MS Word can be a double edged sword. Sometimes it makes things easy for you, and sometimes, well—it doesn’t. This article presents four short tips to help you conquer this application.
-Using F4 to repeat – pressing F4 will repeat the last action you performed. However this tip is not so much about pressing F4, but rather identifying when this feature will save you tonnes of time. For example, we recently edited a massive Word document with hundreds of tables, each of which required multiple formatting changes. When you’re in the thick of things it’s easy to take the brute force, manual approach. However it soon dawned on us that a quicker method was to do multiple passes over the tables, where in each pass we performed one formatting change using F4 to repeat the change on each table. In the next pass when then did a different formatting change, again using F4 to quickly repeat the change for each table. The take away here is to stop and think “how can I do this faster”. Chances are you will find a way.
-In a recent article we touched on change tracking in Word. As handy as this feature is, it can be easy to lose your place as you toggle the markup visibility on and off. In fact in some cases, Word will scroll to a different page when making this toggle, causing you to completely lose track of where you were. The solution is to highlight the current word or paragraph you are working on in your document before toggling the markup visibility. Then when you do the toggle, your text will remain highlighted and you will know exactly where you were prior to the toggle. If Word has scrolled to another page, a quick scroll up or down should be enough to quickly find your highlighted text and get on with your edit.
-Positioning images that refuse to go where you want them is best addressed by setting their text wrapping to “In Front”. In most cases you can then position them with the mouse. However in some cases we’ve found that the image will still not go where we want it to. The solution to this is to go into Text Wrapping->More Layout Options->Picture Position Tab, and then manually set the absolution position (note: we disagree with the word “absolute”, as it is really relative to whatever page region option is selected).
-Removing stubborn page breaks – we’ve had many a page break that we simply could not delete. This often occurs when a page break is added after a table. The solution is to first show all hidden characters, then highlight the stubborn page break character, go to the paragraph formatting dialog and deselect “Page break before”. You should now be able to delete the page break character.