Indiana University: IT Training Tips Blog

Way back in the day, when there were endless deep piles of snow, uphills both ways, and lunchpails filled only with scraps, people used writing instruments known as "pens" to inscribe letters and words onto dead trees, known as "paper".  Once the person was finished inscribing, s/he would fold up the paper, tuck that paper inside other paper, and inscribe more words on the front as a means of addressing (kind of like an email address, but way more complicated, taking up three lines or more!)

This whole process was known as "writing and mailing a letter". Nowadays, of course, this antiquated technology has been surpassed by IM, texting, Twitter, and status updates on Facebook. I think we can all agree that there is nothing that needs to be said if it can't be said in 140 characters or less! But let's say for a minute that you wanted to "write and mail a letter, " but didn't want to go all the way back to 1920 to do it. (more...)

When working with a Style Set, you might experience unexpected results when you press the Enter key.  Style properties include a specific "Style for following paragraph."  This means that each style is automatically set up to be followed by a specific style. 

In the default Office 2007 Style Set, the Headings are followed by the Normal style.

But what if you wanted your Heading 1 to be followed by a Heading 2?  You could manually change the Style to Heading 2, or you could modify the properties of Heading 1 so that it is automatically followed by Heading 2. 

Modifying a Style

To begin modifying the Heading 1 style, in the Style Gallery, right-click the Heading 1 style.  From the drop-down menu, choose Modify. 

The Modify Styles dialog box opens.  One of the properties of Heading 1 is "Style for following paragraph."  This property is currently set to Normal. 

The "Style for following paragraph" can be changed by clicking the drop-down arrow and choosing the style you want to follow Heading 1.  In our case, this is Heading 2.  Click OK to close the dialog box. 

After making that change, when we type a Heading 1 and press Enter, the next paragraph will be a Heading 2.  We made no change to Heading 2, so it will still be followed by Normal.

Users of Microsoft Office can take advantage of STEPS workshops on Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access.  However, these workshops are all taught in Office 2007 for Windows; and Office for the Macintosh (both the 2004 and 2008 versions) have a significantly different interface. Don’t worry though - users of Office 2008 for the Mac can find the training they need in Office 2008 through lynda.com. From now until December 20, 2009, students, faculty and staff in the IU community receive FREE access to lynda.com. (For more information and a link to lynda.com training, visit http://ittraining.iu.edu)

For users already familiar with Office for Mac, one tutorial on Lynda gives a comprehensive look at just the new features in the 2008 suite. Other topics of training include essential training for Word, PowerPoint and Excel as well as Entourage, the personal information manager. For a more detailed listing of titles included in the Word, Excel and PowerPoint tutorials in the lynda.com site read the rest of this article.

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In Word 2007, Styles and Themes play a much more prominent role.  Styles have been placed in the middle of the Home tab of the Ribbon and Themes are hard to miss on the Page Layout tab.  At first glance, it may be difficult to see the differences between the two features.  They both greatly affect the document.  However, Styles and Themes have been designed to work together and have different purposes.

Styles are a predefined combination of text and paragraph attributes which include font, size and line spacing, as well as indents, alignment, borders and shading.  Styles can be used to quickly and consistently format a document.  Styles are also necessary for some advanced work in Word, including outlines, tables of contents, and document maps.

Themes control the overall colors, fonts, and effects that are used in a document.  Each theme has twelve colors and two fonts.  Theme effects determine how effects are applied to your charts, SmartArt graphics, shapes, and pictures. (Themes are available throughout Microsoft Office 2007 so it is possible to create consistent documents, presentations, and spreadsheets.)

What it boils down to is this: The Theme gives Word 12 colors and 2 fonts to work with and the Style determines exactly how the colors and fonts are used. Or, in other words, the Theme is the list of ingredients and the Style is the recipe.  (more...)

Interested in seeing some of the new features in Microsoft Office 2010? Check out this article on the Lifehacker blog containing some introductory videos from the Microsoft Office team:

Microsoft Office 2010 in Videos

You can also check out this user's videos on YouTube for more:

Office Videos

The release of Office 2010 isn't for a while yet, but Microsoft is being quite social with the changes being made.

Stay tuned to this blog and our website for information about training opportunities when Office 2010 gets released to the general public.

Enjoy!

When using the Address Block or Greeting Line features of Mail Merge, the fields have to be specific.
• For the Name fields, you may use either “First Name,” “FName,” or even simply “First” to cause Word to recognize that the data in the field is associated with a first name.  The same varieties apply to the Last Name field.
• Use the full words “Address,” “City,” and “State.”  Abbreviations of these words are not recognized by Word.  However, “Zip” is recognized for “Zip Code.”

In a perfect world, everyone would be aware of, and follow, these naming conventions.  However, you may have a data source which uses different field names.  In these cases, the Address Block and Greeting Line features may not work as expected.  If this happens, you can tell Word exactly which fields should be used and where they should be placed.
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Are you irritated with the line spacing in Word 2007? Here is a simple solution:

If you want to have the “2003” look on your 2007 document, select your text, go from the Home Tab to the Paragraph group and open the dialog box launcher.

This dialog box is divided into four sections. Look at the third section named Spacing.

Look for the field called After and you will see the number 10 there by default. This means that Word is adding 10 points of space after each line of text. Reduce this number by pressing and dragging that number 10 and inserting a 0, (or use the downward pointing arrow to the right of that field until the number is 0).
Also, look to the right and you will see Line Spacing. Click on the dropdown and change the spacing from multiple to single. This will solve your problem for this document only.

If you want this to be your default for all of your Word documents, click the Default button at the bottom of this dialog box.

Another way to do the same thing is to go to the Change Styles button from the Styles group (Home tab) and choose Style Set>Word 2003. This will change the settings for your document without having to select the text first.

Has Word cooperated with you when you are creating a list? Notice below that when a parenthesis follows the number, Word will align the numbers on the left hand side:

apples

9) pears

10) bananas

What if you would like the numbers lined up on the right side instead? Here’s how you would like it to look:

 8) Apples

 9) Pears

10) Bananas

Here is how you do it: 

1) On the Home Tab, go to the paragraph group and click on the option for numbers on the top row of buttons. 

2) Choose the option for numbers with a parenthesis (second option on the first row under Numbering Library).

3) Go back to the same option, clicking on the dropdown arrow.

4) Go to the bottom of the menu and choose Define New Number Format.

5) Under the Number Format section, look for the Alignment choice.

6) Click on the dropdown and choose Right.



Now begin typing your list.

Did you know you can apply formatting to text in MS Word without highlighting and manually selecting type attributes? You may be accustomed to highlighting text and clicking buttons to to re-format every paragraph, heading, subheading and so on. In a long document, this process is repetitive, time-consuming, and subject to errors. Using the Microsoft Office Word 2007 Quick Styles, applying type specifications is as easy as clicking a button in the Quick Styles Gallery.

Let's see how...

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It is very easy to use the Custom dialog box in Microsoft Excel to add preceding zeros to a number, such as a University ID number, for example, to make it 10 digits. However, these zeros may be lost when using this field in a Word mail merge. To solve this problem, here is what you can do:

In Microsoft Word, set up the main document and data source in the normal way, placing the UniversityID field in the Word document. Right click the UniversityID field. Choose "Toggle Field Codes." Change the {MERGEFIELD UniversityID} to read {MERGEFIELD UniversityID\#"0000000000"}. These 10 zeros indicate that the number must be 10 digits. Right click again and choose "Update Field." Then click "Preview Results" on the Ribbon.

Now when you perform the mail merge, the zeros should appear in the merged document(s).

(Special thanks to April Law for contributing to this article).