HOME
TOPICS
ABOUT ME
MAIL
I Here are six features of Word 97 you
probably never knew were there.
|
|
technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and
commentaries, continuously available online since
1983
The hidden power of Microsoft Word, Part 2
April 4, 1999
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©1999, The Syracuse
Newspapers
I wrote recently about the hidden power
of Microsoft Word, the standard high-quality
word-processing program for Windows PCs. I told you about
five features of Word 97 you probably never knew were
there. Here are six more:
- A way to see everything the exact way it will
print.
The Print Preview function is right
there in plain sight, in the File menu, but nobody seems
to know what it really does. Listen up: Print Preview
doesn't just give you a cute preview of how things
will look when they're printed. It gives you an EXACT
view. A totally exact view. It shows you EXACTLY how your
document will look. Why am I doing stuff LIKE THIS in big
letters when I tell you about Print Preview? Because most
people who use Word don't realize that Print Preview
shows them every little booboo in advance -- lines out of
place, tabs that don't line up, all that kind of
thing. Use Print Preview EVERY TIME you're going to
print something.
- A way to fix your document while you are previewing
it.
OK, you get serious about this and
follow my advice about the Print Preview. Then you see a
goof in your finely crafted prose and need to fix it. So
you get out of Print Preview and Ö stop the
projector! Wind it back! DON'T GET OUT OF PRINT
PREVIEW. Word 97 has an almost totally secret feature
that lets you write and make changes while using Print
Preview! Even savvy users usually don't know about
this, because the Print Preview magnifying l glass gets
in the way. (You can't type or use your mouse in any
normal way when the magnifier is showing.) To turn the
magnifier on or off, click the second toolbar button from
the left while using Print Preview. With the magnifier
turned off, you can type and use your mouse to make
changes while using Print Preview.
- A way to make Word scroll up and down
automatically.
I swear nobody knows about this. I defy
anyone to find it in any of the menus. It's called
AutoScroll. Make a toolbar button so you can get at it.
Right click a blank area where the toolbars are and click
Customize. Click Commands. Under Categories:, click All
Commands. Scroll down the list on the right until you see
AutoScroll. Click AutoScroll and drag it out and drop
inside one of the toolbars to create a new button. Close
the Customize window. AutoScroll works only if your
document is longer than one screen. Gently move the mouse
up or down to make scrolling slower or faster.
- A way to unduexx undo your misteakesxx mistakes.
My favorite combination of keys is
Ctrl-Z. It's the all-too-easily-forgotten combination
called Undo that forces Word to be very forgiving when
you make mistakes. Ctrl-Z makes Word "undo"
whatever it did last. There's also a way to get Word
to undo something using the menu, but telling you that is
like telling you there are two ways to get from Boston to
New York -- going from Boston to New York, or going from
Boston to London to Moscow to San Francisco to Chicago to
New York. The menu method is Total Dumbness, because when
you need to undo something in a hurry, nothing could be
faster than Ctrl-Z. A bonus of Undo is that it's got
a memory; it will undo the last goof, and the one before
that, and the one before that, and so on.
- A way to get your printer to behave.
Don't you hate it when you print
out something that's 11 pages and they're all out
of order? Don't you wonder why nobody figured out a
way to get your printer to print stuff backwards? Guess
what? Somebody already did, then they hid it away so
you'd never find it. Here's how to turn it on:
Tools menu, then Options, then "Reverse print
order."
- An image viewer.
-
People think I'm nuts when I tell
them Word has an image viewer. But they're wrong
and I'm right. Want proof? Run your Web browser,
open up a page that has nice pictures, press Alt-Print
Screen, then run Word 97. Start a new document and
press Ctrl-V. See what I mean? An image, right in your
Word window. You can save it, print it out, whatever
you want. (Uh-oh, I've just caught myself pulling
an old trick -- slipping in a quick tutorial on one
thing while talking about something else. I just showed
you how to capture the foreground window on a PC.
That's what Alt-Print Screen does. But we can talk
more about that another time.)
|
|