When I paste material from another part of the document or a different document, Word sometimes carries through the formatting and sometimes doesn't.
Two separate things are happening here.
First, if the text that you paste includes a paragraph mark, it brings its style along with it. So, normally, when you paste one or more complete paragraphs, you get the styles that were applied to those paragraphs. You can override this behavior by choosing Edit Paste Special, selecting the "Unformatted text option, and clicking the OK button. This makes the paragraph you paste take on the style of the paragraph into which you paste it, which is what happens if you paste material that doesn't include a paragraph mark.
Second, the smart-cut-and-paste feature in Word 2003 and Word XP tries by default to apply the appropriate style when you paste a paragraph of text. Choose Tools Options, click the Edit tab, check the "Smart cut and paste box if it's unchecked, and click the Settings button to display the Settings dialog box. Uncheck the "Smart style behavior" box if you want to handle the styles manually. Uncheck the "Merge pasted lists with surrounding lists" box if you want to ensure that Word doesn't change the style of list items that you paste within another list.
If you leave these boxes checked, you can quickly change the formatting of text you've pasted in Word 2003 or Word XP by clicking the Paste Options Smart Tag and choosing the appropriate option from the pop-up menu (see Figure 4-2).
Here's a problem I run into all the time when I'm in either Word 2003 or Word 2004 for the Mac. Let's say I'm surfing the Web and find something really interesting. I select the text I want, copy it, open a Word document, and paste it in. Regardless of whether I use Paste Special or just plain Paste, the formatting is way off on every lineI get all sorts of weird tabs and spaces. This also happens with text from PDF files, Notepad, Text-Edit, and occasionall-y older versions of Word. Why can't I just paste in the text without any formatting?
Choosing Edit Paste Special and selecting the "Unformatted text option should give you plain text. If not, on Windows you can try bouncing the text through Notepad first: paste it into Notepad, copy it again, and then paste it into Word. That should get rid of any formatting nasties.
If the text still contains extra spaces and tabs, they're probably included in the PDF or web page for layout purposes. To remove them, either Alt-drag to select the column of unnecessary tabs or spaces (see "Hack Out Columns of Tabs or Spaces" in Chapter 3) or replace whitespace ( ^w ; see "Find Any Character, Digit, or Letter" in Chapter 3) with a single space or tab, depending on the layout.
After some intensive work in the Font dialog box, I've finally got this word formatted exactly right. Now I need to apply the same formatting to five other words in the document. Groan!
Swallow that groan. You can fix this annoyance easily in any of three ways:
Select the word you've formatted, double-click the Format Painter button on the Standard toolbar (it's the button with the paintbrush icon), and then drag over each of the words you want to format, in turn . Press Escape (or click the Format Painter button again) when you've finished.
Copy the formatted word, paste it in over the first of the other words, select the pasted word, and retype the required word. Repeat as necessary. This method isn't as good as using the Format Painter button, but it's sometimes useful.
Create a character style from the formatted word. Select the word, click in the Style listbox at the top of the Style drop-down list, and type the name for the new style. You can then apply the style to selected text from the Style drop-down list.
HOW WORD'S FORMATTING WORKSWord offers enough formatting options to stop a Humvee in its tracksand more than enough to waste plenty of your time. Here's what you need to know:
Here's the best way to apply formatting:
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It's taking me hours to format all these paragraphs by hand.
You need to use styles. See "Styles," later in this chapter, for details on how to save yourself many hours of effort.
In every document my boss types, he formats THE HEADINGS IN ALL UPPERCASE instead of using a heading style. The Caps Lock key must be his best friend. I need to change all the headings to regular capitalization and small caps. I almost wish he were dictating instead.
Sorry, there's no one-click fix for this one. In Word 2003 or Word XP, select the first offending heading, then hold down Ctrl as you select each of the other headings in turn. With all of them selected, choose Format Change Case to display the Change Case dialog box (see Figure 4-3). Choose the Title Case option, and click the OK button. Then press Ctrl+Shift+K to apply small caps. (Alternatively, choose Format Font, check the "Small caps box, and then click the OK button.) Word 2000 sadly doesn't support multiple selections, so you'll need to treat the headings one at a time.
One of my "traditional" colleagues just loves to put four spaces at the beginning of each paragraph. I think it might be a typewriter thing. Anyway, I need to replace those spaces with a first-line indent, but I can't figure out how to do so, as there are other instances of four or more spaces in the document.
This sounds like a double-replace job. Replace ^p and four spaces with ^p and a distinctive stringfor example, ^pfirstlineindent . Then replace firstlineindent (or whatever) with nothing but the paragraph formatting you need: delete the contents of the "Replace with box," choose Paragraph in the Format drop-down list, specify the indentation level, click OK, and click Replace All. Alternatively, once you've deleted the whitespace (by replacing ^p and four spaces with ^p ), you can use a style to apply a first-line indent to all of the paragraphs. See the "Styles" section later in this chapter for more on using styles in Word.
Help! I'm a (maybe) recovering WordPerfect user , and I'm finding it hard to see which formatting is applied to a word. Why is there no Reveal Codes option?
Becausein theoryyou don't need Reveal Codes in Word. There are other ways of checking the formatting applied to an item:
To check font formatting, choose Format Font and check the settings in the Font dialog box (or look at the status of the controls on the Formatting toolbar).
To check paragraph formatting, choose Format Paragraph and check the settings in the Paragraph dialog box. (Again, you can look at some of the buttons on the Formatting toolbar for settings such as alignment.)
To check tab formatting, look at the ruler or choose Format Tabs and check the settings in the Tabs dialog box.
To check the style, display the Style area at the left of the document window (choose Tools Options, click the View tab, and set a suitable widthsay, 1in the "Style area width" box). The Style area is available only in Normal view and Outline view.
To check the language, choose Tools Language Set Language and look at the setting in the Language dialog box.
To check the page setup, choose File Page Setup and look at the settings in the Page Setup dialog box.
In other words, the settings are all over the place, and you need to know where to turn to learn particular pieces of formatting information.
Word 2000, in response to 10 or so years of complaints (from Word users as well as WordPerfect users), introduced another option for getting formatting information: the "What's This?" feature. You choose Help Whats This? or press Shift+F1, the mouse pointer displays an arrow with a question mark, and you click a paragraph to display details of its formatting (see Figure 4-4). Click further paragraphs as necessary, and then press Escape to restore the pointer to its normal self. This is better than the previous options, but not much.
Word 2003 and Word XP improve matters a little with the Reveal Formatting task pane (see Figure 4-5), which you display by choosing Format Reveal Formatting. This task pane provides a breakdown of the font, paragraph, and section formatting, plus any other relevant formattingfor example, table formatting if the selection is within a table. You can click one of the links to reach the relevant dialog box for more details.
If Word's Reveal Formatting task pane doesn't show you enough detail on which formatting is applied to which object, try CrossEyes ($49.99), by Levit and James (http://www.levitjame-s.com/crosseyes/CrossEyes.html). CrossEyes (see Figure 4-6) provides a pane at the bottom of the document that shows you all the details of the formatting.
My WordPerfect document got horribly mangled when I opened it in Word.
You need to adjust the conversion parameters for WordPerfect. Choose Tools Options, click the Compatibility tab (see Figure 4-7), and select the appropriate version of WordPerfect in the "Recommended options for drop-down listfor example, "WordPerfect 6.x for Windows." The "Recommended options for" setting makes Word check the appropriate boxes in the Options list.
Try opening the WordPerfect document again with those settings in place. If you can identify particular problems, display the Options dialog box again and check or uncheck the appropriate boxes in the Options list manually. This will take some experimentation and may be worth doing only if you have a handful or more of WordPerfect documents that you need to convert. Otherwise, it may be easier simply to fix any mangled formatting.
WHY WORD AND WORDPERFECT DISAGREE ON FORMATTINGWord and most versions of WordPerfect are destined to disagree on formatting matters because they use different means of marking the formatting. WordPerfect considers a document to be a stream of characters flowing from the start of the document to the end of the document, and it embeds formatting codes at the appropriate places in that stream. For example, if a word in a WordPerfect document should be bold, there's a bold-on code, the text of the word, and then the bold-off code, all within the same text stream. Word looks at formatting differently. In Word, each document is built of section, paragraph, and character units. The text of a Word document is saved more or less as plain text, with the formatting kept separate at the bottom of the file in a property table stored in the default section break. (If a document is divided up into sections, the property table for each section is stored in the section break that marks the end of the section.) The location of the formatting is stored using pointers to the appropriate locations in the text. This is why, if a Word document becomes corrupted (or simply too complex, as happens with master documents), the formatting can shift dramatically, or disappear altogether. Property tables are a more efficient way of implementing formatting, but you can't simply look at the document stream and see which code is placed where. Word and WordPerfect include converters that do a good job of translating each method of formatting into the other method, but they may be unable to handle very complex formatting. |
I spent a while formatting our family newsletter so that it looked just perfect. But when our friends opened it on their computers, the fonts were all wrong: bland fonts were substituted for the ones I used. Worse , the font changes had messed up the layout.
You've probably figured out what's wrong: your friends' computers don't have the fonts you used, so Word substituted other fonts. When the substitutes take up different amounts of space, the layout can change. The combined effects can be distressing.
There are two things you can do about this. Firstyes, you've guessed ityou can simply stick to the fonts that everybody has, such as Arial, Times New Roman, and Tahoma. Documents that use only those fonts can look pretty bland, though. The second (and probably preferable) option is to embed the fonts you use in the document so that they'll be there for your friends to see. Here's how:
Choose Tools Options and click the Save tab.
Embedding the complete character sets bulks up the file size and is necessary only if you want your friends to be able to edit your document. It's usually best to also check the "Embed characters in use only" box to keep the bloating down a bit. If you use Word 2003 or Word XP, you may also want to check the "Do not embed common system fonts" box; your friends should have these fonts on their PCs.
Click the OK button.
Save the document. Check the file size before sending it via email; if you've used a lot of fonts and embedded the full character sets, it could be pretty hefty.
I've installed a load of fonts, but Word's Font drop-down list and Font dialog box offer me only Device Font in three different sizes: 10cpi, 12cpi, and 17cpi. I figured out that "cpi" stands for "characters per inch," but that doesn't really help me. How can I introduce Word to my fonts?
Word has somehow been set to print with a Generic/Text Only printer. You'll get similar effects (see Figure 4-8) if you've installed a very limited printer, such as a dot-matrix printer.
Choose File Print, click the Name drop-down list in the Print dialog box, select another printer, and click the Close button. Back in the document, check the Font drop-down list or the Font dialog box; your fonts should have flocked back, ready for use.
If your fonts still don't show up, make sure they're in your Fonts folder. The easiest way to get there is to choose Start Control Panel Appearance and Themes Fonts. If your fonts are missing, youll need to reinstall them.
I applied bullets to two paragraphs I selectedbut Word applied the bullets to every paragraph in the document.
First, click the Undo button or press Ctrl+Z to remove the bullets. Then check out these two possibilities:
Your paragraphs aren't really paragraphs, but rather continued paragraphs with "soft returns" (Shift+Enter) between them. To check, click the Show/Hide button on the Standard toolbar to show formatting marks, and see if the paragraphs end with a mark rather than a mark. If so, choose Edit Replace, enter ^l in the "Find what box and ^p in the "Replace with" box, and then click the Replace All button.
Word has decided automatically to update the styleand either it's the style that you've applied to all the paragraphs in the document, or it's the style on which all the styles you've used are based (in a default document, heading styles and some other styles are based on the Normal style). If the paragraphs aren't soft returns, this is probably what's wrong. In Word 2003 or Word XP, choose Format Style, click the paragraphs style in the Styles and Formatting task pane, click the drop-down arrow, and choose Modify to display the Modify Style dialog box. Uncheck the "Automatically update" box and click the OK button. In Word 2000, choose Format Style to display the Style dialog box, click the style name in the Styles list, and click the Modify button. In the Modify Style dialog box, uncheck the "Automatically update box, click the OK button, and then click the Apply button in the Style dialog box.
Word keeps changing the language, even if I tell it to ignore special characters. I set it to English Australia, and it changes to English US, English UK, or, worse, French!
Turn off automatic language detection: choose Tools Language Set Language, then uncheck the "Detect language automatically box in the Language dialog box.
To adjust the languages that Word tries to detect automatically as you work, open the Microsoft Office Language Settings application (for example, for Office 2003, choose Start All Programs Microsoft Office Microsoft Office Tools Microsoft Office 2003 Language Settings) and use the options on the Enabled Languages tab. Youll need to restart all the Office applications before your changes take effect.