditRange.Find.ClearFormatting
EditRange.Find.Execute FindText:=FindThisWord, ReplaceWith:=ReplaceWithWord, MatchCase:=0, Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub

For more tips and tricks and helpful Office columns, visit Projectwoman.com

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:25 pmNo Comments links to this post