Formatting Text In Boxes

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Can anyone suggest a quick way of reformatting text (changing font & size) in multiple boxes throughout a document. I’m using Word 97.

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I don’t know a way to change them all at once – that’s for the macro guys. You don’t say how many text boxes are involved. If it’s not some massive document, the format painter should work nicely. Just change the first one, click the format painter, change the second one, click the format painter… next time you look up – it’s dark out.

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There is currently an active thread in the VBA area on cycling through text boxes! It can get complicated if you have multiple sections and/or grouped boxes in your document.

If you are lucky you can cycle through all the boxes with the alt-DownArrow key. Then you can use the macro recorder to record a macro (tools-macros-record) that processes one box and then moves the cursor to the next one. Be sure to assign the macro to a key. Then just hit that key repeatedly (or hold it down) until done with the text.

Ed Colaianni
edc@post.harvard.edu

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Many thanks for the advice, I will give the format painter a bash as it is a one off job which hopefully won’t reoccur. I will see if I can get the macro working on it though – perhaps more at my leisure ! Once again thanks.

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Along with the format painter idea…

You don’t have to repeatedly “reset” the format painter. Select the box that has the formatting you want on it.
Double-click on the Format Painter button. This will turn it on and it will stay on until you turn it off.
Click on each of the boxes you want formatted the same.
Click on the Format Painter button again or press Esc. to turn it off.

Hope this saves you some time!!
Mary

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Mike,

In addition to dbl-clicking the format painter, here are a few other ideas:
Idea #1:
– when formatting the text in the TB, use the format | font dialogue box to make the change for the first TB. This way the font and size change are treated as one change.
– as you go from TB to TB (eg, using ALT+down arrow as suggested), just hit CTRL+A to select all the text in the TB and then CTRL+Y which repeats the single last change (which is why you want to do this in the font dialog and not off the toolbar).

Idea #2: kind of wacky but
– if the VBA thread finds a way to select all TBs in a doc, then you can do whatever it comes up with and then press CTRL+A which will select all the regular text not in TBs and deselect the TBs.
– with the non-TB stuff selected, change it to another style temporarily (I’m assuming you use the same style inside of TBs as outside; if not, see idea #3).
– you now have TBs just formatted with the style you started with. You can either change this style definition to accommodate the change in font and size or do a Find-Replace to change the style of text in the TBs to another style with the proper font/size (use the more and format buttons in find-replace to get at the style info)
– remember to change your non-TB stuff back to it’s original style if necessary (the style you used in the second dash doesn’t have to be a dif appearance, just a dif name so this step may not be necessary)

I tried this with 2 pages of text and TBs in Word 97.
– I reduced the view to view my pages 2 at a time (just to cut down the amount of time; does Word 2000 allow even more to be viewed at once?).
– selected the multiple text boxes (click on first TB and with shift held down click on the rest until they’re all selected)
– now do the CTRL+A; the non-TB stuff is now selected and the TBs are not
– proceed as above

Idea #3:
if the text in TBs is formatted with a dif style than the rest of the non-TB stuff, just change the style def. That’s easy but you probably have Normal style for both TB and non-TB stuff so forget this item and use #1 or 2 above.

hope this helps.

Fred

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Some great ideas here. I might add, since I’m partial to the keyboard over the mouse, that if you want to use format painter, you can use Ctrl+Shift+C to copy formatting. Then you can paste multiple times using Ctrl+Shift+V. It has the advantage of allowing you to do other editing in between (which would turn off the format painter).

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Phil,

Thks for the tip. And what’s even better is that you can copy some text to the CB and it won’t destroy the formatting info that you copied with CTRL+SHIFT+C.

Fred

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Thanks for the tip about using Ctrl-Shift copy and paste. I’ll be adding a note to my Legal Users Guide chapter on Basic Formatting that you can use that to copy text in addition to formatting.

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