Replies

Okay, thanks — didn’t know that!

Thanks! And ya, I do put a lot of things in autocorrect – I love autocorrect – but there are lots of words that are correctly spelled but are still incorrect in some contexts.

Like I don’t want to always autocorrect “conducive” into “conductive,” for instance. My department (Word Processing) works with papers coming from a few dozen authors who aren’t professional typists (they’re engineers and lawyers), and part of our job is to find and fix the writers’ typos.

Like when the writer typed bowl, but meant bowel, or bread but meant break, or chamber but meant camber (or vice versa). There’s entities vs. entitles, the classics fist–first and host–hose, fluorescent and florescent, forth and froth, hermetic and hermitic, axle (like in a vehicle) and axel (a figure skating jump) – all commonly used (or rarely, so the spelling isn’t familiar). Best not put them into autocorrect, I think.

Some of these close-but-no-cigar words are pretty funny, so building an exclusion dictionary is entertaining – I highly recommend it. We’ve caught molecular bacon probes (beacon), FIG. 1 and FIB. 2, brining the action (bringing), sandwiched between two lawyers of dielectric material (layers), and so on. I need both “lawyers” and “layers” to be allowed, sigh – can’t put either one into autocorrect.

With our hand-built exclusion dictionary in place, Spellcheck helps us spot these correct but still wrong words. And for me it seems like it would be useful to have one exclusion dictionary for scannos and one for typos.

Oh well – the solution we have, which works just fine, is that, since each user can modify his or her own exclusion dictionary, they can start with my very inclusive exclusion list and modify it to fit their own needs.

But if anyone ever figures out how to have two ENGLISH-US exclusion dictionaries in use at the same time, please let me know!

It doesn’t sound like the answer to your (very interesting!) situation, but I know that styles with paragraph line spacing set to “exactly” any height can cause chopping off of top portions of text or pictures, but if that was the case I think the chopping would be happening on every line, not just the top line.

I’d probably be blaming my printer driver — I think the printer driver can affect the display as well as the hard copy.

If you want to print a whole section, all you have to remember, really, is the section number (at least in older versions — I am in 2007).

To print section 4, for instance, it is only necessary to type s4 in the page range box, and all of section 4 will print.

Judy

This seems to be a dialog that Microsoft don’t like much, it used to be useful for moving autotext entries but that has been removed from the organiser and now they don’t even put it on the default interface.

One reason the Organizer may have fallen out of favor is that it doesn’t work with some file management systems. I cannot copy styles around using the Organizer anymore, at least not in documents that aren’t saved on my hard drive, because we use iManage file manager (now called DeskSite, I believe) in our office. I miss this function almost daily.

Judy

Andrew, I accidently stumbled across a link to the Organizer in the ribbon just the other day, under the DEVELOPER Tab, on the DOCUMENT TEMPLATE window. I happily thought “Oh look, the Organizer!” and then promptly forgot where I’d seen it, but this query got me hunting it down.

Of course, the DEVELOPER tab isn’t shown by default [the setting is in the MICROSOFT OFFICE BUTTON (which I call the MOB), WORD OPTIONS, POPULAR], so they don’t make it easy, do they.

Also I’m in Word 2007, but I bet it’s the same in 2010. And as you suggested, I added the Organizer to my QAT back in the beginning, having not been able to find it in the ribbon.

Judy

Word doesn’t supply an easy way to “turn off” the application of a character style

I’d have sworn that just pressing Ctrl-Spacebar cleared any character style. Can be pressed after typing the last “character-styled” character desired (when typing a new string), or can be pressed for a selection of existing “character-styled” text. Also clears other hard character formatting of course.

Judy

One note of caution about character styles — if you are sharing your documents with anyone unfamiliar with such styles, they may well, unknowingly, continue to type in that area of the text with the style still attached, but they will likely hard format it to not be your purple polka dots anymore. And you end up with miles and miles of unintentional character style underlying hard formatting.

It’s not a big help, I know, but if you have a Word 2003 template (for instance, your old normal.dot) running as a Global Template (in 2007, at least — haven’t seen 2010 yet), some of the buttoned macros from that template, including their custom-created icons, will appear in a little space on the QAT, which can be accessed by adding the command “Custom Toolbars” to the QAT.

I wrote about it some in http://bro.ws/772844L, and put in a little picture of mine.

Judy

I’ve seen similar behavior when I’ve had a template attached and have accidently left “Automatically update document styles” checked on. Next time anybody opens the document everything has reverted to — I’m not even sure what it reverts to, but justification is changed, fonts are changed, and there’s a scream echoing in the hall (mine).

It doesn’t sound like you have a template attached, but if you want to check this out, look here:
–Developer tab*
–Templates grouping
–Document template button

* The Developer tab only shows if you’ve set it to do so:
—–Microsoft Office Button (the round button, upper left of screen)
—–Word Options button
—–“Popular” subgroup
—–The checkbox (“Show Developer tab in ribbon“) is the third selection under “Top options for working with Word”

Judy

Aha! Thanks, Retired!

Would it be feasible to replace the spaces in those numbers with commas (or another character) in white font? This worked for me in the tiny test I set up — the tabs moved to the periods. (Very interesting that the tab stop defaults to the space, isn’t it!)

Sounds like it’s going in as a watermark, tho in 2007 I don’t think that can be done accidentally. But didn’t inserting a watermark used to involve opening the header? Just a thought.

There’s also something about attaching a template’s “style gallery” to the document, isn’t there, to get keystrokes to work? I figured this out years ago when building some templates, but don’t remember how it works anymore, sorry.

Judy

“or the problem so deep”

Yes, I think that was it!

Well, I cheat a lot in Word, so I would probably just roll my eyes at it (yet again), and then, assuming you are talking about “columns” as a “Page Setup” feature rather than in a table, move my text into a 3-column table, with borders not showing. Or a 5-column table, with the 2nd and 4th columns being small, and acting as margins between the 1st, 3rd, and 5th column. No Page Setup columns at all — take that, Word!