What s Covered in This Book?

What's Covered in This Book?

Here's a taste of what the 10 chapters in this book have to offer you:

Chapter 1, Installation, Repair, and Configuration

Prevent Word from demanding the installation CD, or install multiple versions of Word on the same PC. Deal with crashes and slow running. Sort out your toolbars and menus , and create a Work menu for frequently used documents. Dispose of the Office Assistant, either temporarily or forever.

Chapter 2, Creating and Saving Documents

Exploit the power of templates to minimize the annoyances of creating and saving documents at home or at work. Use Microsoft Office Application Recovery to mitigate a crash, and get the AutoRecover feature under control. Learn why master documents tend to corruptand how to recover as much as possible when your master document does corrupt.

Chapter 3, Text Entry and Editing

Deal with common annoyances in Word's views; Outline view is usually the prime offender, but the other views get in on the act. Bring "Smart Cut and Paste" under control, turn off "Click and Type," and assert your dominance over AutoCorrect and AutoText. Escape unwanted copyright symbols, harness the power of Find and Replace to change your documents automatically, hack out columns of tabs or spaces, and keep the same text updated in different parts of the same document.

Chapter 4, Formatting and Layout

Get the mysterious "Normal template" under control and change its settings. Tame direct formatting and get a grip on styles. Hammer out annoyances with list numbering, graphics, hyperlinks , and tabs. Create different headers on different pages, and divide a printed page into multiple separate pages.

Chapter 5, Forms, Revising, Proofing, and Finalizing

Prevent users from accessing certain parts of a documentand force them to fill in the rest with suitable data. Deflate comment balloons, turn off revision marks for formatting, and view the revision marks for only some reviewers. Check spelling, share custom dictionaries with your colleagues, create an exclusion dictionary of words you mustn't use, and upgrade the Thesaurus.

Chapter 6, Printing, Faxing, and Scanning

Does Word prompt you to save a document you've printed but haven't changed? Or does Word 2003 simply crash when you try to print? Learn to deal with printing annoyances, add faxing capabilities to Word, and scan hardcopy text and graphics into your documents.

Chapter 7, Tables, Columns, and Text Boxes

Should you draw tables or simply insert them? Learn how to make a table appear at the start of a pageand how to get a table away from the start of a document when it's stuck there. Force Word 2003 to let you use the Cell Height and Width dialog box, and fix header rows so that they won't walk from one page to another. Mix different numbers of columns in the same document, and create a series of linked text boxes throughout a document.

Chapter 8, Automate Away Annoyances with Macros

The annoyances discussed in other chapters have fixes or workarounds in the Word user interfacebut for annoyances that don't, macros written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) offer a solution. Learn to record macros, edit them, and write them from scratch, with examples of specific VBA-quashable annoyances and generic approaches that you can turn on your own annoyances.

Chapter 9, OLE, Mail Merge, and Office Applications

Annoying as Word can be on its own, it can be even worse in combination with the other Office applications. Learn how to minimize annoyances with object linking and embedding (OLE); discover how to use mail merge effectively and how to convince Word you've stopped using mail merge; and see how to outwit key annoyances when using Word in conjunction with Excel, PowerPoint, and Access.

Chapter 10, Mac Word Annoyances

Deal with crashes and performance annoyances on the Mac; find out why you should panic when Word incessantly repaginates a document; and learn how to outfox Word's "Unable to save" message, restore page setup to your preferred size , and turn off auto-capitalization in tables.

That was just a taste of the contents. Though broken up into categories to make this look like a book, the annoyances are all over the map. Browse the table of contents, investigate the index, or simply dip into the book at random and see which annoyance you find.