Thursday, October 6th, 2011

Switch between open documents in Excel and Word

Hmmm … I am fussy, I want my cake and I want to eat it too!

I want to have a clean task bar so I don’t want to see lots of files lined up there so I love Windows 7 and its clean task bar. But I find the new panel that opens when I right click an icon on the task bar to be just a little bit too free with information. I really want it to show me a list of currently open files – not everything that I have open or have recently opened. Actually I could live with the information it gives me if I didn’t have to actually use it to switch windows.

So, problem is… how can I switch between open documents in Excel or Word, for example, without having to use the Windows task bar? Solution is to use the Switch Windows button. I add it to the QAT (Quick Access Toolbar) and it totally makes sense to me.

In Excel or Word, click the Customize Quick Access Toolbar button and choose More Commands. From the list which currently shows Popular Commands choose All Commands and scroll to find the Switch Windows button and click Add.

Now it is on the QAT and it will show you all your open files and you can use it to switch between them by just clicking on the one to go to. Repeat the process for both Excel and Word and you’ll be happy – at least until something else bugs you!

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:58 am3 Comments links to this post

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Timeline in Microsoft Word 2010

The new SmartArt feature in Word 2007 and 2010 helps you create timelines very easily:

Step 1
Choose Insert -> SmartArt -> Process and select one of the process options such as Basic Timeline and click Ok. Type the text into the textboxes in the SmartArt object. Alternately, click the arrows at the far left of the object and add text via the dialog.

Step 2
To format the timeline SmartArt, select the object and choose Format -> Design on the Ribbon and then select one of the SmartArt Styles. Click Change Colors to alter the colours used in your SmartArt object.

Step 3
From the Shape Effects list you can customise an effect such as reflection or shadow for the art. In addition, as the look of a SmartArt object is controlled by the document theme you can choose Page Layout -> Themes and select an alternate theme for your document.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:01 am2 Comments links to this post

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

DIY Color Changing Clip Art

Much of the illustration Clip Art in the Microsoft Clip Organizer can be edited by changing its colors. By doing this you can not only recolor the art to match the look of your document but, if you use Theme colors then the art will change color when the Theme or Color scheme changes.

Now you won’t need information technology degrees to learn this – but maybe you’ll be so good at it, you just might consider graphic design college.

So, let’s see how the recoloring is done. First select the Clip Art and from the Picture Tools -> Format tab click the Group > Ungroup button. Answer Yes if you are prompted to convert the image to a Microsoft Office Drawing Object. In some applications  such as Publisher you’ll need to repeat the process and select Ungroup again.

Now click on individual parts of the object and either remove them or recolor them by selecting a Shape Fill Color from the Drawing Tools > Format tab. If you use Theme colors then the colors will change later on when the theme changes.

When you are done and you have recolored all the pieces you want to recolor, select all the pieces, right click and choose Group.

Change the document theme or Color Scheme to see the image change color to match the look of the theme.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 6:22 pm1 Comment links to this post

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

Word – joining up short lines

One of my readers – Joe – recently asked for some help regarding removing spaces in Word. He thought that the problem with the text was additional spaces, but when I looked into it, it appears that something else is causing the issue.

Here is a piece of sample text and you can see that it is a series of short lines which my reader wants to make into one continuous paragraph.

To see what is causing him issues click the Show/Hide¶ button on the Home tab of the Word Ribbon.

At the end of each line you will find either a Paragraph Marker or a Manual Line Break – each is different and you need to work out which you have at the end of each line. Also determine if there is a space before each of the markers. If there is not a space you will need to add it yourself. Here is a mix of both markers but no spaces:

To make the lines flow into each other, from the Home tab on the Ribbon click the Replace option. If you need to replace Paragraph Markers, enter ^p into the Find What box. If you need to replace a Manual Line Break then enter ^l (lower case L) into the Find What box.

If you need to add a space, click in the Replace With box and press the Spacebar once – if you don’t need to add a space, then leave the Replace With box empty.

Click Find Next and then click Replace. Check to make sure the replacement is working as expected. If it is, click Replace All and lines will be joined together into a single paragraph of text.

Typically you only have to replace one type of marker and not both, but if you have both, then you will need to find and replace each individually.

When you’re done click Show/Hide¶ again to hide the extra characters from view.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 7:45 pm5 Comments links to this post

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

Permanently fix Word’s image insert behavior

I was at dinner the other night and talking computers with some friends. We were joking about Excel not being a word processor when the subject of images came up. And Lo! and behold someone suggested that Excel was a much better option to use than Word so far as images are concerned.

This has been a particular issue for me for years. You see Word inserts all images, by default as in line with text which is the option you’d probably never want to use.

I promised my friends to show them how to fix Word – permanently – so images get inserted as you’d want them to be – with a square wrap around. It’s a good starting point and my recommended default for Word. You can change the wrapping if you want but 99.9% of the time this is the setting you’ll want to use.

In Word 2003, choose Tools > Options > Edit tab and from the Insert/Paste Pictures as dropdown list choose Square and click Ok.

In Word 2007 choose File > Word Options > Advanced tab and locate the Cut, Copy and Paste group. From the Insert/Paste Pictures as dropdown list choose Square and click Ok.

In Word 2010 choose File > Options > Advanced tab and locate the Cut, Copy and Paste group. From the Insert/Paste Pictures as dropdown list choose Square and click Ok.

Now you know how to fix it … spread the love and tell a friend!

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 11:40 am3 Comments links to this post

Friday, February 25th, 2011

Scale a font’s height but not width in Word 2010

how to increase font height but not font widthI call this post – one step forward, two steps back. It’s a funky solution but it rocks and that’s why it’s worth today’s post.

Ok, you are in Word and you want to make a great title for a document. But it’s a little long so you can’t make the font really big cause that stretches it too wide. Hmm..

Ok, there’s a setting for scaling font width but not height – so what do you do? Well, with a little ingenuity you can solve the problem by scaling the width – in the reverse direction.

Select the text to alter then click the small icon in the bottom right of the Font group on the Home tab of the ribbon and click the Character tab. Set the Scale of the font to around 50% to shrink its width. Now, back in the Home tab, size the font up so it is nice and big. The ‘big’ font setting gives you the increased font height – which is what you want, and the small Scale value gives you the narrow width which solves the “too wide” problem.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:11 am7 Comments links to this post

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

Straightening an image in Word 2010

While Word 2010 has no tool for straightening an image, you can create the same effect.

step 1

To do this, I’d suggest you start with a new drawing canvas which is Insert > Shapes > New Drawing Canvas to draw a canvas on the screen.

step 2

Adjust it to just larger than the image that you want in your document and then click inside the canvas and choose Insert Picture to select an image to insert.

Size the image once it’s placed inside the drawing canvas.

Step 3

Now with the canvas selected but not the image, choose Insert > Shapes and select a rectangle shape.

Draw the rectangle shape over the top of the image.

From the Drawing Tools> Format tab, set the Shape Fill to No Fill and the Shape Outline to White and set the Outline Weight to a large weight. To do this, you’ll probably need to select the format shape options so that you can set the shape outline to something like 40 points. You need something that will cover the edges of the shape that you are about to crop.

In this image, I’ve set the outline of the rectangle to a light grey so you can see what you’re aiming to achieve:

Step 4

Now with the image selected rather than the shape, rotate the image until it is straight. Select the image and click the Crop button crop away a little bit around the edges of the image. You don’t need to crop too much but you might need to crop a little bit.

Click outside the image and now adjust the shape itself the white border you created so that it covers the area of the image that you want to hide because you’ve rotated the image.

In some cases, you may still not have enough border so you can adjust it to make it wider or narrower as required not by selecting the rectangle and choose Drawing Tools > Format tab > Shape Outline > Weight> More Lines and now increase the size of the line until you have enough border to hide the outside of the image.

The border grows from the middle out so you need to add about half as much extra border than you think you need.

Once you’ve added the extra border, click on the border and drag it outwards until it covers the uneven edges of the image.

Essentially what you’re doing here is rotating an image then using a white frame with no fill placed over the top of the image to mask out the area of the image that is on an angle and that you don’t want to see.

When you’re done, you can resize the drawing canvas until it fits closely around your image. It should not extend over the image or you will distort the frame.

Placing the image and frame inside a drawing canvas means that you can just click and drag on the drawing canvas edge and it will move both the frame and the image in your document.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 1:11 pm3 Comments links to this post

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

Section Breaks in Word 2007 & 2010

I love working with Microsoft apps and finding cool things to do with them. I hate it when Microsoft messes with my head.

While I love Microsoft Word 2010, Word 2007 was never my favorite application so I didn’t use it as my day to day tool preferring to stick with Word 2003 which really was a great program.

Now that Word 2010 is here, I have bitten the bullet and I’m turning all my production work over to Word 2010 – it is just such a wonderful program and a fitting successor to Word 2003.

But, wonderful as it is, it has some annoyances. One is when you come to insert a section break into a document. For years I’ve used the Insert menu in Word 2003 to add Breaks of all types to my documents. In Word 2007, 2010 – no go! You can insert a cover page, a blank page or a page break and any other number of smart document objects from the Insert tab – but you can’t insert a section break.

Instead the Breaks feature has been moved to the Page Layout tab – select it and then choose Breaks. Why it wasn’t placed on the Insert tab along with page breaks or why page breaks was added to the Insert tab and also duplicated in the Page Layout tab, I don’t know, but there it is.

So, when you need to add a section break to a Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010 document use the Page Layout tab, select Breaks and then, for example, Next page to create a section break that immediately opens a new page in the document.

You may not like it, but if you’re using Word 2007 you have to accept it’s Microsoft’s world and we just get to live in it.

If you’re using Word 2010 – Yeah! life is good. Thanks to the new customizable ribbon you can add your own Group to the Insert tab, move it up so it’s alongside the built-in Pages group then add the Breaks command to it – it’s a great solution and quick and easy to do and it makes such good sense.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 11:50 am3 Comments links to this post

Monday, January 24th, 2011

Join two tables together in Word

How to join two tables together in Microsoft Word

Quite often you’ll find that you have two tables in a Word document and you want to join the two together to make just one table. The solution is simple but way from obvious.

To do this, first select over all the cells in one of the two tables. If the table is underneath the one you want to join it up to, then press Alt + Shift + Up Arrow to move the table up the document so that it joins the bottom of the table before it. Keep pressing the key until the top row that you have selected joins the bottom border of the one above.

If you have selected the topmost table, then press Alt + Shift + Down Arrow until the top table locks onto the table below.

You can also drag one table up or down until it joins but this method is very slick. It also works on a single row so you can take one row from one table and move only it to join up with another table or to become a table all of its own. Experiment with this key combination – I’m sure you will love it.

Once you’ve done this, the tables will be joined to make one single table. If desired, you can then adjust the positioning of the columns so that the columns match between the two tables – this isn’t required but you may want to do it if the columns are supposed to be the same throughout.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:36 am50 Comments links to this post

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

Word – place a table over newspaper columns

Place a table over two columns in Word

Sometimes you’ll need to include a table in a document but place it so that it’s placed over a series of columns rather than inside the column itself.

To do this, click where you want the table to appear and insert the table at this point.

Hold your mouse over the table and you’ll see the table selector above the top left corner of the table. Click it to select the table and drag the table into position.

The default text wrap settings for a table in Word is that the text wraps around the table so there’s no special option to set to make this happen.

You can widen the table cells as large as necessary. If desired, the table can be sized so it fits the full width of the page or you can make it any size that you want.

To adjust the wrapping of text around a table, right click the table selector (the little square above its top left edge) and choose Table Properties > Table tab. Here you can select how text flows around the table or you can make it not flow around it if you want the table to push the text completely out of its way.

Here too you can alter the alignment of the table – by choosing Left, Center or Right.

This table behavior is consistent across Word 2007, 2010, 2003 and earlier versions.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:19 am1 Comment links to this post

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