© 2007 Susan Lohrer

Microsoft Word

Working with Microsoft Word

The writing life goes far more smoothly when you’re not fighting with your word processor. Here are some handy tricks that will help resolve your differences. To suggest additional topics, contact me, and I’ll post solutions for the most common Word problems.

• AutoCorrect sometimes has a mind of its own. To undo special formatting, such as the funky border that appears across your page when all you want is to mark a scene break with a few asterisks, simply hold down the Ctrl key and press Z. This will undo the last thing you or Word did. You can access the Undo Typing feature in the Edit menu, where you’ll also find its nifty friend, Repeat Typing.

• Insert an em dash: Hold down the Ctrl key and the Alt key and type a semicolon.

• Insert a header: Click View, Header and Footer. Type your information into the header (the rectangle at the top of the page). A little toolbar will also appear; it contains options for formatting your page numbers (set them to the upper right corner), page setup, and so forth. In Page Setup, Layout, put a check in the box beside Different first page—this way, you can eliminate the header on the first page of your manuscript, which already has the title, with your name below it.

• Type an apostrophe when Word would rather give you a single opening quotation mark: Hold down the Ctrl key and press the apostrophe key, then type an apostrophe.

• Type closing quotation marks after an em dash: Hold down the Ctrl key and press the apostrophe key, then type the closing quotation marks (same as previous tip, but use the Shift key to get the double quotation marks instead of an apostrophe).

• Insert common diacritical marks:

  • For é, hold down the Ctrl key and press the apostrophe key, then type an e.

  • For ñ, hold down the Ctrl key and press the Shift and ` keys (the one with the ~, usually to the left of the number 1), then type an n.

  • You’ll find many useful symbols in Insert, Symbol. The most commonly used ones are in the subset Latin-1.

• Caveat: before attempting any of the procedures listed below, please save a copy of your work in a separate file in case something goes amiss.

• Get rid of all those extra spaces between sentences: Use Find and Replace. Type two spaces in the Find field and one space in the Replace field. Click Replace All. Repeat the last step until no more extra spaces are found.

• Get rid of extra spaces at the beginnings and ends of paragraphs: Use Find and Replace. Type ^p^w in the Find field and ^p in the Replace field (^p means “paragraph mark” and ^w means “white space). Click Replace All. Repeat as necessary. Then type ^w^p in the Find field and ^p in the Replace field. Click Replace All. Again, repeat as necessary. Now you’ve eliminated your extraneous white space. Feels good, doesn’t it?

The following procedure is not for the faint of heart. SAVE A COPY OF YOUR WORK before you begin:

• Oh no—I used the tip above and all my indents disappeared! It’s OK. That just means you used your Tab key to indent paragraphs, which is a no-no anyway. Use Find and Replace. With the cursor blinking in the Find field, click More. Click Format. Select Paragraph. In the Alignment field, select Left. Now click your mouse in the Replace field. Go to Format, Paragraph. In the Special field, select First line, and in the By field, select 0.5”. Click Replace All. Your indents will probably be too big now. With the cursor in the Find field, click the No Formatting button. With the cursor in the Replace field, click the No Formatting button. Now type ^t into the Find field and delete anything that’s in the Replace field. Click Replace All. There, you’ve correctly indented your entire manuscript without messing up the formatting of your centered text. I’m so proud of you.