September 9, 2006

The Taming Of The Shrew

Probably the most used and least understood application in the world is Microsoft Word. Like many people my knowledge of Word was limited to the bare minimum required to get the job done. Since I never did anything extensive with it there was little motivation for me to learn how to use it properly, until now...

I've been working a Polices and Procedures training manual for my company that was becoming a rather large document and Word has been slowly driving me to distraction, formatting that wouldn't go away and headings that wouldn't revert. The final straw was the word "Error!" appearing in a grey box in the middle of document all by itself—document corruption was the last thing I needed... So I decided enough was enough, I was going to tame this beast and make it work properly for me.

Here's what I learnt:

Top 5 ways to guarantee a corrupted document

According to the horse's mouth (i.e. Microsoft MVP's) using any of these features is asking for trouble and they should be avoided at all costs.

  1. Using Master Documents
  2. Complex Nested Tables
  3. Using Versions
  4. The Fast Save feature
  5. Using the Document Map

The best ways to recover a corrupted document

From what I've read the most common place for document corruption to be located is in section breaks. Every document has at least one section by default, so if you haven't explicitly created sections, there will be one hidden away in the very last paragraph mark of the document. These are the best ways of recovering from document corruption:

  1. Select everything except that last section break, and copy & paste into a new document. Ctrl+End and then Ctrl+Shift+Home will create such a selection.
  2. Save as another format, reopen that new document and then save it as a new word document: Rich Text or HTML seem to work well as the middle men.
  3. Paragraph marks themselves can also be corrupt. So if you have one paragraph that is misbehaving, text appears in weird places when working with it or styles are screwed up, try cutting and pasting it to and from Notepad—you'll need to restyle it after you paste it back though.
  4. As a last resort try saving the whole file as plain text, however you'll lose all formatting and graphics in the document—but you will kill any and all corruption permanently!

Really Useful Keyboard Shortcuts

Shift+F3Change the case of letters.
Shift+F5Move to the last change
Handy if you've just selected some text and want to get back to where you last typed.
F4Repeat the last action
More useful than it sounds, if you've just styled some text, you can select some other text and hit F4 to give it identical styling.
Ctrl+Alt+OSwitch to Outline view
Ctrl+Alt+PSwitch to Print view
Ctrl+Alt+NSwitch to Normal view

Outline view is probably the most useful feature I've recently learnt. It allows to navigate around and edit a large document with incredible ease. In Outline view you can choose to see just Level 1 Headings, or Level 1 & 2 Headings, or 1, 2 & 3 and so on, or all headings and their text. Move you cursor over a heading and switch back to print or normal view you're instantly at that location, even if it was 400 pages away from where you were.

You can also move headings up and down, but it doesn't move just the heading it moves all the sub-headings and paragraphs under it, meaning you can make alters that cover dozens of pages in one go—without selecting any text.

These are the most useful shortcuts for working in Outline View:

Shift+Alt+1View Level 1 Headings Only
Shift+Alt+2View Level 1 & 2 Headings
Shift+Alt+xView Level 1 to x Headings
Shift+Alt+AView All Headings and Paragraphs.
Shift+Alt+Left ArrowPromote text
(make higher level heading)
Shift+Alt+Right ArrowDemote text
(make lower level heading)
Shift+Alt+Up ArrowMove selected headings/paragraphs up.
Shift+Alt+Down ArrowMove selected headings/paragraphs down.

Outline view is only of any use if you have used styles in your document. These are selected from Formatting Toolbar (the drop down list with Heading 1 in it) or Styles & Formatting sidebar. Using styles also makes maintaining your document a lot easier too.

Hopefully this info helps you tame the shrew too!

Posted by Matt at September 9, 2006 4:26 PM

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