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Ever been digging around that junk drawer, the
one everyone has, and come across something
really cool…something you'd either forgotten about
or didn't know you had? Well, I enjoy digging
around my computer looking for buried features. In this
article, I share some of my favorite treasures, which
are the product of many years of digging.
Style Area
If you use Microsoft Word, you've probably had
a few wrestling matches with styles. You're editing
a document and suddenly things don't look right. Rather than clicking various paragraphs to see
their style names in the Formatting Toolbar's style
window, you can save time by working in Normal
view and opening up the Style Area, which displays all
the paragraph styles you've applied.
Open a Word document and choose View|Normal. (This
view uses fewer resources than Page View, but
doesn't display the document exactly as it will
print.) Choose Tools|Options|View and type a
number in the Style area width box. Now as you
work with your documents in Normal view, you see your styles on the left. Even better, when you
double-click a style name, Word opens the Style dialog
box, so you can quickly modify the style.
Vertical Selecting
Have you ever wished you could select a tabbed
column of numbers or a vertical chunk of text in
Word? Maybe you thought you had to select each item
separately because you couldn't highlight just one
column without highighting other areas. What a pain!
Guess what? You can select text vertically in Word!
Just click at the beginning of your selection and
hold down the Alt key while you drag your mouse
across and down to select a vertical chunk of text.
Pretty cool, huh?
Split Window
The other day I was working on a big document
that contained a large table. I needed to make
some modifications to various cells near the end of
the page. But because there were so many columns and
I couldn't see the column heading, I kept
forgetting which column I was in. I needed to see both the
top and the bottom of the page. Luckily, I knew a secret!
Word lets you split your document window so you can view two portions of the same document at
the same time. A little button allows you to access
the Split Bar. It's that tiny bar just above the top of
the right scroll bar.
Double-click it and a bar
appears across your document window that splits the
screen. You can move the bar around to adjust your top
and bottom window views. Now you can easily click in the top window
to scroll up and display the table headings and
also click in the lower windows to scroll down to view the end of the
table so you can add more data to the appropriate columns. Just double-click
the Split Bar to make it disappear and return your
document to just one window.
Note that you can also split the window by choosing Windows|Split. You turn it off by
choosing Windows|RemoveSplit (this option appears on
the menu once Split is activated).
What's This?
All Microsoft Office applications have a cool
little feature that helps you get details about the items
on your screen. Most people know that if you see a
button that you don't understand, you can hold
your mouse over the button to see a little yellow tip
that tells you the button name. And you can press the
F1 key to get more information about the button. But
if you're in a hurry and just want a little quick info,
you can also use the What's This? feature.
Just press Shift+F1 and your cursor turns into
a pointer with a question mark attached. Now
click anything on your screen to get more information.
If you click a button, you see a bit of information
about what the button does. If you press Shift+F1 and
click the What's This? pointer on your document text,
you get a list of the formatting that has been
applied. When you're done with the feature, press the
Escape (Esc) key to turn it off.
Places Bar
Whenever you choose File|Open or File|Save As
in an Office application, you see the common
dialog box that shows files and folders on your computer.
In Office 2000, folders are now listed along the left
side of the dialog box as well. If you click a folder
button, it takes you directly to a path, such as My
Documents, Favorites, History, or Web Folders.
These folders are part of a new feature called
the Places Bar. The settings for the Places Bar are
located in the Windows registry. Until recently,
you would have had to go into the registry to make
any modifications to the folders listed in the Places
Bar. However, Microsoft now has a utility you can
download and install that adds a new option to your
Tools menu called Set Places. From there, you can
easily add more folders or change the display size.
You can download this new utility from this Microsoft Knowledgebase article:
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q260/1/90.ASP.
(Note! Microsoft has added the Places bar setting to the registry for Office XP. Follow this URL for if you use Word 2002: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q282087 )
In the article, you see the Places.exe hyperlink. Click to download it and then unzip
the file to a temporary location. (You can type a new
directory name right in Winzip's Unzip dialog box
and it will create that new folder for you.) After you
have unzipped the file, open and read the ReadMe.doc
file, which contains instructions that explain how to
register the DLL in your computer registry.
Unfortunately, Microsoft included more confusing files
than necessary and the instructions aren't the greatest.
Basically, you have to move the places.dll file
into your Windows/System directory (usually C:\windows\system). Then click Start|Run and type:
Regsvr32 [[win system path]]\Places.dll
(where [[win system path]] is the location of
your Windows system directory)
Then press the Enter key. You should see a
dialog box telling you that the file was registered.
Now open Word and choose Tools|Set Places. You can choose to have your Places Bar display
either five large folders or ten smaller folders. You
can deselect some of the default folders, if you want
to add your own personal folders to the Places
Bar. When you're finished, click OK to close this
dialog box and choose File|Open from your favorite
Office application to check out your new Places Bar
selections.
By taking advantage of these little hidden treasures, you can save yourself lots of time and
aggravation. And what Word user doesn't want that?!
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