Word Tip Wednesday: Clipboard

Today's topic is pretty basic and I think most of us have had some experience with it. But I also think that most of us aren't aware of all the features of the Clipboard, so I thought I'd do a quick post about it. Well, hopefully it'll be quick. :)

The Clipboard menu is under the Home tab* (Figure 1).

Figure 1

The basics (or as I like to call them--The Essentials) are all there--Cut (Ctrl+x), Copy (Ctrl+c), Paste (Ctrl+v).

Format Painter is pretty cool too. Just highlight the text with the formatting you want to duplicate and click Format Painter . Your mouse cursor will turn into a tiny paintbrush. Use it to paint (select) the text you want to format and you're done. Simple, right?

You can view everything you have on your Clipboard (everything you've cut or copied) by clicking the tiny arrow in the bottom right corner of the Clipboard menu (Figure 2).

Figure 2

That will bring up this (Figure 3) on the left side of your screen.

Figure 3

This not only allows you to see everything you have on your Clipboard, but you can also select text you copied several copies back (by clicking on the arrow next to the text (Figure 3)) and paste it without copying it again. Or with this menu, you can delete text you no longer need from the Clipboard to free up space.

The Options menu at the bottom (Figure 3) allows you to change the way your Clipboard appears within Word.

Anyone else out there who can't live without these features? Anything to add? If you have any questions or need me to clarify anything, please let me know in the comments. :)

More Word tips posts here.

*Word 2007

Word Tip Wednesday: Macros

Update 6/7/13: There is an error in this tutorial regarding the highlight feature. There are notes in the comments on the correct way to do it. I will be updating the post soon. Thanks goes to Serena Yung for pointing out that it wasn't working. :)

Today’s topic will be easier if you’re familiar with  Find and Replace, since I will be using those as part of my example.

Macros might seem a little scary, but once you understand what they are and how they work, I think you’ll find they’re actually quite easy to use and very useful, especially during revisions. Basically, it’s a recorded set of steps that can be accessed by a shortcut key, a button on the toolbar, or by selecting from a list.

With this feature, I recommend reading through all the instructions before trying any of it. It will probably be less confusing that way.

The macro options are under the Developer tab.* By default, this tab is turned off in MS Word 2007, so first, you’ll need to turn it on. To do this, click the Office button in the top left corner (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Select Word Options at the bottom of the menu (Figure 2).

Figure 2

In this menu (Figure 3), select Popular in the left column and check the box next to Show Developer tab in the Ribbon. Then click OK.

Figure 3

You should now have the Developer tab in your Ribbon (Figure 4).

Figure 4

First, click the Record Macro button (Figure 5).

Figure 5

This menu will pop up (Figure 6). Enter a name in the Macro name: box. You can also add a description in the bottom box if you want.

Under Store macro in: you can choose to have it apply to all documents or just the one you are currently working with.



Figure 6

Under Assign macro to (Figure 6), you can choose to access the macro through a Button (Option 1) on your Quick Access toolbar or through a Keyboard shortcut (Option 2). If you don’t select one of these options and just click OK from this menu, it will immediately begin recording your macro. In this case, after you have recorded your macro, you will have to go to the Macros button (Figure 7) under the Developer tab and select it from a list (Figure 8) and click Run every time you want to use it (Option 3).

Figure 7

Figure 8

Note: This window (Figure 8) is also where you go to Edit your macros, but editing macros requires editing code, so unless you’re familiar with code, I wouldn’t attempt this. If there is problem with one of your macros, the easiest thing will probably be to Delete the macro and record it again.

Option 1: In the Record Macro window (Figure 6), choose Button under Assign macro to, it will go to this screen (Figure 9). Select the macro from the list in the left column, click Add>> and it will add it to the right column, which lists all the buttons in your Quick Access menu (this shows to the right of your Office button (Figure 1)). You can change the icon for the macro by selecting the macro and clicking Modify. Then click OK to begin recording your macro.

Figure 9

Option 2: In the Record Macro window (Figure 6), choose Keyboard under Assign macro to (Figure 6), and it will go to this screen (Figure 10). In the Press new shortcut key: box, press the keys you want to assign to the macro (pressing the Alt key at the same time as another key will enter “Alt+whatever key you pushed” and the same works for the Ctrl key). It will show you if that shortcut is already assigned to something else next to Currently assigned to:. Once you’ve chosen your shortcut, click Assign to begin recording your macro.

Figure 10

Now that you’ve clicked OK or Assign, you are in record mode, and it will continue to record until you click Stop Recording.

You can record anything with a macro. For today’s tip, we’re going to create a button to highlight overused words. So, using the Find feature, follow the steps to highlight any overused word(s) (Figure 11). See this post for more detailed instructions.

Figure 11

1. Go to Find under the Home tab.
2. Type in the word you want highlighted, check Find whole words only (Figure 11) and select Highlight All.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 for any other words you overuse frequently.
4. Click Cancel or the X to close the window.

At this point, all instances of overused words should be highlighted in your document. Now go back to the Developer tab and click Stop Recording (Figure 12). Note: It will continue to record until you click Stop Recording so it’s very important not to miss this step.

Figure 12

Quick review of the steps:

1. Click Record Macro under the Developer tab.
2. Select your preferred method to access the macro (button, keyboard shortcut, or list) and complete the steps to set up that method.
3. Complete the steps for the function you would like to record—highlight words, format changes, font changes, etc. Anything that Word can do, you can record in a macro.
4. Click Stop Recording.

Now, if you chose the Button (Option 1) as you were setting it up, all you have to do to highlight all your frequently overused words in future documents is click on the button in your Quick Access menu (Figure 13). It might look different, depending on which icon you chose.

Figure 13

If you chose Keyboard (Option 2) as you were setting it up, then when you want to run the macro, just type in the keystrokes you selected. In this case, I chose Alt+Z.

Now you’re ready to set up macros for anything you do frequently in Word.

Anyone using this already? Anything you love to use it for?

More Word tips posts here. 

*Word 2007

Word Tip Wednesday: Find and Replace

This is another one of the basics, but I've found it very helpful during revisions. Especially for highlighting all of my "favorite" words so I can get rid of them. :)

If you're curious about which words you might be overusing, wordle.net and wordcounter.com are both good resources for this.

The Find and Replace buttons are on the far right under the Home tab.*

Clicking Find brings up this window. You can get to Replace by clicking the Replace button under the Home tab or if you're already in Find and Replace, you can just select the Replace tab in this window.

To get a word count for a specific word, type the word you're looking for in the "Find what:" box and select "Main Document" under the Find in menu. This will also allow you to visit each instance of the word individually by clicking Find Next repeatedly until you've gone through the whole document.

Personally, I prefer to select "Highlight All" from the Reading Highlight menu. This highlights all the instances of the word, including those in the middle of another word (I'll show you how to eliminate this in just a minute). Doing it this way allows you to highlight multiple words (repeat above steps for each word) and it also allows you to close the Find and Replace window and just go through your document as you normally would.

When you're done, select "Clear Highlighting" from the Reading Highlight menu to remove all the highlighting from the document. You shouldn't have to do each word individually.

Most of the time, you probably won't want it to include parts of words as it did above. To eliminate this issue, click on the More >> button in the bottom left corner of the Find and Replace window to give yourself more search options. The More >> button becomes the << Less button when it is selected and vice versa.

All the options are pretty much what they sound like they are.

• Match case will find uppercase or lowercase versions of the word according to how you entered it in the "Find what:" box.
• Find whole words only eliminates the issue of it finding parts of words.
• Use wildcards allows you to type only part of the word with special characters to broaden your search. For example, you can use "?" for any missing letters. "j??t" will find all four letter words starting with "j" and ending in "t". You can also add a * to the word, like "j*t" and it will find words beginning with "j" and ending in "t" with no limit on the number of letters in between. With the * it also finds sentences or parts of sentences beginning with "j" and ending with "t", so this may be too broad for most searches. There are other options under the Special button at the bottom of the Find and Replace window. 
• Sounds like will find words that are spelled similarly or have the same sound. I don't use this one much, so I'm not familiar with its limitations.
• Find all word forms will find different forms of a word. So if you search for "their" it will find "their", "them", "they", etc. Again, not one I use much, so I'm not familiar with its limitations.
• Match prefix will find all words with your search word at the beginning of the word. So if you search for "for" it will find "for", "forever", "forget", etc.
• Match suffix is the same as "Match prefix", it just finds your search word at the ends of words throughout your document.
• Ignore punctuation characters I've yet to find a use for this one, so if anyone has any input, please share.
• Ignore white-space charaters will let you search across words, so if your did a search for "mental" it would find "moment all". Make sense?

The Format button at the bottom has options for finding specifically formatted text.

The Special button at the bottom has options for finding things that don't have visible characters, like tabs (^t), paragraph marks (^p), etc. What comes up under this button is different if the Use wildcards box is selected. I don't think I've ever used these with the Find feature, but I use them all the time with Replace.

The Replace menu is a little different from the Find menu. I use this mostly for formatting changes and name change.

It's a pretty simple process. Just type the word (or characters) you want to replace in the "Find what:" box and the new word (or characters) in the "Replace with:" box. Then select Replace to replace the words one at a time or you can just select Replace All and it will replace all instances of the word and give you count of how many words were replaced.

Make sure you select Find whole words only or you'll end up with some made up looking words in your manuscript. Like, if you're replacing the name Jack with Bob, you may get things like Bob-o-lantern and carBobing. :)

This feature is so helpful if you need to do a quick formatting change to make your manuscript more blog or email friendly. First do a select all (ctrl+a) to highlight all the text or highlight the text you want to change. Then select the Paragraph menu under the Page Layout tab and change your Line spacing to single.

Then fill out the Replace menu to match this and click Replace All.

If you use a formatted indent instead of a tab at the beginning of your paragraphs, you'll need to change the Left indentation to 0" under the Paragraph menu (see above). In this case your Replace menu should look like this:

This should give you a single spaced document with a space between each paragraph and no indentations, which is the most reader friendly for the web.

You may find that Blogger likes to add extra spaces between paragraphs with this formatting. If this is the case, try this instead. Set your spacing after your paragraphs to 12pt in the Paragraph menu.

And your Replace menu:

Remember that whether you use the ^t character or not will depend on your indentation formatting, so remove that from the "Find what:" box if necessary.

So hopefully that's not too confusing. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.

Any of you using this already? Any suggestions for using this feature?

More Word tips posts here. 

*MS Word 2007

And there are still a few days to enter my contest for a custom contact button!

Word Tip Wednesday: Compare and Combine

Before we get started, there's a great post over on the LiyanaLand blog building off my last Word Tip Wednesday post on styles and document map. She's got step-by-step instructions on setting up a template for your manuscripts. It's a great post and very informative. Click here to check it out. :)

Okay, today we are talking about the Compare and Combine features. Great for when you want to compare a new version of your manuscript to an old one and for when you have several crits on the same manuscript and you don't want to mess with keeping track of multiple documents as you're doing revisions.

It's under the Review tab.*

Click the Compare button and select Compare or Combine in the menu that pops up. The two are very similar. The only difference that I've been able to find is in how the Track Changes appear within the merged document.

Compare (legal blackline) merges two versions of a document and notes any changes that have been made. This option will force you to accept any Track Changes and it will note you as the author of those changes--great for comparing old and new versions of your manuscript. But if you're trying to compare critique notes from other people and you want to keep track of who the author is for any track changes, you'll want to select the Combine option, which basically does the same thing without affecting track changes. And if your settings are set up correctly, each author will show up as a different color.

So, to put it simply, Compare works best if you are the author of all the changes in the documents you are comparing. Combine is the better choice if there are multiple authors of changes and comments.

I'll show you how to do it using the Combine menu, but the menus for either option are pretty much identical.

Select the pull down arrow under "Original document" and "Revised document" one at a time. You should have a list under each with your most recent documents and an option to Browse.

Once you have selected your documents, you can adjust the "Comparison Settings" according to what you want to compare. I just leave them all checked and keep the default settings in the "Show changes" section at the bottom. You can play around with them to see what you prefer. Note: Selecting to have it show changes in the original or revised document will change the selected document.

After you select OK, this may pop up. Just select the document you want to use for the formatting and select "Continue with Merge".

And your document should show up looking something like this (click to enlarge):

Without the blurring and the big cut down the middle, of course. :) You can open the reviewing pane (on the left) by clicking the Reviewing Pane button under the review menu. The pull down menu gives you the option to have the pane appear vertical (left side of screen) or horizontal (bottom of screen).

If the comments and changes are all showing up as the same color regardless of author, go into your Track Changes settings (steps to get there are here) and change the color selections in the "Markup" and "Formatting" sections to match this:

And that should fix it. :)

So, who's using this already? Anything you want to add? Any questions? Was I unclear or confusing? Let me know in the comments and I'll try to clarify.

More Word tips posts here. 

*Microsoft Word 2007

Word Tip Wednesday: Styles and Document Map

I figured out this cool tip from this post by MG Higgins. Thanks, MG!

Today's tool is a little more complicated to set up, but once it's set up, it'll save a lot of time on formatting and your manuscript will be so organized. Hopefully, I can explain it clearly.  :)

First, you'll want to make sure you've put in a Page Break at the end of each chapter. It's under the Insert tab.* Just place your cursor after the last punctuation at the end of your chapter and click Page Break.

This will insert a clean break between chapters that won't be changed if you add or remove text from the document. Well, unless you delete the Page Break, and in that case, you'll have to insert a new one.

Update: You can also insert a page break by typing CTRL+RETURN/ENTER. Thanks, Stina Lindenblatt, for sharing! :)

So, now that that's in place you can create a new style for your chapter heading. It's under the Home tab.

Select your chapter heading within the document and click on the arrow in the bottom corner of the Styles box.

This window will pop up. Select the button in the bottom left hand corner.

This window will pop up so you can create a new style for your chapter headings.

These are the settings I use, but you can adjust them according to your own preferences. The only thing I recommend is that you make sure the "New documents based on this template" circle is selected. That way you don't have to do this every time you start a new document. :)

My settings center the chapter title in bold about a third of the way down the page and leave a couple of lines between the chapter title and the first paragraph of the chapter. It's also set to automatically insert a page break before the chapter title so you can skip the page break step we discussed earlier if you set your Chapter Headings style to do it.

Most of the changes can be made in this window, but not all. To change the spacing before and after your chapter title, click the Format button in the bottom left hand corner of the Create New Style window and select Paragraph. This window will pop up.

Change your spacing by adjusting the numbers under spacing. These are the numbers I use, but you can play around with until it looks right to you.

Note: It is important that your Outline Level is set to Level 1. This affects how it appears in Document Map--we'll get to this in just a minute.

Click on the Line and Page Breaks tab and select "Page break before" to have it automatically insert a page break before your chapter title.

Note: Your "Widow/Orphan control" button is probably selected automatically. Whether or not you keep this on is a personal preference. This is what makes your text hop to the next page if there's only one or two lines from that paragraph on the page. I guess this is to keep the paragraphs all together with their families (no widows or orphans). ;) It annoys me, so I always turn it off.

Once you've set all your settings according to your preferences, click OK on all the boxes to close them.

Now, all you have to do to format your chapter headings throughout your document is select each one individually and click on the Chapter Headings button that should now appear in the Styles box under the Home tab.

If you ever need to modify the settings, simply click the arrow in the bottom right hand corner of the Styles box to bring up the styles menu. Click the pull down arrow next to Chapter Headings, select Modify and you can make any adjustments there just as you did when you created the style.

You can also adjust your Normal settings (the default formatting settings for a new document) by following the same steps, except instead of selecting the arrow next to Chapter Headings, you would select the arrow next to Normal.

Okay, now that all your chapter titles are formatted, go to your View menu and select Document Map.

That will bring up this on the left side of your screen.

Obviously, it will list your chapter titles, not mine, but it works as a table of contents to allow you to go to any chapter you need to without scrolling through the whole document. Pretty cool, huh?

And if you click on the pull down arrow next to Document Map, you can select Thumbnails to see thumbnails of all your pages. I like that I can quickly check the appearance of all the formatting this way and check for rogue blank pages. And I think it looks really cool, because it makes it look like a real book. :)

Wow. That was way longer than I thought it would be, but hopefully it helps some of you. If you have any questions or my explanations confused you more than helped you, please let me know in the comments and I'll try to be clearer. :)

So, how many of you are already using these features? Anybody use these features for anything else? Anything you want to add?

More Word tips posts here. 

*Microsoft Word 2007

Word Tip Wednesday: Comments

If you missed last week's post on Track Changes, you can check it out here. :)

Commenting is another of my favorites features in Word. Like Track Changes, the day I discovered this feature, the world got a little brighter. ;)

It's under the Review tab.*

And it's very simple to use. Just highlight the text you want to comment on and click on the New Comment button. A comment bubble will pop up on the right side of the screen, like this:

Then you just type your comment in the bubble. This makes your comments much more visible and since you're not typing in line, you don't have to worry about changing the text color. Any steps that can be eliminated equal time saved.

Comments can be deleted by selecting the comment you want to delete and either clicking on the Delete button next to the New Comment button or by right clicking the comment and selecting Delete Comment.

You can show and hide all of your Track Changes and Comments by clicking on the arrow next to Final Showing Markup and selecting one of the options.

Or by clicking on the arrow next to Show Markup and checking or unchecking the items you want to show or hide.

Keep in mind that until you go through and accept or reject each Track Change and delete all your comments, they will show up in the document. So make sure you take care of this before sending your work out to an agent or anyone you don't want to see them.

Rejecting and accepting Track Changes can be done by right clicking the change and selecting reject or accept. This is a pretty tedious process, and as far as I know, it's the only way to eliminate all of them. But it's well worth it to make sure your prospective agent recieves a nice, clean document from you. If anyone knows a faster way to do this, please let us know in the comments. :)

How many of you are already using this? Anybody have anything to add?

More Word tips posts here. 

*Microsoft Word 2007