Microsoft Office Tips

Last edited spots in Word

When you have a long document in Word and you’ve been jumping all around making changes you can quickly jump to the last three spots locations in your document where you typed or edited text.

Just hold down the shift key and press the F5 key - the cursor jumps to where you made your last change. It remembers 2 more places too. Give it a try.

In Word if you want to copy several items (paragraphs, list items, etc) you just highlight them by clicking and dragging or clicking at the start and holding downs shift while you click at the end. If the items are not contiguous you have been out of luck.

But in Word 2002 (XP) you can copy (move, delete, etc) items that are not all in order.

Mark the first item as you normally would then scroll to the next item you want to highlight and press the control key as you highlight it. Repeat for other items you want to highlight. Then cut, copy, move, whatever you want to do.

If you want certain colors in a document for easy screen viewing but want to print it in black and white, you can easily find and replace colors. Go to Edit and then Replace (or just press Cntrl-H) and click on the More button, then the Format button and choose Font.

Choose the color you want to change and click OK. Click the Replace With box, then Format and Font and choose the color. Then click Replace All.

Text color defaults to Automatic so to change red text to black, change it to Black rather than Automatic and you can easily change back when you are done by the same process.

No, it’s not an episode of NYPD Blue. We get lots of questions on this one. Sometimes you want to use a few asterisks (equal signs, hyphens, underscores) in a Word document to separate a section but a whole line appears after you type a few. Then you can’t delete the line no matter what you try - or can you (evil grin)?

If you notice this happening you can immediately press Control-Z to undo the line creation and turn it back into asterisks. If you are too late for that and the lines are already there, here’s the secret. They are not actually lines but Borders. So put the cursor above the line (border) and go to the Format menu, choose Borders and Shading , click None and OK. Voila!

To prevent this from happening automatically go to Tools and then Autocorrect and look for the Autoformat as you type Tab (different spots for different versions of Word) and uncheck the Border Lines.

If you are still using earlier (pre-XP) versions of Microsoft Word and Office you are missing out on a lot of cool stuff. Sure, 90% of the functions in Office programs will never be used by most of us but it's interesting to see what they add.

A) Earlier versions of Word let you build organization charts with a mini add-on application. These are good for business, clubs, family trees, etc. Word XP makes it a lot easier and gives you some neat extras.

Select INSERT, DIAGRAM from the top menus and you will get 6 different diagram options including the standard org chart. They make it a lot like PowerPoint where the image is drawn and "Click here to add text" messages go where you should add your own stuff.

B) You could always use Tools, Word Count to see how many words you had in your document (great for students, columnists or really intense A-type individuals). Being all 3 of those, I like to enable the Word Count toolbar by selecting View, Toolbars and checking Word Count. This gives me the number of Words, Characters (with and without spaces counted), lines, paragraphs and pages.

It has a Recount button so the count gets updated whenever you want. Just the thing for control freaks.

C) Maybe the best new feature is the enhanced Search from within Word.

Choose Files, Search and a task pane opens up with easy to follow prompts to help you find what you want. Type in some text, click on where you want it to search, what kind of files and more advanced options if you want.