Adding footers in Word

Scenario: You are creating a multiple page document with others. You need to let others know how many pages there are in total and you want to help your future self remember where you stored the document.

Use the header and footer functionality in Word which lets you insert repeating text on each page in your document, either at the top (the header) or at the bottom (the footer).

Here’s a quick video on how to add page numbers, file name, and storage location in the footer of your document. The video shows you the steps for Microsoft® Word 8.0 for Mac. The concepts for other version of Word on PC or Mac are similar. (video, 7:14 min): 

Have fun with footers! Once you start, you’ll find you’ll want them on most documents.

 

Resetting a style in Word when all else fails

Scenario: You’re trying to apply a new style to a paragraph yet the new style isn’t being applied. You’ve tried clearing the style and even that doesn’t work! Now what?

If you ever run into style issues like the one listed above, delete the paragraph marker, make a new paragraph, and then apply the new style. It works every time.

OK, so why did I tell you to do this? Here’s the trick: Word stores the formatting attributes in each paragraph marker. When you delete the paragraph marker, the style that corresponds to that paragraph will be gone. Since you’ll then have content that runs together so you’ll need to make a new paragraph before applying the new style. Otherwise you’ll have one L-O-N-G paragraph where previously there were two paragraphs.

Here are the quick steps to follow:

1. Turn on “show codes”

Click the backwards looking “P”, called a pilcrow, on the Standard toolbar – see the image below for the icon.

The pilcrow is Word’s name for a paragraph mark.

Now you will see various hidden codes in your content that Word inserts behind the scenes as you type. A pilcrow means you pressed Enter. A space (it looks like a tiny dot) means you pressed the space bar. An arrow means you pressed the Tab key.

2. Delete the problem pilcrow.

The style you didn’t want is now gone.

3. Make a paragraph

Go to the end of the sentence that used to be the end of the first paragraph and press Enter. You’ll see a new pilcrow appear.

4. Position your cursor somewhere in that paragraph and apply the new style.

5. Turn off “show codes”.

Click the pilcrow on the Standard toolbar a second time to turn it off.

That’s it, you’ve done it! Onward, ho.

 

Create Your Own Audio Book

What better way to be close to loved ones if you aren’t in the same place! Record your voice reading a book and then share the audio file.

Before starting, make sure you have three items ready to go:

1. a working microphone connected to your computer – I used my internal microphone on my laptop;

2. recording software installed on your computer – install Audacity, a free audio recording and editing program that works on all operating systems;

3. a good book to read aloud. When I decided to make an audio book, it was for my niece and nephew in Burnaby, BC so I needed something age appropriate for them. I searched for ebooks on Google and had an incredible amount of books to choose from.

Here are the general steps to make a recording, assuming your microphone is ready to go:

1. Launch Audacity.

2. From the File Menu, click New.

3. Name and save the file as an Audacity Project File (.aup is the file extension).

You can choose other file saving options, however, if you save as an Audacity Project File, then you can make future changes to the original recording and simply export to the desired format upon completion.  You won’t have to start all over with a new recording.

You’ll see in the example below that I start out with an .aup extension and then typically export to a .m4a or .mp3 extension. Why? The latter two file types let me play files in iTunes and they are typically smaller in file size.  They are easier to import to and play back on my iPod, and, share with others.

4. To record, click the red button on the menu and start reading from your book. To stop, click the yellow square “stop” button.

5. When you have finished recording, save the Audacity Project File (click File, Save).

Then export the recording to either an .mp3 or .m4a file format. Click File, Export and then choose a format from the formatting options list. See the example below.

6. Check the file location on your computer for your audio recording. If you’ve followed these steps, you will see three files with the same name.

7. Share the file with the .m4a or .mp3 extension.  For convenience and due to size limitations for sending files by email (typically), I’d use Dropbox as my method of choice.

Happy recording! Let me know how it goes.

 

What To Do If You Get A Word Document With Messed Up Styles Throughout

Scenario: Your boss comes to you with a Word document and you are asked to make the content look professional in a short amount of time. Someone else has written the content, and, when you look at the document, you see that the author has inconsistent styles throughout the file. Or one section has styles applied and another section has specific words highlighted on a case-by-case basis. Ugh.  

Going forward, you and your boss need a document that has consistent styles. There’s not much time until the end product is due. What’s the fastest way for you to fix this up?

Here’s the easiest and quickest solution that I’ve found:

1. Show the existing styles in the Word document.

Turn on the style pane and make the style pane at least 1” wide. Go to your Word settings and enable the option to view the style pane, set the width as 1″ (or wider), and save your settings. Then go back to the document and switch the view to Draft View.

Why? At a glance you’ll be able to see which style has been attributed to each paragraph in the document. Otherwise you’d have to click on each paragraph or heading and check which style has been attributed.

2. Change your view to Draft view and print out a copy of the document with the style pane visible.

Why? At a glance you’ll be able to see which paragraphs need style help and it’s much quicker than trying to compare documents side by side electronically. I’ve tried the electronic method to avoid making hard copies and wasting paper but I’ve always ended up having to make a printout in the end anyways after wasting precious time.

3. Make a new electronic copy of the Word document, save it with a new name, and strip out all the styles.

Don’t work within the original file. Leave it alone and as is.

In the new renamed file, select all the content (CTRL+A on PCs, Command+A on Macs) and apply the “clear formatting” option. This resets all the content to the Normal style. Now you’re starting from scratch on the styles front and you have the printout to help guide you. Save the file.

4. Apply the correct styles to headings and paragraphs. Save the new file often!

Put on your headphones and listen to some great tunes as you start to apply the styles. Use your printout as a guide and watch how fast you build a professional looking document. It’s actually fun when you get into a groove. Save often – I can’t stress that enough. You’ll find a pattern of saving that works for you – whether it’s after each new heading or at the end of every page. Just save, save, save.

5. Review your work and fix any issues.

I use Print Preview, turning on the multiple pages at a glance option, to do this task quickly. Glaring issues pop out at me. I also have the printout from the original file to refer back to (mostly to see how it’s NOT supposed to look like, LOL).

6. Save the file, keep a copy for your own records, and pass the file onwards. 

You may be thinking that I’m making more work for you with these steps. Nope. You’ll find it’s the fastest, simplest way to get the styles to be consistent and make the document look professional. And believe me, I’ve had to do this on 300+ page documents in less than 2 hours. No problem!

 

Make Professional Looking Documents in Word (Part 2)

See the first part of this subject: Make Professional Looking Documents in Word (Part 1) before reading any further.

OK, so you have a document that now contains styles, whether you applied the styles or you inherited a document from someone else that contains styles.

Here are 3 reasons why you need to use styles to make documents look professional:

1) Using styles you can easily update the look of your entire document by changing the formatting attributes of one style. (I talked about this in the first article, but it’s so important and useful that I wanted to draw your attention to it again.)

OK, so let’s take an example. The default style in Word is called “Normal” and it may be preset to be Arial font, size 11, with single line spacing.

Open the style and check the formatting attributes if you want to see what is preset. Here’s a picture of the default formatting attributes for the “Normal” style in my document (I’ve opened the Style pane, clicked on the style called “Normal”, and selected “Modify Style”):

Let’s say you now want double spacing and you want a different font.  So you change “Normal” to be double spaced and Helvetica font size 12. Here are the 4 quick steps that I took:

After I click “OK”, every spot where the “Normal” style was applied in the document gets automatically updated in one fell swoop. Yippee!! No more fiddling around line by line, only to have to redo formatting work if you add or subtract content. It’s an incredible timesaver.

2) Using styles, you can make use of the (hidden) document structure of your document.

Translated: when you build a professional looking document, you will want headings and subheadings. It makes the document easier to read if it’s well organized.

Some of the Word styles are set up for this. Look for outline styles called Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. As you apply these styles, you are building the document structure. You can only see the document structure when you turn on the Document Map.

I find the concept of having a document structure built into my document very useful when I start to write, especially if I’m experiencing writer’s block or am dealing with a complex subject. I can always start writing in one section where I know have information to contribute and I typically find that as I start, it becomes easier to write in the other sections.

For example, I’ll take a few minutes to outline the main sections of my document, as in:

Name of my section	Style to apply
Introduction	Heading 1
Main Point 1	Heading 1
Sub Point 1	Heading 2
Sub Sub Point 1	Heading 3
Sub Point 2	Heading 2
Main Point 2	Heading 1
Analysis	Heading 1
Conclusion	Heading 1

Then as I write, I turn the Document Map on and off as I want so that I can make sure that the logical structure of my document is intact. It is SO USEFUL – you’ll love it.

3) Using the built-in outline level styles (e.g. heading 1, heading 2, heading 3, etc), you can have the software generate and update a table of contents for you.

When you build professional lengthy documents, a table of contents will help organize your sections by putting together an index that lists your section titles and the starting page numbers for each section.

As you add and remove content, you’ll want to help the reader navigate to specific sections and page numbers will change…alot, especially the more modifications you make to your document. So by using styles, and auto-generating a table of contents, your document section titles match their page numbers and your document looks even more professional. Another timesaver!

Next, you will want to find out what to do if you get a document that has messed-up styles. Read on…

 

Using the Document Map in Word

The Document Map in Word provides an outline of the sections in your document. Subsections are indented in the Document Map to show you that they are sub points.

At a glance you can see the writer’s logical progression of the topic that you are reading about. You can also use the Document Map to quickly navigate to different sections in the document, which is especially useful if it’s a lengthy document.

Before you can use the Document Map, apply outline-level styles to your section titles.

Outline level styles are built-in. In Word outline-level styles are called Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 (up to 9 levels).

If you don’t like the way the section title looks, modify that style’s formatting attributes. If you want to know more about this or styles in general, read this article before going any further: Make Professional Looking Documents in Word (Part 1) .

To turn on the Document Map:

On a PC:

In Word 2007 and earlier, from the View menu, select Document Map.

In Word 2010, from the View section, select Navigation Pane and then the first button on the left.

On a Mac:

From the View menu, select Print Layout, then Navigation Pane, then from the drop down arrow, select Document Map.

The Document Map typically opens in the left side of your screen, in a separate pane.

To turn off the Document Map

Repeat the steps you followed to turn on the Document Map.

Make sure you turn the Document Map off before closing your document; otherwise the software will attempt to open a future document with the Document Map option turned on. And if that future document doesn’t yet have outline-level styles applied, you may encounter an error message so you may have to restart Word.

To go to another part of the document quickly

Once you’ve turned on the Document Map and it’s opened up on the left side of your window, click on a section title. The right side of your screen will reposition your cursor to the start of the section whose title you just clicked.

Once you get the hang of using the Document Map, you’ll find this feature one of your handy tricks to help you write, edit, and format professional documents. Have fun!

 

How to easily share, back up, and sync your documents across devices

Scenario: One of my clients in Canada, let’s call him Al, just got himself a fancy schmancy smart phone (Samsung Galaxy IIX, an Android phone). Al has a PC in his home office (Sony Vaio) and acquired a 13″ Macbook laptop for travel. Now he needs to figure out how to easily transfer files between devices and make sure he’s only dealing with one version for each file. What’s the easiest solution?

Dropbox, a web-based file hosting service!!

There are many web-based services available to you to share, back up, and sync your files. After using Dropbox personally over 18 months, it’s quickly become my go to, and only,  file management provider. You need to sign up for a free account which will give you 2 GB of free storage in your Dropbox web-based account. If you like Dropbox and recommend it to friends, Dropbox will give you another 250 mb free of storage up to a max of 8 GB of free storage (at the time of writing this posting).

OK, so why is it so good?

1. Dropbox encrypts your documents on the web using the same security measures that banks use for their online banking.
2. Dropbox works behind the scenes when you have an Internet connection to transfer any updated or new documents that live in the folder(s) that you have told Dropbox to monitor. This means that you can still access your files when you don’t have an Internet connection (something that other web-based file hosting services don’t permit you to do). Plus if you open and modify a file when you’re offline, the next time you establish Internet connectivity, Dropbox updates your information automatically. Sweet!
3. AND Dropbox easily lets you share specific folders with others.

Imagine this –  you are collaborating with a few others on an upcoming conference workshop and you need to finalize the outline. You set up a Dropbox folder called “conference workshop”. You share this folder with your colleagues (who also need a Dropbox account – again, it’s free to get). You create a new document called Outline and you put it in the “conference workshop” folder. Almost immediately your colleagues are notified of a new document. Amazing! One of your colleagues opens up the new document, reads the content, makes a small change, and resaves the document. Now you, along with everyone else who shares this folder, are notified of the modified document. Again, amazing! Dropbox makes file sharing so easy! And fun to use!!

Now back to Al. How does Dropbox help him with his situation of multiple devices? By installing Dropbox on his smart phone, on his PC, and on his Mac laptop, whatever documents or photos he puts into his Dropbox folders get immediately synced to his other devices. There’s no need to burn a CD, or save content to a USB stick. Simple and sweet! If Al accidentally loses one of these devices, or heaven forbid, he loses all three in one go, Al can still get access to all the information he put into his Dropbox folders by going to his web-based account on Dropbox. Whew!

Personally I use Dropbox to share, collaborate, and back up important information that I can’t afford to lose. That being said I do not use Dropbox for critical, sensitive information (like banking information, etc) nor do I use it to back up my photos (due to storage limit).  There was a minor breach of Dropbox earlier this year and the company fixed the security breach as soon as they found out about it. But it’s better to be safe and use the file hosting service to your own comfort level. I hope you like it as much as I do and now as much as Al does.

 

Read new online content without losing the information currently on your screen

Scenario: you’ve found an excellent web page containing links to other web sites that you now want to check out yet you’ve only read part of the content on this web page so far. How can you look at the new links without losing the original content on your screen?

The easiest way to do this is to open a new browsing area when you click on a link which involves two steps.

These two steps work in most web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, on both PC and Mac platforms.

STEP 1: Choose how you want to view the new content and open a new viewing area

1. To see the new content in a new browser window:
   a) Right-click on the link you want to open and left-click on Open in New Window.
   OR
   b) Open a new browser window by pressing CTRL+N (on a PC) and COMMAND+N (on a Mac).
   
2. To see the new content in a tabbed window (the new content will open within a new tab within the current window):
   a) Right-click on the link you want to open and left-click on Open in New Tab.
   OR
   b) Open a new browser window by pressing CTRL+T (on a PC) and COMMAND+T (on a Mac)

STEP 2: Close the new viewing area once you have finished reading the new content

Press CTRL+W on PC or COMMAND+W on a Mac.

Now you’re back to reading the content that you started from.

 

Choose how much web content to print (Internet Explorer)

Sometimes you only need a printout of some of the content on a web page or you just want to be environmentally sensitive because you don’t need all of the content in hard copy.

Here are the steps:

1. To print only part of a web page, select (highlight) the content you want to print. Make sure the content that you have highlighted contains mostly text. For example, highlighting a list of email messages in your inbox will not work with this tip.
2. Go to the File Menu, select Print (do not click on the printer button on the toolbar).
3. In the new window that opens, called the Print Dialog Box, look for the heading called Page Range (it should be located near the bottom left corner). Choose the option called “Selection”. Tip: if your printer permits double-sided printing and you know the selected content to print will be more than one-page, select that option now.
4. Then click Print.

 

Make Professional Looking Documents in Word (Part 1)

Here’s the scenario: You are working on a document that needs to be formatted nicely so that it’s both easy to read and easy to see the inherent logic, or document structure, in the document. You want: text evenly spaced, headings to introduce new sections, and maybe even a table of contents. So you start writing and you format as you go using Word’s basic formatting features such as bold, italic, underline, etc.

For headings, you may want the font size to be larger and you may want the text underlined. As your document grows, you notice you start spending more and more time fiddling with the formatting of text because no matter what you do, text isn’t flowing nicely across the pages. There may be huge gaps between some of the paragraphs. One heading may look different than another.  And you can’t quickly make up a table of contents that can be updated if you move sections around or make other changes. Before you know it, you’re spending more time fixing and re-fixing formatting issues and pulling your hair out than you are on writing the document. There must be a better way.

There is! Use Styles in Microsoft Word.

Let’s first review what a style is. A style contains formatting properties – i.e. font type, font size, font colour, alignment, indentation, numbering, etc. The default style in Word is a style called “Normal”.

Styles live in a template. Templates are documents that have formatting properties already set for you. Word stores templates in a separate location from our working documents folder and locks them so we don’t accidentally overwrite them. In older versions of Word, templates have “.dot” extensions, meaning DOcument Template. In newer versions of Word, templates have either “.dotx” or “.dotm” as their extension.

The default template in Word is called “Normal”.  When you start up Word, and that blank sheet of paper appears on your screen, Word has opened a copy of the template called Normal (which opens up to give you the blank page to start writing on). And when you start typing, the font characteristics of what appears on your screen are determined by the default style, called Normal.

There are a couple of style types but the most common one that you will use is called a paragraph style. For paragraph styles, Word uses the paragraph marker as the style delineator.  The accurate term in Word for the paragraph marker is “pilcrow”. [I know, who knew and who cares, and who comes up with these obscure terms!]

When you turn on the behind-the-scenes codes in Word, you’ll see what looks like a backward facing “p”, the pilcrow. That means every time you press enter, Word inserts the pilcrow. Each paragraph marker (pilcrow) stores style information for preceding text.

You decide when to apply a style to your content. You can write first and then apply a style or apply a style and then write.The choice of when to apply a style largely depends on your preference and possibly how much you know about your document structure before starting out. If you prefer to build the document structure after you have written out the content, then apply the styles afterwards. If you are creating a document that has specific headings and is standardized, like a judgment, then create the document structure first.

Word comes with a few styles already built in, such as Normal (the default style), Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3. The last 3 styles are examples of styles that will help you build the hierarchy in your document structure. Heading 1 means it’s the first level below a title. Heading 2 means it’s the first subheading under Heading 1. And Heading 3 means it’s a sub-subheading. You can have multiple Heading 1s, multiple Heading 2s, and multiple Heading 3s in your document. Word will allow you to have up to 9 levels of hierarchy if you want. Most documents don’t have a need to go beyond 3 levels.

So if you want to create a quick heading, and it’s your first heading in your document (not the document title), apply the style called Heading 1. You’ll notice the formatting properties have changed.

Here are step-by-step instructions on how to apply a style for PC users, written by Shauna Kelly at www.shaunakelly.com. Thank you Shauna!  Just a quick aside: Shauna is one of Microsoft’s MVPs, or Most Valuable Professionals. MVPs are experts awarded Microsoft recognition on an annual basis for their outstanding contributions to the larger community. I have had the pleasure of working with a few of them now (Dian Chapman, John Marshall) and participating in some of their Word email discussion lists over the years. I hope to return the favour by paying it forward.

One quick tip to help you apply a style– you don’t have to highlight all the text in a text string to apply a style. The text string might be a couple of words (as in a heading) or it might be as long as a paragraph. You only need to make sure that you have placed your insertion point, the blinking I-beam on your screen, within the text where you want to apply the style. When you apply the style, the formatting properties will change for all the text up until the paragraph marker (yup, the pilcrow again).

For Mac users using Word 2008, a quick way to access styles is the following. After you select text or position your insertion point in a paragraph, click on the Toolbox (it’s located on your toolbar). The Toolbox will open a separate window on your screen. The title of this window will be Formatting Palette. Expand the Styles section by clicking on the triangle beside the word Styles. Then click on a name of the style you want to apply. You can choose to leave the Toolbox open on your screen or not.

And if you don’t like how a style looks in your document, modify the style.  The beauty of modifying the style is that by making one change, all the text that had been marked with that style will be automatically updated! I’ve tried this in large documents that easily had 400+ pages and the changes were immediately implemented. It’s really cool!

Here are some tutorials on how to modify a style:

On PC, Word 2007 and Word 2010, again thanks to Shauna Kelly from Australia.

On Mac, Word 2008, thanks to Xander Tan in Indonesia.

Okay, that’s enough about styles for now.

Stay tuned for Part 2 because now we can talk about advanced reasons for using styles that will make your documents look even more professional!