ALTERING AUTOCORRECT TO ALLOW FOR TWO INITIAL CAPITALS

Although AutoCorrect is a great feature for silently correcting your most common errors, sometimes it just doesn't know what it's talking about. When writing about music, we found that Word 2000 always wanted to change "DJ" to the incorrect "Dj," which quickly became very frustrating. The key was to change our AutoCorrect settings to ignore the occurrence of two adjacent capital letters.

Select Tools, AutoCorrect and uncheck the Correct Two Initial Capitals box. Click OK, and AutoCorrect will leave those two initial capitals alone.

UNDOING AUTOCORRECT ENTRIES

Last month, we described how to turn off AutoCorrect when you don't want the first letter of a sentence capitalized automatically. (The tip was written in response to a reader who wrote poetry and didn't want capitalization after line breaks.) As we explained, you select Tools, AutoCorrect, then deselect the Capitalize First Letter Of Sentences option. Another reader wrote in to offer a more elegant solution: Whenever AutoCorrect performs an undesired action, you can simply press Ctrl-Z (or click the Undo button) and the action is undone. More important, the next time the action would be performed (such as after the next line break in our poetry example), AutoCorrect will leave it alone. So, our reader with the poetry problem would need to press Ctrl-Z only once to disable AutoCorrect for his entire poem. Thanks.

ADDING AUTOCORRECT WORDS

Word 2000's AutoCorrect feature is a timesaving way to customize your word processing program. You probably find that you make similar spelling mistakes repeatedly, and by having Word correct them automatically, you can just keep typing. While using AutoCorrect will do nothing to correct your overall spelling skills, it will help you get your word documents completed faster. The next time you check your spelling, ask yourself if the particular spelling mistake is one you often make. If it is, instead of selecting the correct word from the list, choose AutoCorrect instead of Change, and Word 2000 will start making the corrections without asking. Neat, huh?

FUN WITH AUTOCORRECTING

You can use AutoCorrect to make inputting text much faster. For example, perhaps you have to write a set of instructions for your co-workers on how to use Netscape Navigator. Odds are, you'll have to type the name of the program over and over again. To save yourself some time, create an AutoCorrect entry for Netscape Navigator. Use "nn" as the entry for the full program name, so that whenever you type nn, Word will automatically replace it with "Netscape Navigator." You can find the AutoCorrect dialog box on the Tools menu.

TURNING OFF AUTOFORMATTING

Are you annoyed when Word automatically creates bulleted lists for you? Well, no one likes to be second-guessed, and Word's AutoFormatting feature is a pro at it. If Word is automatically turning your text into bulleted lists, then you probably have Word set up to AutoFormat as you type. For example, if you type an asterisk and then a tab, Word may replace it with a bullet. To take back control of your lists, choose Tools, AutoCorrect, and then click the AutoFormat as You Type tab. Uncheck the box for Automatic bulleted lists.

Check out the other options in this panel to see if Word automatically does anything else that annoys the heck out of you!

USING AUTOSHAPE

Word 2000 provides many ready-made shapes, called AutoShapes, that you can add to your document. Word can only display AutoShapes in the Print Layout and Web Layout views.

To place an AutoShape in your document, follow these steps:

1. Choose View, Toolbars, Drawing to display the Drawing toolbar.
2. Click AutoShapes.
3. Click the type of AutoShape you want to add.
4. Click the AutoShape you want to add.
5. Position the mouse plus sign where you want to begin drawing the AutoShape.
6. Drag the mouse plus sign until the AutoShape is the size you want. The AutoShape appears in your document. The handles around the AutoShape let you change the size of it.
7. To hide the handles, click outside the AutoShape anywhere in your document.

ADDING AUTOSHAPES TO A DOCUMENT

Clip Art is great, but sometimes something simpler will do. Instead of a detailed drawing of a golf ball, sometimes you just want to draw a circle. Word 2000 lets you draw perfect circles, squares, ellipses, octagons, and just about any geometric shape you can imagine. All these shapes are at your fingertips when you use what Word calls AutoShapes. To insert an AutoShape into a document, first display the Drawing toolbar by right-clicking the Standard toolbar and choosing Drawing. Then, click the AutoShapes button on the Drawing toolbar and find the shape you're looking for. Once you've made your selection, click and hold on the screen and use your mouse to draw the shape. If you hold down the Shift key while drawing, the shape will retain its symmetry. Release the mouse when you've finished, and the AutoShape is in your document.

SPECIFYING A TEMPLATE FOR AUTOTEXT

Many smart people use Word 2000's AutoText feature to reduce their number of keystrokes and speed work. The downside of AutoText is that you sometimes see those yellow boxes popping up too frequently, which can be especially annoying if they don't pertain to the matter at hand. If you are a user who works on several types of documents, it can be helpful to specify certain AutoText entries to correspond to certain types of templates.

Let's say you have an AutoText entry for your company name--we'll call it Fake Acme Inc.--and you want to make sure that AutoText pops up only when you're writing company letters. To designate this AutoText entry for letters only, go to Insert, AutoText, AutoText to open the AutoText tab of the AutoCorrect dialog box. Then click on the entry you wish to modify (in our example Fake Acme Inc.) and select a template from the Look In menu. When you finish, click OK.

GETTING AUTOTEXT TO WORK IN WORD 2000

If AutoText doesn't seem to be working in Word 2000, then you need to turn it on. Here's how:

1. Choose Tools, AutoCorrect.

2. In the AutoCorrect dialog box, click the AutoText tab.

3. Select the Show AutoComplete Tip for AutoText and Dates check box by clicking in it.

4. Click OK.

GOING BACK

They say that once you commit, there's no going back. That is, unless you're running for office or using Word. If you go anywhere you don't want to be, press Shift+F5, and Word carries you back to where you started.

The Shift+F5 keyboard shortcut works only in Word; you can't use this command in real life, unfortunately.

Pressing Shift+F5 returns you to where you were before; pressing it again takes you back to where you were before that. This keyboard shortcut works about three times before it starts repeating itself. Repeating itself. Repeating itself.

BACKGROUNDS IN WORD

Adding a plain, one-color background to a document or a Web page is simple. Just choose Format, Background, and then click on a color from the palette.

To create a background with a gradient fill, a texture, a repeating pattern, or a picture, choose Format, Background, Fill Effects. The Fill Effects dialog box then appears. The Gradient, Texture, Pattern, and Picture tabs allow you to choose different types of backgrounds.

Have fun experimenting as you find the background of your choice.

BACKING UP YOUR WORK

Computer users should back up their hard disks religiously by making a second copy for safekeeping in one of several ways:

• Floppies: Some people copy all their files from the hard disk to a bunch of floppy disks. Custom-written backup programs make this task easier, but it's still time-consuming.

• Tape backup unit: This special computerized tape recorder either lives inside the computer like a disk drive or plugs into the back of the computer. Either way, the gizmo tape-records all the information on your hard disk. Then, when your hard disk dies, you still have all your files on tape. The faithful tape backup unit plays back all your information onto the new hard disk.

• Removable disk: These guys work like floppy disks. Removable disks are usually just a little larger than a floppy, but can hold more than a hundred times as much information.

• Automatic network backup: The luckiest people don't need to worry about backing up their hard disk at all -- they work on a network that handles all the backup chores automatically.

SAVING BACKUP COPIES

We've all had to deal with lost work because of missing, corrupted, or deleted files. To guard against these kinds of mishaps, you can set Word 2000 to automatically save backup copies of all your new documents. First, choose Tools, Options and click the Save tab. Select the Always Create Backup Copies check box and click OK. Then, whenever you open and save a document, a backup copy is automatically created in the same folder where you saved your original document. The document is identified with a filename of "Backup of X," where "X" is the name of your original document. These backup copies will have a file extension of .wbk and will automatically update whenever you modify your original document.

MAKING A FAMILY BOOK

If you want to make a family album or scrapbook, but aren't sure how to get started, you can use a template. Go to the Microsoft Office Template Gallery [http://search.officeupdate.microsoft.com/TemplateGallery]. Click Personal Interest, Community, and Politics, and then click Personal Use and click My Family Book for a template that can get you started.

BORDER PATROL

To add a border around a text paragraph:

1. Place your cursor anywhere in the paragraph to which you want to add a border.

2. Choose Format, Borders and Shading to open the Borders and Shading dialog box.

3. Select the type of border you want from the options in the Setting area. Or click none if you want to remove the border.

4. Select the line style from the Style list, a color from the Color list, and line width from the Width list if you don't like the default settings.

5. Click OK or press Enter.

PLACING A BORDER AROUND A PICTURE

When you insert a graphic into a document (by going to Insert, Picture), you might try adding a border to the graphic to spruce it up a bit. First, select the picture, then right-click on it and choose Borders And Shading. From here, you can choose from several border settings, styles, and colors. Play around and when you find one you like, click OK.

APPLYING BORDERS

Sometimes applying borders to your document can draw attention to a particular piece. If you want to apply a border to an area of your document, follow these steps:

1. Open a document with several paragraphs of text.
2. Select some text that you want to have a border around.
3. Choose Format, Borders and Shading.
4. On the Borders tab, choose a border setting.
5. If you want a different line style, choose it in the Style section.
6. If you want a thicker line, choose it in the Width section.
7. Click OK and your border will appear around the text you selected.

BRINGING BACK THE BRIEFCASE

In Windows NT 4 (as well as Windows 98 and 95), the Briefcase icon is a permanent feature on the Desktop. The Windows 2000 designers apparently figured out that it wasn't the most popular in town, so they gave it a hiding place.

To roll out the briefcase in Windows 2000, just right-click on a blank spot on the Desktop and select New, Briefcase from the popup menu. Presto, you have a nice, new, unscuffed Briefcase on your Desktop.

BROWSING BASICS

Lurking at the bottom of the vertical scroll bar you find three buttons. These are the browse buttons, which allow you to scroll through your document in leaps and bounds of various sizes.

• The top button (looks like two stacked triangles pointing up) is the Browse Up button.
• The bottom button (looks like two stacked triangles pointing down) is the Browse Down button.
• The center button (looks like a dot) is the What the Heck Am I Browsing For? button.

When you click the center button, a pop-up palette of things to browse for appears. Pointing the mouse at any one of the items displays text that explains the item in the bottom part of the palette.

NO THANKS, I'M JUST BROWSING

Lurking at the bottom of the vertical scroll bar you find three buttons. These are the browse buttons, which allow you to scroll through your document in leaps and bounds of various sizes.

• The top button (looks like two stacked triangles pointing up) is the Browse Up button.
• The bottom button (looks like two stacked triangles pointing down) is the Browse Down button.
• The center button (looks like a dot) is the What the Heck Am I Browsing For? button.

When you click the center button, a pop-up palette of things to browse for appears. Pointing the mouse at any one of the items displays text that explains the item in the bottom part of the palette.

USING DEVIANT BULLETS

If you don't like the default bullet format that you get when you click the Bullet button, change it! Here's how:

1. Select Format, Bullets and Numbering from the main menu. The dialog box has three tabs. If the bullet options don't appear, click the Bulleted tab to bring them forth. The Bulleted tab presents six possible bullet formats.

2. If one of the seven bullet formats shown in the dialog box suits your fancy, click it and then click OK.

3. Otherwise, click one of the bullet formats and then click the Customize button.

4. Modify the bullet format as you see fit.

5. If you don't like any of the bullet characters shown in the Modify Bulleted List dialog box, click the Bullet button.

6. Pick the bullet character you want; then, click OK.

7. OK your way back to your document.

ADJUSTING THE SIZE OF BULLETS

If you want to make your list items stand out with larger bullets, you can adjust the size of your bullets by changing their font size. Select Format, Bullets And Numbering; click the kind of bullet you want to use; and then click the Customize button. Click the Font button, and then select a size from the Font Size menu on the right. In the Preview window at the bottom of the dialog box, you can see what size bullet you're dealing with before you click OK.

SETTING THE CLOCK

Many computer users don't bother to set the computer's clock, preferring instead to look at their wristwatches. But they're missing out on an important computer feature: Computers stamp new files with the current date and time. If the computer doesn't know the correct date, it stamps files with the wrong date. Then how can you find files you created yesterday or last week?

For a quick way to change the computer's time or, double-click the little digital clock that lives on the taskbar on the edge of the screen. Up pops a calendar and clock. Change the date and time as needed and click OK. Pretty simple, huh?

COPY, COPY

When you use the Copy command (Ctrl + C or the Copy tool) two or more times in a row without doing any pasting, a special Clipboard window appears. Word stores everything copied in a special Clipboard window, up to 12 items. When you copy the unlucky thirteenth item, the Office Assistant displays a warning message.

To paste in the items on the Clipboard all at once, click the Paste All button.

Or you can click individual "scraps" in the window to paste those items in particular order. Pointing the mouse at a scrap icon displays information about what's stored in the scrap.

COPYING AND PASTING SECTIONS

Our previous tip pointed out that you need to add section breaks to your document to change headers. The more you use Word 2000, the more you realize that it makes sense to divide your documents into individual sections whenever you change formatting. Section breaks allow you to accomplish such tasks as change page orientation, insert columns, and add new headers and footers to pages. If you want to re-create the formatting of a specific section elsewhere in your document, remember that you can copy section formatting from one place and paste it somewhere else. The key is to remember that an individual section's formatting is anchored to the section break that follows it.

To copy a section break, go to the end of the section you want to replicate, select the lines that represent the break, and press Ctrl-C. You may then paste this section break where you like. Keep in mind that you want to paste it after the text you wish to reformat. Also remember that this action will reformat all previous text back through the prior section break.

CREATING A DROP CAP

A drop cap is the first letter of a report, chapter, or story that appears in a larger and more interesting font than the other characters. Here's how to add a drop cap to your document:

1. Select the first character of the first word at the start of your text.

2. Choose Format, Drop Cap.

3. Select a drop cap style.

4. Click OK.

5. Click the mouse in your text (not on the drop cap) and continue editing.

INSERTING A DROP CAP

One of the ways word processors changed the world was to introduce all kinds of fancy formatting features formerly reserved only for the professionals. One example of this once out-of-reach formatting is the drop cap, a large letter inserted at the beginning of a paragraph. Inserting drop caps in Word 2000 is a cinch. Click inside the paragraph you want to work with and select Format, Drop Cap. Choose Dropped from the Position section and then specify Font and Lines To Drop under Options. Lines To Drop tells Word how large to make your letter--the number you choose will equal the number of lines the letter reaches down. When you have the parameters the way you like, click OK.

CORRECTING ACCIDENTAL USAGE OF CAPS LOCK

Long ago, we spilled some coffee on a keyboard, and the Caps Lock key has never been the same. We have to be sure to punch the Caps Lock key extra hard to both engage and disengage it, a nuisance that leads to the occasional sentence tHAT LOOKS sOMETHING lIKE tHIS. FORTUNATELY--excuse me, fortunately--Word 2000 has a handy little feature that automatically corrects a few words of this kind of error, meaning I don't have to delete and retype the whole thing. To engage this AutoCorrect feature, select Tools, AutoCorrect, and click the AutoCorrect tab. Select the Correct Accidental Usage Of Caps Lock Key option, and then click OK.

HOW TO AVOID CAPITALIZING AFTER PAGE BREAKS

A reader likes to use Word 2000 when composing poetry. One thing he doesn't like, however, is Word 2000's overriding desire to capitalize the first letter of each new line, and he wrote us to ask how to change this. It's a function of AutoCorrect, and changing this setting is pretty simple. Select Tools, AutoCorrect and deselect the Capitalize First Letter Of Sentences option. Click OK, and you should be able to start each line with a lowercase letter without a problem. Art thou impressed?

CAPITALIZING THE FIRST LETTER OF SENTENCES IN WORD 2000

A popular AutoCorrect option automatically capitalizes the first letter of every sentence. Many users take advantage of this by not using the shift key while they type, instead choosing to let Word 2000 automate the capitalization process for them.

One potential danger exists, however, if you use abbreviations in the middle of sentences. If those abbreviations have a period (.) at the end of them, Word will think the period is the end of a sentence and capitalize the first letter after the period. If you have this problem frequently, create an exception for the abbreviation.

HARD PAGE BREAKS

Keep these things in mind if you've inserted a hard page break (Ctrl + Enter) into your document.

• Remember to use Print Preview to look at your document before you print it. Sometimes your text will move around during the writing process, making those hard page breaks unnecessary.

• You can always delete a hard page break by pressing Backspace or Delete keys. If you do this accidentally, just press Ctrl + Enter again, or you can press Ctrl + Z to undelete.

CREATING A NEW PAGE BREAK

You no longer have to keep pressing Enter until you see the row of dots that denotes the start of a new page. Yes, hitting Enter repeatedly works, but you can get the job done much easier and faster. Simply press Control + Enter, and a new page miraculously appears!

ADJUSTING CHARACTER SPACING

The Spacing control in the Character Spacing tab of the Font dialog box defines how much space appears between characters. This control changes the spacing between characters by the same amount for all characters in a selection. The default setting is Normal. Choosing the Expanded setting adds more space between all characters in your selected text. Choosing the Condensed setting -- you guessed it! -- decreases the amount of space between the characters. By default, Word uses one additional point for expanded spacing and one less point for condensed spacing. You can customize spacing for the Normal, Expanded, and Condensed options by typing a number between 0.25 and 14.00 in the By box or by choosing the By text box and clicking the up- or down-arrow buttons.

CHARTS--PART 1 OF 5: AN INTRODUCTION

As with Excel and PowerPoint, Word 2000 allows you to insert and manipulate charts in your documents. For the next few days, we'll take a peek at some of the ways you can use charts. Charts add zip to your document, illustrating graphically numerical data that would just slide by in common prose. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a chart's gotta be worth a couple thou, easy.

The first thing you'll need to know is how to insert a chart into a document (you'll need to have some data handy, of course, but we'll deal with that later). Select Insert, Picture, Chart, and a small applet called Microsoft Graph opens. A sample datasheet and chart also appear. The datasheet contains the information that the chart represents graphically, but it remains invisible when you print your document.

Next time, we'll discuss entering data in the chart.

CHARTS--PART 2 OF 5: ENTERING DATA IN THE DATASHEET

In this series of tips, we're examining the built-in chart features of Word 2000. To insert a simple chart into your document, select Insert, Picture, Chart. This opens both a datasheet, which looks like a small spreadsheet, and a sample graph. Now, to enter data in your chart using the datasheet, first determine what kind of data you want the chart to display. The default headings for your chart pertain to what seems to be some kind of vague financial data, with the vertical axis listing three different companies and the horizontal axis listing quarterly projections or earnings. However, you aren't stuck with these vague headings. Depending on what kind of chart you're creating, you can give the headings any label you wish. Simply click in any of the heading boxes and start typing. You can also add or delete rows and columns much in the same way you would for a Word table.

Next time, we'll show you how to select different types of charts.

CHARTS--PART 3 OF 5: SELECTING DIFFERENT TYPES OF CHARTS

In this series of tips, we're examining the built-in chart features of Word 2000. By default, Word 2000 opens a simple chart that lists three kinds of data over four periods, but this is only one of an infinite number of possibilities for charts. The kind of data you're dealing with--and the way you want to present it--will dictate the formatting for your chart.

First, you need to insert a chart by selecting Insert, Picture, Chart. You can then choose the kind of chart you want to use by right-clicking on the chart and selecting Chart Type. You'll see upwards of a dozen different kinds of charts in the left column, more than we ever knew existed, including Doughnut charts (which unfortunately have nothing to do with measuring how delicious doughnuts are), Radar charts, and Column charts. Click on any of the charts in the left column, and on the right you'll see a handy one-line description and several examples of what the chart looks like. The best thing to do when you're just starting is to experiment with different chart types to see which best expresses the kind of data you're dealing with.

CHARTS--PART 4 OF 5: CHANGING THE LAYOUT OF A CHART

In this series of tips, we're examining the built-in chart features of Word 2000. Our previous tip gave a brief overview of how to select from among the different kinds of charts. First, you need to insert a chart by choosing Insert, Picture, Chart. In addition to selecting the type of chart (by right-clicking on the chart and selecting Chart Type), you can tweak many of the display details of an individual chart by right-clicking the chart and selecting Chart Options. You can choose how gridlines are displayed, which axes will correspond to which pieces of data, and so on.

CHARTS--PART 5 OF 5: USING A TABLE AS A DATASHEET

In this series of tips, we've examined the built-in chart features of Word 2000. What if you already have a bunch of data entered in a table in Word 2000? Do you need to enter it all over again to turn it into a chart? No, not at all. Translating your table into a chart is simple, and you don't have to repeat any data entry. First, select the table by choosing Table, Select, Table. Then, select Insert, Picture, Chart, and Word will automatically launch the Chart applet using your table's data as its foundation. You'll notice that Chart creates a datasheet that mimics the layout of your table. This means you can delete your now-redundant table, and both the datasheet (which is typically invisible when you look at the document) and the Chart itself remains.

CREATING CHECKLISTS

Say that you need to create a checklist to help you and your kids plan for a camping trip. You can create a bulleted list of the things they should bring, using large, hollow squares for the bullets to serve as check boxes so that the kids can check off the items as they pack. To create the checklist, just type in the list, highlight the text, and choose Format, Bullets and Numbering. Then click the Bullets tab and select the bullet style that has the boxes.

SEARCHING FOR CLIP ART ONLINE

As long as you have a connection to the Internet, you'll never want for clip art. Microsoft's site alone has a repository of hundreds of thousands of clip-art images, organized and searchable in much the same manner as the images you store locally on your own computer. To access this archive when creating a document, go to Insert, Picture, Clip Art and click Clips Online. From there, you can search for clip art using keywords or browse for just what you're looking for. To download a piece of clip art from Clip Gallery Live, simply click on it, and the file will be stored in your computer in the Downloaded Files folder.

CLEARING THE WORD 2000 CLIPBOARD

If you're cutting and pasting repeatedly in a document, you may grow tired of seeing the newfangled Word 2000 Clipboard (which features your last 12 cuts) popping up with every paste. To clear the contents of the Clipboard, right-click on the Standard toolbar, select Clipboard, and click the Clear Clipboard button at the right of the toolbar. All your previous cuts and pastes are wiped clean. Close the toolbar and return to your work.

CHANGING A COLOR CLIP ART IMAGE TO GRAYSCALE

Word 2000 comes with hundreds of pre-installed Clip Art images. Around half of these are full-color, which is great if you have a color printer. Some of us, though, aren't so lucky, and we could use a simple technique for converting color Clip Art images to grayscale for easy printing. First, you'll need to make sure you have the correct toolbar; right-click on the Standard toolbar and select Picture. Next, select your image, click the Image Control button (it looks like four small boxes in one and appears on the left side of the toolbar), and select Grayscale. Your Clip Art colors are converted to their corresponding shades of gray.

COLOR MY WORD...

Add color to your Word document to make certain parts of your text easy to find. First, select the text as a block. Then click the down arrow by the capital A icon on your tool bar. A drop-down color palette should appear. Choose any color, and your text will take on that color.

INSERTING A COLUMN BREAK

Our previous tip explained how to ensure that your columns are all the same size by inserting a section break at the end of your last column. It's also possible to end a column before the text reaches the bottom of the column. Simply go to the point where you'd like to break and choose Insert, Break, Column Break. The text splits off and begins in the next column. This trick can be handy if you need the space in an earlier column for another purpose.

INSERTING A COLUMN BREAK IN WORD

Columns in Word will run continuously, down one side of the page, then to the top of the next column. If you want to stop one column in the middle of the page and have the next column start at the top of the page, just put your toothpick cursor in the column you want to break, maybe at the end of a paragraph. Then choose Insert, Break. Choose Column Break from the list; then click OK. Your next column will continue at the top of the page

MAKING COLUMNS THE FAST WAY

Speedy, speedy! To create multiple columns in your Word document quickly (and painlessly):

1. Choose Edit, Select All or press Ctrl+A.
2. Click the Columns button on the Standard toolbar.

   The Column menu appears.

3. Highlight the number of columns you want by dragging the mouse to the right.

Word immediately converts your document into a multicolumn document.

COMMENT AUTHOR FILTER

Group collaboration can mean a lot of noise, even in a Word document as you use the collaboration features. For example, if you use the Reviewing toolbar to look at comments, you see all comments by everyone who has had their mitts on the document. That can be useful if you want an overall feel for reactions, but may be confusing if one person likes a portion that another hates. You can switch to viewing just one commenter's ideas at a time by choosing that comment author from the list at the top of the pane.

COMMENT BE GONE

If you've been using Comments as a way of sharing ideas about a document and you're done with some of the comments -- having accepted or rejected their advice, perhaps -- you probably want to clean the document up a little. Dump the comments that you no longer need. Right-click on the section of text the comment applied to and choose Delete Comment from the pop-up menu.

COMMENT PANE

The markers of a comment -- a little note added to a document -- appear as bracketed initials or as Screen Tip highlighting. Of course that only works when those features are turned on (in Tools, Options, View). If you choose Edit Comment from the Reviewing toolbar, you open a separate pane in the Word window, down near the bottom, where the comments themselves appear. Double-clicking the comment also opens this pane. There, you can edit them -- naturally, as it is an Edit command -- and scroll through all of the comments of a document.

COMMENT SCROLL

Use the Reviewing window to edit comments, or double-click on a comment attached to a document, and you see the comment pane area open near the bottom. As you scroll through it, the main document pane also scrolls, showing where each comment was inserted. You can also jump straight from one comment to the next by clicking the Previous Comment and Next Comment buttons on the Reviewing toolbar.

RESIZING AN DRAWING OBJECT

In previous tips, we showed you how to insert a perfect shape by using the AutoShape menu on the Drawing toolbar. You should know that you don't have to get your shape absolutely perfect on your first try; you can go back later and resize your shape any time you like. Just click on the image to select it and drag one of the corner squares to resize your image. You may also notice a series of yellow diamonds around your AutoShape after you select it; these diamonds can be dragged back and forth to change the proportions of your shape. Experiment and see how you can manipulate shapes. You can always press Ctrl-Z to undo if you make a mistake.

DRAWING YOUR OWN PICTURES

To activate Word's Drawing mode, click the mouse on the Drawing button on the toolbar or choose View, Toolbar, Drawing from the menu. You can choose among circles, lines, arrows, and squares to satisfy your artistic nature.

A good tip: Save Word's drawing tools for simple illustrations only. If you need more detailed drawings, pick up an illustration package at your software store

EMBEDDING YOUR WAY TO THE TOP

Say that you work in advertising, and you've been working for weeks on several jingles for a new ad campaign. The big presentation day has arrived, but you don't know quite how to present your jingles. You can create a Word document and embed the sound files of the jingles into the document. Then, all your audience has to do is double-click on the sound objects to hear them.

USING MANUAL HYPHENATION IN WORD 2000

Using manual hyphenation, you have more control over what is hyphenated and how it is hyphenated in Word 2000. You can select which parts of the document are hyphenated and where a hyphen appears in specific words.

To select manual hyphenation, do the following:

1. Select the text you want to hyphenate manually. If you want to hyphenate manually the entire document, don't select anything.
2. Choose Tools, Language, Hyphenation to open the Hyphenation dialog box.
3. Click the Manual button, and Word immediately begins scanning the selection or the document for words to be hyphenated. When such a word is located, Word displays the Manual Hyphenation dialog box.
4. To hyphenate the word at a point other than that suggested in the Hyphenate at box, click where you want the hyphen to appear.
5. To accept the suggestion, choose Yes.
6. To skip the word and move on, choose No.
7. To stop the manual hyphenation, choose Cancel.

USING THE MIRACULOUS F8 KEY

Who in their right mind would assign the F8 key to mean "select text"? Probably the same gang of microbrew-swilling, Volvo-driving, stock-option-obsessed people at Microsoft who brought you the F4 key. Remember F4? It's the Repeat key, so naturally the F8 key should mean select text. Drink some Talking Rain and you'll understand.

Never mind! If you can find room in your skull to remember the F8 key, you can put it to good use. Try this:

• Select a word. Pressing F8 twice selects a word. But, honestly, if you're going to point at the word to move the toothpick cursor there anyway, you may as well go ahead and double-click the word to select it.
• Select a sentence. Position the toothpick cursor in a paragraph and then press F8 three times to select a sentence.
• Select a paragraph. Do the same and press F8 four times.
• Select your entire document. Pressing F8 five times selects your entire document, but why not just use Ctrl+A like everybody else?

WORD'S REPEAT KEY

The F4 key in Word is known as the Repeat key. It can be a real time saver. If you press a Word command, cursor key, or character, and then press the F4 key, your command, or whatever you typed, will be repeated. (You can also choose [E]dit, [R]epeat Typing or press Ctrl+Y.)

For example, type the following lines in Word:

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Knock.

Knock who?

Now press the F4 key. Word repeats the last few things you typed. (If you had to press the Backspace key to back up and erase, then F4 repeats only from that point on.)

Another handy F4/repeat deal: Type a bunch of underlines on-screen, like blank lines in a form. Then press Enter. Press the F4 key a few times, and the page is soon filled with blank lines. Hey! Create your own ruled paper!

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS FOR BULLETS

As long as you have Word 2000 set up to generate bulleted lists automatically (you do this by choosing Tools, AutoCorrect, clicking the AutoFormat As You Type tab, and selecting the Automatic Bulleted Lists option), you can insert several different kinds of lists with just a few common keystrokes. For example, to begin a standard bulleted list, simply type

*

and the list item, then press Enter. The asterisk will change to a bullet, effectively beginning your bulleted list. Other bullet symbols are available:

Type - to get a dash

Type -- to get a square block

Type > to get an arrow

Type -> to get a longer arrow

Type => to get a thicker arrow

Enjoy!

A KEYBOARD SHORTCUT FOR COLUMN BREAKS

A little while back we ran some tips on columns in Word 2000, including one on how to insert column breaks to format text more precisely. We gave you the menu commands for inserting column breaks, which involved choosing Insert, Break, Column Breaks. A reader wrote in to give us a keyboard shortcut that does the same thing, and we are grateful. To insert a column break, simply press Ctrl-Shift-Enter. Thanks.

MAKING COLUMNS THE SAME LENGTH

Using columns in Word 2000 is an easy way to give your documents a more professional look; having your text snake from one column to the next instead of simply running across an entire page is the first step to learning page layout. To insert a column, you need to select the text, and then select the number of columns you need from the Columns button on the Standard toolbar.

One downside of laying out text in columns is that sometimes your text goes only partway down the last columns, which looks a bit asymmetrical. To tell Word 2000 to make all your columns identical length, simply add a section break to the end of the last column by choosing Insert, Break and selecting the Continuous section break. Your columns automatically resize in a symmetrical manner.

ADDING LINES BETWEEN COLUMNS

Laying out a document like a newsletter in columns is an easy way to give it a more professional look. To bump the snaziness factor up another notch, try inserting lines between your columns.

Click inside one of the columns and select Format, Columns. Check the Line Between box, click OK, and Word automatically places vertical lines between your columns. Sharp!

ADDING LINES BETWEEN COLUMNS

We've been experimenting with columns to expand page layout options. One last little nicety before we move on is inserting lines between columns; in addition to looking sharp and professional, lines can make your document easier to read. To insert lines between columns, choose Format, Columns and select the Line Between option on the right. Click OK, and an elegant line now separates one column from the next.

INSERTING AND DELETING COLUMNS AND ROWS

Here's the lowdown on inserting and deleting columns and rows in Word 2000:

• Inserting columns: To insert a blank column, select the column to the right of where you want the new column to go. If you want to insert two or more columns, select the number of columns you want to add. Then right-click and choose Insert Columns, or choose Table, Insert, Columns to the Left (or Columns to the Right).

• Deleting columns: To delete columns, select them. Then choose Table, Delete, Columns, or right-click and choose Delete Columns. (Pressing the Delete key deletes the data in the column.)

• Inserting rows: To insert a blank row, select the row below which you want the new one to appear. If you want to insert more than one row, select more than one. Then right-click and choose Insert Rows, or choose Table, Insert, Rows Above (or Rows Below). You can also insert a row at the end of a table by moving the cursor into the last cell in the last row and pressing Tab.

• Deleting rows: To delete rows, select them and choose Table, Delete, Rows, or right-click and choose Delete Rows from the shortcut menu. (Pressing the Delete key deletes the data in the row.)

RESIZING COLUMNS AND ROWS

The fastest way to adjust the width of columns and the height of rows in Word 2000 is to "eyeball it." To make a column wider or narrower, move the cursor onto a gridline or border. When the cursor changes into a double-headed arrow, start dragging. Tug and pull until the column is the right width or the row is the right height.

You can also slide the column bars on the horizontal ruler or the rows bars on the vertical ruler (if you're in Print Layout View) to change the width of columns and height of rows.

Because resizing columns and rows can be problematic, Word offers these commands on the Table, AutoFit submenu for adjusting the width and height of rows and columns:

• AutoFit to Contents: Makes each column wide enough to accommodate its widest entry.

• AutoFit to Window: Stretches the table so that it fits across the page between the left and right margin.

• Fixed Column Width: Fixes the column widths at their current settings.

• Distribute Rows Evenly: Makes all rows the same height as the tallest row. You can also click the Distribute Rows Evenly button on the Tables and Borders toolbar. Select rows before giving this command to make the command affect only the rows you selected.

• Distribute Columns Evenly: Makes all columns the same width. You can also click the Distribute Columns Evenly button. Select columns before giving this command if you want to change the size of a few rows, not all the rows in the table.

DO YOU COPY. COPY?

When you use the Copy command (Ctrl + C or the Copy tool) two or more times in a row without doing any pasting, a special Clipboard window appears. Word stores everything copied in a special Clipboard window, up to 12 items. When you copy the unlucky 13th item, the Office Assistant displays a warning message.

To paste in the items on the Clipboard all at once, click the Paste All button.

Or you can click individual "scraps" in the window to paste those items in particular order. Pointing the mouse at a scrap icon displays information about what's stored in the scrap.

FIXING THE DATE

A reader named Ray wanted to know how to insert the date into a document automatically and keep it from updating once the document was finished. In other words, he wanted to ensure that when he opened a letter some time after he created it, it would display the date the letter was drafted rather than the current date.

The key is, when inserting the date (by choosing Insert, Date And Time and selecting a format) make sure the Update Automatically option is not selected. When the option is enabled (and by default it is whenever you select Insert, Date And Time), a field is inserted instead of a string of text, and the field is updated continuously.

CHANGING THE DATE FORMAT

A reader wrote in asking how to change the formatting of dates in Word 2000. There are many situations in Word 2000 where the date is entered and updated automatically, yet the format used by Word may not be in accordance with your preferred method. Specifically, he wanted to know how to change the dates from

July 1, 2000

to

1 July 2000

It's a simple thing to change. Choose Insert, Date And Time and select the desired date format from the list on the left. Then, click the Default button and click OK. Voila! The date you chose becomes the default date format for all your new Word documents.

INSERTING THE TOTAL NUMBER OF PAGES IN A DOCUMENT FOOTER

Many readers wrote in to tell us of a simpler way to insert both the page number and number of pages in a document footer. Our explanation in a tip a while back was rather lengthy, and while it worked, it wasn't nearly as easy as the solution offered by other readers. To insert the total number of pages and the page number in the footer, simply position the cursor in the footer and select Insert, AutoText, Header/Footer, Page X Of Y. Wow, how much easier was that?

ADDING A HEADER OR FOOTER TO YOUR DOCUMENT

Use Headers and Footers to make your document shine! Here's how:

1. Choose View, Header and Footer.

2. Click the Switch Between Header/Footer icon to choose either the Header or Footer for editing.

3. Type in your header or footer text.

4. Click the Close button when you're finished.

CHANGING HEADERS IN A DOCUMENT

Many times, you will want different page headers for different parts of your document. You might, for example, want the header to be the title of the specific chapter. The key to having different headings in different parts of your document is to divide the various parts of your document into sections. Inserting a section break resets all of your header and footer settings, allowing you to create new headers and footers. To insert a section break, simply choose Insert, Break and select from among the various kinds of section breaks.

HYPHENATING A DOCUMENT AUTOMATICALLY

To hyphenate a document automatically in Word 2000, follow these steps:

1. Choose Tools, Language, Hyphenation.

2. Click Automatically Hyphenate Document to let Word do the job.

3. Click Hyphenate Words in CAPS to remove the check mark if you don't care to hyphenate words in uppercase.

4. If the text isn't justified -- that is, if it's "ragged right" -- you can play with the Hyphenation Zone setting (but you shouldn't hyphenate ragged right text anyway).

   Words that fall in the Zone are hyphenated, so a large zone means a less ragged margin but more ugly hyphens, and a small zone means fewer ugly hyphens but a more ragged right margin.

5. More than two consecutive hyphens in a row on the right margin looks bad, so enter 2 in the Limit Consecutive Hyphens To box.

6. Click OK.

MOVING QUICKLY THROUGH YOUR DOCUMENT

There are easy ways to jump around in a document. Instead of woodpeckering your keyboard, try using some of the arrow key (and non-arrow key) combinations to make your cursor fly around your document.

• PgUp: Moves the cursor up one screen.

• PgDn: Moves the cursor down one screen.

• Ctrl+PgUp: Moves to the first line in the previous page.

• Ctrl+PgDn: Moves the cursor to the first line on the next page.

• Ctrl+Alt+PgUp: Moves the cursor to the top of the current screen.

• Ctrl+Alt+PgDn: Moves the cursor to the bottom of the current screen.

Up/down, top/bottom, begin/end -- sometimes you just need to get right there. These are the keys that do it:

• End: Sends the cursor to the end of a line of text.

• Home: Sends the cursor to the start of a line of text.

• Ctrl+End: Sends the cursor to the end of your document.

• Ctrl+Home: Sends the cursor to the beginning of your document.

USING DOCUMENT SCRAPS IN WORD 2000

One way to paste text and objects in different Word 2000 documents (or between various applications) is to place them as scraps on your Windows desktop. Simply select some text in your Word document and click-and-drag the scrap to the desktop. A scrap icon is automatically created with a handy filename. You can then click-and-drag the scrap into other documents as you need it.

Using scraps is also helpful if you need to paste several bits of text at various times, but you also need to use the Clipboard to do other cut and paste activities.

BASING A NEW DOCUMENT ON A TEMPLATE

You can choose a template in the template folder as the basis for a new document in Word. For example, if you want to create a document based on the Elegant Letter template, follow these steps:

1. Choose File, New to open the New dialog box.

2. Click the Letters & Faxes tab, and then select Elegant Letter template icon.

3. Choose OK, or press Enter, to open a new document based on the Elegant Letter template.

4. Type your letter.

SPLITTING A DOCUMENT WINDOWS FOR EASIER EDITING

With Word 2000, you can view different parts of a document at the same time by splitting the window into two panes. Splitting a document window can make navigating and editing long documents easier, because changes that you make in one pane are reflected in the other.

You also can work in a different view in each pane. For example, the document can be in Outline view in one pane and Normal view in the other.

The easiest way to split a document window is to double-click the split box at the top of the vertical scroll bar. When the mouse pointer is on the split box, it appears as an up-and-down arrow divided by two short lines. The document window then is split evenly into two panes with the split box at the top of the split.

To adjust the size of the panes, drag the split box up or down. Note that each pane has its own scroll bar and ruler as well. To switch between panes, simply click in the pane you want to activate or Press F6 to move between panes. To remove the split, double-click on the border of the top horizontal border of the bottom window.

You also can split a document window using the keyboard. Just choose Window, Split or press Alt+Ctrl+S. Then use the up or down arrow to position the horizontal gray line where you want the split to be, and press Enter. After you split the window, the Split command in the Window menu changes to Remove Split. To remove the split using the keyboard, just choose Window, Remove Split.

CREATING BACKUP COPIES OF DOCUMENTS

If you're the paranoid type who worries about your Word documents becoming corrupted (who was it who said the paranoid man is the one who knows the truth?), you can set Word 2000 to create backup copies of your documents automatically, without you having to do a thing. Select Tools, Options and click the Save tab. Select the Always Create Backup Copy option and click OK. A backup copy of your file, with the extension .wbk, is automatically created in the same folder as the original, and it is updated every time you save your original.

CHANGING THE DEFAULT DIRECTORY FOR SAVED DOCUMENTS

A reader wrote asking how to change the default directory for saved documents. He had two hard disks and wanted his documents saved in a folder on his D drive, not in the generic My Documents folder. To change the default folder for storing documents, select Tools, Options, and click the File Locations tab. In the File Types section, click Documents and then click Modify. In the Modify Location dialog box, browse your computer and find the folder you want to be your default. Select it, click OK, and then click Close.

ADDING A BOOKMARK TO A DOCUMENT

If you find yourself working on a truly huge document, you owe it to yourself to use bookmarks to get around. Bookmarks allow you to mark sections of your document that you can then jump to with a couple of clicks. To add a bookmark to a document, put the insertion point where you want the bookmark to be and select Insert, Bookmark. Choose a name for your bookmark (the name can't include spaces) and click OK. You can access this place in the document by choosing Insert, Bookmark to open the Bookmark dialog box and double-clicking on the bookmark name to jump to it.

ADDING CAPTIONS TO GRAPHICS IN A DOCUMENT

If you are working with a long document that contains tables, pictures, or other illustrative files, you probably want to put a small descriptive caption with the document so that the reader knows which picture you're referring to. The problem is, you never know when you'll want to move your pictures and captions around, so writing captions by hand can lead to a lot of renumbering. By using Word 2000's Captions feature, which automatically numbers captions, you can save yourself a lot of time and hassle.

First, select your picture, table, or illustration and then select Insert, Caption. Figure, Equation, and Table are the preset labels for captions; if you select one of these and click OK, Word will automatically insert a caption beneath your graphic with the correct label and number. If you need to use another label, click the New Label button, enter the correct text, and click OK. The new label will become one of the choices for your future captions.

ADDING COLUMNS TO A DOCUMENT

With Word 2000, you can create newspaper-style columns that make text more appealing and readable. Newspaper-style columns are also called snaking columns, because the text wraps continuously from the bottom of one column to the top of the next.

To create equal-width columns, follow these steps:

1. Choose Format, Columns.
2. In the Number of Columns area, type in the number of columns you want.
3. In the Width and Spacing area, check the Equal Column Width box.

Click OK and you're ready to go!

To create equal-width columns from text that you already have in your document, do the following:

1. Position the cursor in the section that you want to format with columns, or select the text or sections that you want to affect.
2. Do one of the following:
   • On the standard toolbar point to the Columns button and then drag the pointer in the drop-down palette down and to the right to select the number of columns that you want.
   • Choose Format, Columns. The Column dialog box appears. From here you can choose the number of columns and widths you want.

ONE DOCUMENT IN TWO WINDOWS

Word will allow you to view two or more different parts of the same document in a large window. To set up a second window, choose the Window, New Window command. The second window opens, as does a second button for that window on the taskbar.

Remember: You're still working on only one document. The changes you make in one of the copies are immediately included on the other.

CREATING IN-DOCUMENT CROSS-REFERENCE

Creating a cross-reference within a document to another section of your document is a simple matter of typing some fixed text and then inserting a reference to the item. Here's how:

1. Place your cursor where you want the cross-reference to appear, and then type an introductory text. For example, you might write "For more information, see." Make sure your cursor ends up at the exact spot where you want the cross-reference inserted.

2. Choose Insert, Cross-reference. The Cross-reference dialog box appears.

3. Select the general reference category in the Reference type drop-down list. The Insert Reference To and For Which list changes, depending on the reference type that you select.

4. Select an option for the Insert References To drop-down list to specify the information from the reference category that should be inserted in the cross-reference. Note that each reference category contains a Page Number option with which you can refer to the page where the reference item occurs.

5. Specify the exact reference that you want from the For Which list. For example if you choose Bookmark as the reference type, the For Which Bookmark list then contains a list of all bookmarks in the document.

6. Choose Insert. The Cross-reference dialog box remains open so that you can add more info to your reference.

7. When you're finished, close the Cross-reference dialog box.

FIGURE CAPTIONS IN WORD

Putting a caption around a figure in Word is easy.

1. Create a table in the spot where you want the image and caption.

2. Make your table so that it has only two rows.

3. Select "No Border" as the line style.

4. Insert or paste the figure into the top cell.

5. Type the caption into the bottom cell.

6. Resize the table (or resize and crop the image) so that everything fits nicely.

7. Select the bottom cell and format your caption as you like: centered, bold, italic, and so on.

TRACKING CHANGES

If you are writing a paper, article, or book in which technical accuracy is extremely important, you may want to have a subject matter expert review the document. If so, have the reviewer use Word's Track Changes feature so that you can see what changes the reviewer made. To access Track Changes, just click Tools, Track Changes, Highlight Changes. You can choose to track the changes while editing, view the changes onscreen, or have the changes show in a printed document -- or all three.

TURNING OFF WORD 2000'S CHARACTER FORMATTING

We've all been there: You're typing in Word 2000 and you've activated every imaginable character formatting option (color font, bold, italics, AND background color). Now, you just want to get back to plain, basic formatting but you don't want to turn off everything that you just turned on.

Well, you can easily turn off all character formatting in one quick motion by pressing Ctrl+Spacebar. This key combo turns off all formatting features and brings you back to "Formatting Ground Zero."

EXPANDING AND CONDENSING CHARACTER SPACING

When you're adding headlines or titles to sections of a document, sometimes you need to be able to play with the text to make it fit just so. To make adjustments to letter spacing, select Format, Font, then click the Character Spacing tab. Under Spacing, choose either Expanded or Condensed, then choose a value in the By box. The Preview box at the bottom shows you what your text might look like when expanded or condensed at the current value. When you think you have it how you want it, click OK.

INSERTING SPECIAL CHARACTERS

When you're working on a document, remember that you always have a multitude of special characters just a few mouse clicks away. All the most common foreign language characters, as well as accented vowels, Greek letters, and so on, are available in the Special Characters dialog box. To access the characters, choose Insert, Special Characters and select a character from the grid. Note that as you roll your mouse over the individual characters, a large version of the character appears in a box so you can get a closer look at it.

CREATING A NEW CUSTOM DICTIONARY

A custom dictionary is a list of words, each on its own line, in a document with the ".dic" extension. With Word 2000, you can use as many as ten custom dictionaries simultaneously. When you create a new dictionary, Word automatically activates it, so it is available during any spell check. If you decide that you no longer want to use a particular custom dictionary, you can always deactivate it.

To create a custom dictionary, do the following:

1. Open the Spelling & Grammar Options dialog box as before, and click the Dictionaries button to display the Custom Dictionaries dialog box.

2. Click the New button to open the Create custom dictionary dialog box.

3. Enter a file name for the new custom dictionary.

4. Click Save. The file name you entered in Step 3 now appears in the Custom dictionary list.

EDITING WORDS IN YOUR CUSTOM DICTIONARY

When you're spell checking a document in Word 2000, it's a good idea to add words like your name that you use frequently but that aren't recognized by Word's dictionary. You do this by selecting Add from the choices in the Spelling dialog box. The word is placed in your custom dictionary and won't be flagged the next time you check spelling. If you ever wonder what words you have in your custom dictionary, you can view and edit it any time you like.

Select Tools, Options and click the Spelling And Grammar tab. Click the Dictionaries button, then select your custom dictionary (most likely called CUSTOM.DIC) and click Edit. Word will issue a warning letting you know that it turns off automatic spell checking whenever you edit the custom dictionary, which is fine--we can turn it on later. Just click OK, and you'll see a text file containing the words in your custom dictionary, which you can edit and delete at will. When you've made the changes you want, close the document and tell Word you want to save the changes. Be sure to turn Check Spelling When You Type back on by choosing Tools, Options, clicking the Spelling And Grammar tab, and checking the appropriate box.

RESTARTING SPELL-CHECK AFTER EDITING A DICTIONARY

You can look at any of your Word 2000 dictionaries at any time by choosing Tools, Options; clicking the Spelling And Grammar tab; clicking the Options button; clicking the Dictionaries button; selecting a dictionary; and clicking the Edit button. Keep in mind that every time you look at or edit a dictionary, Word automatically disables spell-checking for your document. To turn the spell-checker back on, choose Tools, Options and click the Spelling And Grammar tab. Select the Check Spelling As You Type option, and then click OK.

CHECKING YOUR DOCUMENT FOR CLICHES

Even the best writers toss the occasional cliche into their writing. Sometimes it's out of laziness; other times we just don't notice. Fortunately, we can tell Word 2000 to notify us when we use a cliche by changing the settings for the grammar checker.

Select Tools, Options and click the Spelling & Grammar tab. Click the Settings button under Grammar and make sure the Cliches button under Style is checked. Click OK, and from that point forward, you won't be able to describe something as "crystal clear" without Word letting you know about it. It'll keep you on your toes, and keep your writing as fresh as . . . uh, a daisy?

COMMENTING ON A DOCUMENT

In the old days, comments were scribbled illegibly in the margins of books and documents, but in Word 97 and 2000, comments are easy to read.

To write a comment, follow these steps:

1. Select the word or sentence that you want to criticize or praise.
2. Choose Insert, Comment. A window opens at the bottom of the screen with comments that have already been made and the initials of the people who made them. The comments are numbered.
3. Type your comment next to the square brackets with your initials in them.
4. Click the close button.

CHANGING THE DEFAULT DOCUMENTS FOLDER

By default, Word 2000 first offers to save documents in your My Documents folder. While this makes sense, let's face it: EVERY application wants a piece of your My Documents folder, and unless you make some changes, the folder will soon be overflowing with stray files. Fortunately, you can tell Word 2000 to save your documents in another folder by default. Choose Tools, Options and click the File Locations tab. Select Documents, and then click the Modify button.

From here, you can browse and find an appropriate folder for your Word documents. When you find the folder you want, click OK.

ARRANGING HEADINGS FOR YOUR DOCUMENTS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

If for any reason you find that you need to arrange the headings in your document in alphabetical order (you're preparing a glossary, for example), you can do so. First, choose View, Outline View and click the Show Heading 1 button. Next, choose Table, Sort. Select Paragraphs under Sort By and Text under Type. Click OK, and your headings, along with the associated text beneath them, will be alphabetized.

LINKING DOCUMENTS--PART 1 OF 5: INTRODUCTION

It is possible to link documents in Word 2000 so that when changes are made to a part of one document, they are automatically updated in another. Let's say you have a Word 2000 document that contains a list of names and telephone numbers. Any time a Word document references one of those names, you can link the text to that master document so that if a telephone number changes on the master document, all documents linked to the master list updates automatically. Microsoft has a kind of linking called Object Linking and Embedding, or OLE for short. One thing to remember when linking documents, however, is that you need to be extremely careful to keep your files in their original places so Word knows where to find the information. Once you start moving files around, Word will get confused and not know where to look.

For the purposes of document linking, the original document is called the server and the document you want to copy information to is called the client. To link documents, go to the server document and copy the text you'd like to link (by pressing Ctrl-C). Then, go to the client document, position the insertion point where you want the text to appear, and choose Edit, Paste Special. Click Paste Link, selectMicrosoft Word Document Object, and click OK. Word positions the text as an OLE link, to be updated whenever the text on your server document changes.

LINKING DOCUMENTS--PART 2 OF 5: ACCESSING THE SERVER DOCUMENT

In our previous tip, we introduced you to the concept of linking documents using Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology. Now let's say you're working in a client document that contains an automatically updated telephone number, linked from a server document somewhere else on your system. All of a sudden, you remember that this telephone number has changed, and you need to access the server document to change it (remember, you don't want to break the link by editing the number on the client document). You can open the server document immediately by right-clicking on the linked text and selecting Linked Document Object, Open Link. The server document opens and positions the insertion point at the place where the linked text occurs.

LINKING DOCUMENTS--PART 3 OF 5: BREAKING A LINKED DOCUMENT

In this series of tips, we've covered various aspects of linking documents via Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology. Today, we'll tell you what to do if you decide, "Hey, this whole link thing just isn't working out; let's break those links." To break a link and edit the text of a document normally, first choose Edit, Links. In the resulting dialog box, select the correct link and click Break Link. Your document treats the linked passage as standard text from this point forward.

LINKING DOCUMENTS--PART 4 OF 5: LOCKING A LINKED DOCUMENT

In this series of tips, we've covered various aspects of linking documents via Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology. Today, we'll discuss how to lock a link so the text doesn't change. Locking differs from simply breaking a link because your client Word document still maintains a connection with the server document--it just doesn't update the information when the server document updates. At a later point, you can simply unlock the link to update the text, without having to go through the link process all over again. To lock a link, in your client document choose Edit, Links; select the desired link; and select the Locked option. Later, you can go back and deselect this option to renew link updating.

LINKING DOCUMENTS--PART 5 OF 5: REESTABLISHING LINKS BETWEEN DOCUMENTS

In this series of tips, we've covered various aspects of linking documents via Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology. Today, we'll discuss how to reestablish a link when you've moved your server document. Moving the server document throws off all your links, and Word 2000 gets horribly confused very quickly. To help the program find its way, choose Edit, Links and click on the document link that needs help. Click the Change Source button and find your server document. When you finish, click OK, and the link will be restored.

OPENING A DOCUMENT AS A COPY

Rather than opening a document and then choosing Save As, you can create a copy of a document from the get-go by choosing to open the document as a copy. With Word 2000 open, choose File, Open as you would normally; select the document you want to copy; and click the down arrow beside the Open button. Choose Open As Copy, and the document you open will have the same filename as the original but with the words "Copy Of" inserted just before the name.

SAVING DOCUMENTS AS WEB PAGES

Not only can Word 2000 create Web documents for viewing in a Web browser, but it can also read these documents back in for editing. When you save any Word document as a Web page, almost all of the document's information, including its content, formatting, and document properties, are retained in the HTML document. Just choose File, Save as Web Page. You can also preview any Word document as a Web page by using the File, Web Page Preview in Word. When you choose Web Page Preview, Word automatically launches Internet Explorer to view the Word document as a Web page.

SEARCHING FOR DOCUMENTS BY SUMMARY INFORMATION

Our previous tips showed you how to have Word 2000 automatically prompt you for summary information in the Document Properties dialog box. Now suppose you are looking for one of those documents from long ago, but you can't find it anywhere. You can always use Windows' own search features, but if you've been entering information in Document Properties all along, you might find it easier to search your computer using Word.

To search for documents using Word's search features, select File, Open, then click the Tools button and select Find. The Find Files That Match These Criteria box at the top of the window contains a list of what Word will be looking for. You actually enter the search criteria at the bottom, where it says Define More Criteria. Here, you can initiate your search depending on what you remember entering in the Document Properties box. For example, if you've been giving your Word documents keywords in the Keywords box, you can search for these by selecting Keywords in the Property drop-down menu and entering the keyword itself in the Value box. When you've selected a set of search criteria, click Add To List. To perform the search, click Find Now.

SHRINKING DOCUMENTS TO FIT A PAGE

If you find yourself frustrated when you go to print that letter and it doesn't quite fit on a single page, there's a quick and dirty fix that you can try when printing to shrink your document to the proper size. Go to File, Print Preview and click the Shrink To Fit button on the toolbar. Word 2000 will nip and tuck your font sizes, margin sizes, and line spacing to get your document on to a single page. And all you have to do is sit back, sip on a latte, and await the arrival of your printed file.

LAYING OUT TEXT ON AN ENVELOPE

For the most part, Word 2000 does a good job of formatting the text on an envelope if you simply use the Tools, Envelopes And Labels box. But sometimes you may need to create an envelope that requires more precise formatting. Remember that you can always format envelopes precisely by adding your envelope to your document and creating text on it as you would any other document. Begin by selecting Tools, Envelopes And Labels and clicking the Add To Document button. Then, choose View, Print Layout, and you'll see a white page that's a WYSIWYG version of the envelope. Here, you can format text any way you wish, with the same precision as in any other Word document.

Neat, huh?

MAKING ENVELOPES PART OF A DOCUMENT

Going to Tools, Envelopes And Labels is a quick, easy way to print simple envelopes in Word 2000. But for certain kinds of text formatting (such as the insertion of a watermark), you're better off making your envelope a part of your main document. When you make an envelope part of a document, it's easy to see how your text will be laid out on the envelope itself.

To make an envelope part of your main document, choose Tools, Envelopes And Labels and click Add To Document. If you then select View, Print Layout, you can view your envelope as it will look when coming out of the printer, and you can lay out the text on the envelope accordingly.

CREATING MULTIPLE COPIES OF AN ENVELOPE

A reader wrote in to ask how to print multiple copies of an envelope. He was frustrated with the fact that after he chose Tools, Envelopes And Labels and entered the addresses, he could print only a single envelope before the dialog box was reset, forcing him to repeat the process to get multiple copies. The easiest and most surefire way to print multiple copies of the same envelope is to add the envelope to your document and then print multiple copies from the standard print window.

To do this, first select Tools, Envelopes And Labels and enter the address as you would normally. Then click the Add To Document button, and you'll see that your envelope is inserted as the first page of your document. Click on the page with the envelope and choose File, Print. In the resulting dialog box, select Current Page under Print Range, select the correct number of copies, and click OK.

DOCUMENT REVISIONS--PART 1 OF 6: TRACKING CHANGES

Ask any attorney who regularly deals with contracts, and they'll tell you that the ability to track changes is one of the most important features of a word processor. Word 2000 offers great flexibility for tracking document revisions. To get you started tracking document changes, choose Tools, Track Changes, Highlight Changes. Select both the Track Changes While Editing and Highlight Changes On Screen options and click OK. Word 2000 will now keep track of any revisions you make to the document, marking revisions in red and using strikethrough to indicate deletions and underlining to indicate additions. Using this feature, you can see exactly what you've changed and when (by rolling the cursor over the revised text), and you can refer to all your deleted text later. In our next tip, we'll discuss how to accept or reject individual changes.

DOCUMENT REVISIONS--PART 2 OF 6: ACCEPTING OR REJECTING CHANGES INDIVIDUALLY

In our previous tip, we introduced you to Word 2000's revision-tracking capabilities. By tracking document revisions, you can monitor who made changes and when without losing the deleted text. Eventually, the time will come to review all the proposed changes and make a decision about whether they'll go into the final document. To review changes and accept or reject them individually, right-click on the highlighted revision and select either Accept Change or Reject Change. The revised passage will no longer be highlighted, and the change will become regular text.

DOCUMENT REVISIONS--PART 3 OF 6: ACCEPTING OR REJECTING CHANGES ALL AT ONCE

In this series of tips, we've discussed Word 2000's revision-tracking capabilities. Today, we'll cover what to do if you want to accept all revision changes at once. It takes a certain amount of confidence to use this technique, as you have to be sure all revisions are exactly where you want them without looking at each individually. But if you're someone who tracks changes purely as a precautionary measure, and not to go over in detail later, you'd probably feel comfortable with accepting your revisions in one fell swoop. To accept or reject all revision changes at once, right-click on any highlighted revision and select Accept Or Reject Changes. Click either the Accept All or Reject All button, and Word will ask you to verify your choice. Click Yes, and the changes will be implemented all at once.

DOCUMENT REVISIONS--PART 4 OF 6: TRACKING CHANGES WITHOUT HIGHLIGHTING REVISIONS

In this series of tips, we've discussed Word 2000's revision-tracking capabilities. While highlighted revisions are great for seeing how a document progresses, they can also make for difficult reading. You can turn off the revision highlights at any time to see the document how it stands in its most recent form. The revisions are still tracked, but Word 2000 does so invisibly. To turn off the revision highlights, choose Tools, Track Changes; deselect the Highlight Changes Onscreen option; and click OK.

DOCUMENT REVISIONS--PART 5 OF 6: MERGING VERSIONS OF AN EDITED DOCUMENT

In this series of tips, we've discussed Word 2000's revision-tracking capabilities. Suppose you give a document for editing to several people at the same time. Word 2000 allows you to merge each of the edited copies back into the original so you can have all the changes in one place. To merge the originals with the edited versions, have the original open and choose Tools, Merge Documents. Browse through your files, select one of the edited copies, and click OK. Repeat the process until you've merged all copies. Each set of edits will appear in the original document in a different color, so you can tell who made each change. You can then accept or reject the changes as you would normally, or abnormally, whichever you prefer...

DOCUMENT REVISIONS--PART 6 OF 6: ADJUSTING FORMATTING OF REVISIONS

In this series of tips, we've discussed Word 2000's revision-tracking capabilities. By default, Word 2000 marks insertions with an underline and deletions with a strikethrough. If these revision marks don't suit your taste, you can change them. Choose Tools, Options and click the Track Changes tab. Here you can set how word tracks the aforementioned changes as well as changes to formatting and lines. When you have the settings the way you want them, click OK.

INSERTING THE TIME INTO THE DOCUMENT FOOTER

Last time we showed you how to insert the date into the footer of your document. If you're really editing and printing that document like crazy, you may need even more specific information than the date--you may need to know the time that the document was printed.

The process for inserting the time into the footer is just as simple. Make sure the Header And Footer toolbar is visible using the method we described in our previous tip. Then click on the icon that looks like a small clock face. The time your document was printed will now appear in the footer of your document.

ADDING A WATERMARK TO A DOCUMENT

A watermark is the faint picture or text image that you see when you hold a piece of printing paper to the light. Usually, watermarks are used to identify where the paper came from--for example, a company log. They are so named, we would guess, because years ago they were created with water. But no need for messy liquids in this digital age; adding a watermark to your document in Word 2000 is as easy as adding a picture.

For watermarks to appear on every page of your document, they need to be inserted in either the header or footer. Go to View, Header And Footer. Click in the header and select Insert, Picture, Clip Art (if you're going to use Microsoft Clip Art for your watermark) or Insert, Picture, From File (if you have your own image on your hard drive). Insert the image you want to use for your watermark into the header or footer. Right-click on the image and select Format Picture. Click the Layout Tab, choose Behind Text, and click OK.

Your image is now freed from the header and footer, and you can drag it wherever you need to on the page. When you position your watermark where you want it, click Close on the Header And Footer toolbar. You'll notice that Word 2000 has taken the liberty of fading your picture just a bit to make it watermark-ready; this is because low-contrast pictures make text easier to read.

INSERTING RECORDED COMMENTS INTO DOCUMENTS

Last time we showed you how to insert written comments into a document. With this feature, reviewing a document can be like having another editor looking over your shoulder and offering suggestions. If you REALLY want to experience the sensation of having an editor in the room offering verbal suggestions, you can insert verbal comments into a Word 2000 document, provided your computer allows you to record sound.

Inserting a sound comment into a document is similar to inserting a written comment. First, highlight the text in the document you want to comment on and go to Insert, Comment. In addition to typing the written comments as before, you can click the icon that looks like a cassette tape to open a recording window. Press the record button, speak into your microphone, and press Stop when finished. Close the recording window. In your Comments window, you will see a speaker icon. When someone reviewing your document comes across your comment and double-clicks this icon, he or she will hear your verbal commentary. No yelling, please!

INSERTING THE DATE INTO THE DOCUMENT FOOTER

If you're working on a draft of a document and printing versions as you go, it can be helpful to have the date that the document was printed placed into the footer. This way, you can easily compare two documents to see which is more current.

To insert the date of a document into the footer, first go to View, Header And Footer. Scroll down your document and click in the footer. On the Header And Footer toolbar, you'll see an icon that looks like pages of a daily calendar; as you roll the cursor over it, you'll see that it is labeled Insert Date. Click this button to insert the date into the footer of your document.

INSERTING AN EXISTING DOCUMENT INTO THE CURRENT DOCUMENT

If you created a document in the past that could be of use to you in your current project, there's an easy way to insert entire documents into your current document. Position the insertion point where you'd like the new document to be and go to Insert, File. Find the file you're looking for, select it, and click OK. The file will be inserted into the body of your current document, ready to be edited.

TRACKING DOCUMENT REVISIONS

When you're passing a document around to colleagues to get some suggestions, you may not trust these people to make whatever revisions they wish. You may want to know exactly what changes they made and why, without risking having your original text altered. To keep an eye on the revisions made by others, you need to protect your document and set it to track changes. To do so, choose Tools, Protect Document. When the Protect Document dialog box opens, click the Tracked Changes button and enter a password. This password ensures that only you will be able to make undocumented revisions to the document. Be sure to choose something you'll remember, and click OK.

INSERTING AN EXCEL SPREADSHEET INTO A WORD DOCUMENT

Word 2000 has solid capabilities for incorporating spreadsheet functions into a table, but you just can't beat Excel for crunching numbers. Fortunately, Word and Excel are so closely knit that you can easily insert an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document, and even perform calculations in it.

To insert an Excel spreadsheet, click the Insert Microsoft Excel Worksheet button on the Standard toolbar. Then move the cursor to select how many rows and columns you'd like, in the same manner as when you use the Insert Table feature. When you're working in your Excel worksheet, you'll notice that all the normal Excel commands and buttons are available to you, as if you were in Excel itself.

INSERTING A TEXT BOX INTO A DOCUMENT

Text boxes are like small pages within your larger document. With a text box, you can move a discrete chunk of text around your document and position it wherever you like. They're great for charts and pull quotes and for formatting small bits of text on a page.

To insert a text box into a document, first make sure the Drawing toolbar is visible (right-click on the Formatting toolbar and select Drawing). In the center of the Drawing toolbar is a small white rectangle with a capital A in the corner. Click this, and you'll see small crosshairs you can use to draw your text box. Move to your document, then click and move the mouse to draw the box. Don't worry if you don't get it just right--you can always adjust the size later. When you've finished drawing, click inside the text box and begin typing.

USING THE DOCUMENT MAP TO NAVIGATE THROUGH A LARGE DOCUMENT

If you're drafting a large document, you owe it to yourself to give each section a proper name and to assign these lines a Heading style. (To label a heading, simply select the text, click on the Style menu and select one of the headings.) Once you've done this, you can easily navigate through your large and unwieldy document by using a handy little feature called the Document Map.

Go to View, Document Map to open this window. Your designated headings will appear in a window on the left, and double-clicking on any one of them will bring you to that place in the document.

OPENING TWO WINDOWS IN THE SAME DOCUMENT

If you need to work in two different sections of a document at the same time, it's simple enough to split the document into two windows by choosing Window, Split. But some people find it easier to work with a full-sized document window, yet they still want to work on a document in two places at once. This, too, is a simple procedure. Simply select Window, New Window, and a new window of the same document opens, one you can scroll through and change at will. Keep in mind that the new window is not a copy of the original document but a new view of the same document, so any changes you make on it will be made in the original window.

INSERTING WRITTEN COMMENTS INTO DOCUMENTS

If two or more people are working on a single document, there's a great feature in Word 2000 that allows people to make written comments without altering the text of the document itself. With these comments, you can simply move your mouse over a highlighted section of text and read another person's notes in a pop-up box.

To insert a comment into a document, select the text you want to comment on and go to Insert, Comment. A window opens to type your comments. When you finish typing, click Close. The text that is linked to the comments is highlighted, and when the cursor moves over the highlighted section a small box with the comment notes appears.

DROP CAPS

A drop cap is an oversized, single capital letter that starts a paragraph and is commonly used at the beginnings of chapters or sections of a book. Using drop caps is a great way to add visual appeal to a page, and Word 2000 makes using drop caps easier than ever. Here's how:

1. Click in front of the first character of the paragraph to position the insertion point where you want to add the drop cap. Make sure you have a paragraph of text. Word formats the first character as a drop cap.
2. Choose Format, Drop Cap.
3. Choose Dropped or In Margin. Choosing Dropped places the drop cap within the paragraph text; choosing In Margin places the drop cap in the margin outside the paragraph text.
4. Click the Distance from Text up arrow to move the drop cap text box slightly away from the text.
5. Adjust the position of the text box to have the drop cap appear either closer to or farther away from the paragraph text.

DOING DASHES

You can spot the work of an amateur because amateurs always use a hyphen when they ought to use an em dash. An em dash looks like a hyphen but is wider -- it's as wide as the letter m.

To place em dashes in your Word 2000 documents and impress your local typesetter or editor (not to mention your readers):

1. Choose Insert, Symbol.
2. Click the Special Characters tab in the Symbol dialog box.
3. Choose Em Dash.
4. Click Insert and then click the Close button.

Another way to create an em dash is by typing two hyphens in a row. Word turns them into a single em dash. You can also press Alt+Ctrl+- (the minus sign key on the Numeric keypad) to enter an em dash

INSERTING EM DASHES AUTOMATICALLY

As any Word processing expert can tell you, there is a big difference, stylistically speaking, between a hyphen and an em dash. An em dash is the long dash (the width of the capital letter M, hence the name) used to illustrate a break in a thought or idea. A hyphen is the familiar -, used to join related words or parts of words. Back in the days of the typewriter, a double hyphen was used to stand in for the em dash. Word 2000 can be set up to insert em dashes for you, whenever you type a double hyphen. Select Tools, AutoCorrect and click the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Select the Symbol Characters (--) With Symbols (--) check box, then click OK, and all your future double hyphens will become em dashes automatically.

ADDING THE DELIVERY POINT BARCODE TO AN ENVELOPE

When printing an envelope using Word 2000, it pays to add the Delivery Point Barcode to your envelope to help speed mail processing. This barcode contains information about the address of your letter that can be read by postal machines, theoretically speeding the mail delivery process. Might as well give the Post Office all the help it can get.

Select Tools, Envelopes And Labels and click Options. Check the Delivery Point Barcode box and click OK. Your letter just might get there a day early.

SETTING THE TYPE OF ENGLISH

People in the United States sometimes forget that the standards for correct English vary wildly depending on the region. For instance, when we receive e-mail from our Canadian friends, we notice that they spell "color" as "colour." So the question is, how does the spell-check feature of Word 2000 know what kind of English we're using? Answer: We tell it!

To get a look at the different standards of English, choose Tools, Language, Set Language. Scroll down to English and select from the many different types. You can click on any style of English and click the Default button to make that style the one in use for spelling and grammar checks.

CHANGING THE SIZE OF AN ENVELOPE

Word 2000 comes with a default envelope size of 4 1/8" x 9 1/2". If you typically work with a different size envelope, adjusting the size is easy. Go to Tools, Envelopes And Labels, and click the Envelopes tab. Click Options, and choose a different envelope size from the pull-down menu. When you find the six you need, click OK.

A SHORTCUT FOR USING THE FIND COMMAND

If you're working with a large document and you're looking for many occurrences of a single word using the Find function, having the Find window open during your search can be a nuisance. The window obscures part of the text, and it can be difficult to ascertain context without all the words in view. There is a little trick that makes using Find much easier in these situations. Select Edit, Find and type the word you're looking for as you would normally. After clicking the Find button once, close the Find window. In the lower-right corner of your document window, notice that the up and down arrows are now highlighted blue. Clicking either of these buttons automatically searches either up and down for your previously entered word. You can repeat this process as many times as necessary, without that annoying Find window obscuring your document.

THE FIND COMMAND

Word 2000 can quickly locate any tidbit of text anywhere in your document, from a bombastic oratory down to the tiniest iota of plot. The command used to find text is called, surprisingly enough, the Find command. This command dwells in the Edit menu. Follow these steps to use the Find command and locate text.

1. Think of some text you want to find.
2. Choose Edit, Find.
3. Type the text you want to find.
4. Click the Find Next button to start the search.

COUNTING INDIVIDUAL WORDS WITH FIND AND REPLACE

A nifty thing about the Replace command is that it tells you how many words it found and replaced when it's done. You can take advantage of that in a sneaky way to see how many times you use a certain word in your document.

As an example, suppose you know that you use the word "actually" way too much. One or two "actuallies" are okay, but more than that and you're being obsessive.

To discover how many "actually" words (or any words) are in your document, summon the Find and Replace command and enter the word in both the Find What and Replace With boxes. The same word. Two times. Click Replace All and Word dutifully counts the instances of that word in your document.

Nothing is replaced with this trick because you're searching for a word and replacing it with the same word.

FINDING STUFF YOU CAN'T TYPE

Some characters you just can't properly type in Word 2000's Find and Replace dialog box - unprintable, unmentionable stuff.

For example, try finding a Tab character. You can't! Press the Tab key in the Find and Replace dialog box and - whoops! - nothing happens. That result is because the Tab character, plus a few others, are special, and you must force-feed them to the Find and Replace dialog box.

To find a special, unprintable character, click the More button to see the expanded Find and Replace dialog box and then click the Special button. A list of various characters Word can search for pops up.

Choose one of the items in the list to search for that special character. When you do, a special, funky shorthand representation for that character appears in the Find What box (such as ^t for Tab). Click the Find Next button to find that character.

CHANGING THE DEFAULT FONT

Times New Roman is a nice all-purpose font, but it's not for everybody. Some sophisticates prefer the clean European lines of Arial, while more traditional types like the dignified Poor Richard. If you're tired of looking at Times New Roman every time you open a new document in Word 2000, changing your default font is easy. Open a blank document (if you want to change the default font for documents created in the Normal template) by going to File, New. Then select Format, Font and choose a new font and size. Finally, click the Default button, and this font becomes the default for any document created using the Normal template.

CHANGING THE DEFAULT FONT SIZE

A reader wrote in to ask how to change the default font size for documents in Word 2000. To change the default font size for documents created using the normal template (which is the default template every time you create a new document in Word), choose Format, Font to open the Font dialog box. Select from any font, font style, and size, and then click the Default button. Click OK, and the font you selected becomes the default for your new documents.

SHORTCUTS FOR CHANGING FONTS

For readers in a hurry, there is a quick, mouse-free way to adjust font sizes. By typing Ctrl-Shift-> or Ctrl-Shift-< you can increase or decrease, respectively, your font size by the incremental values specified in the Font pull-down menu. For more pinpoint adjustments, press Ctrl-Shift-] or Ctrl-Shift-[ to increase or decrease, respectively, the font size by one point.

SETTING FONT SUBSTITUTION

If someone gives you a document containing fonts not available on your computer, Word 2000 will substitute a local font by default. Unfortunately, sometimes the font Word tries to use isn't even close to the original typeface. At this point, you need to step in and tell Word how you want missing fonts substituted. Select Tools, Options, then select the Compatibility tab. Click the Font Substitution button (remember that this option is available only when you're dealing with a document originally created with fonts you don't have). On the left you'll see the missing font listed; select the font you want to replace it with from the drop-down menu on the right. When you finish, click OK.

CREATING FOOTNOTES IN WORD

Following these quick steps makes writing your next term paper much easier:

1. Position the toothpick cursor in your document where you want the footnote to be referenced.

2. Choose the Insert, Footnote command.

3. Choose Footnote.

4. Click OK.

5. Type your footnote.

6. Move your cursor back to your original text and continue writing.

A QUICK WAY TO EDIT FOOTNOTES

If you want to edit one of your footnotes, you can choose View, Header And Footer and scroll to the note you need. A quicker approach is to simply double-click on the footnote citation itself. This causes you to jump directly to the footnote, where it is ready to be edited.

MOVING FOOTNOTES AND ENDNOTES

You can make two changes to the placement of footnotes and endnotes. First, you can tell Word that you want your footnotes to follow right after the last text on the page instead of appearing at the bottom of the page. Second, you can direct endnotes to appear at the end of each section instead of all together at the end of the document.

To change the placement of footnotes and endnotes, do the following:

1. Choose Insert, Footnote, and then click Options.
2. From the Place At drop-down list, choose Beneath text to place footnotes immediately after text instead of at the bottom of the page. Select End of section to place endnotes at the end of each section instead of at the end of the document.
3. Choose OK, and then choose close.

TURNING FOOTNOTES INTO ENDNOTES

Footnotes and endnotes are fantastic little inventions that help you to insert parenthetical or explanatory information without cluttering the body of your text. The notation method you choose depends on the conventions associated with your specific document and personal preference; some people want to see the notes at the bottom of every page where they are easily accessible, and others want them in the back, where they are out of the way. You may find, upon drafting a document, that you chose the wrong citation method--say you want endnotes when you've already inserted footnotes. Do not despair; converting them is simple in Word 2000.

Go to Insert, Footnote and click the Options button. Click the Convert button and choose either Convert All Footnotes To Endnotes or Convert All Endnotes To Footnotes, depending on what kind notes you have in your document. Click OK twice, and then click Close to close the Notes dialog box.

QUICKLY INSERTING A FOOTNOTE

If you're composing a document and you don't want to pick up the mouse to insert a footnote, a quick keyboard shortcut will do the trick. To quickly insert a footnote, press Alt-Ctrl-F. This bypasses the Insert Footnote dialog box and takes you directly to a new footnote.

WORD 2000'S FORMAT PAINTER

Suppose you have a chunk of text formatted perfectly -- font, font size, type style, and so on. Do you have to go through the whole laborious process again to make another chunk of text look exactly the same? Of course not! Use the Format Painter.

The Format Painter tells Word 2000, "See the way you formatted that block of text I just highlighted? I want you to use that same formatting on this other chunk of text."

By using the Format Painter, you don't have to format the individual characteristics of text yourself, saving you time so you can do something that's more important to you (like making plans for lunch or printing up your resume).

To use the Format Painter, follow these steps:

1. Highlight the text containing the formatting that you want to use on another chunk of text.

2. Click the Format Painter button (it looks like a paintbrush and appears to the right of the Paste icon) on the Formatting toolbar. The mouse cursor turns into an I-beam cursor with a paintbrush to the left. The paintbrush lets you know that Word automatically formats the next chunk of text that you select.

3. Select the text that you want to format. As soon as you release the left mouse button, Word formats the text with all the formatting characteristics of the text you selected in Step 1.

If the text that you select in Step 1 contains a variety of formatting characteristics, Word copies only the formatting characteristics that the entire chunk of selected text has in common. For example, if you select text that's in Times New Roman font with one sentence underlined, a second sentence in bold, and a third sentence with a yellow background, Word formats your new text with the only shared formatting characteristic -- the Times New Roman font.

VIEWING SPECIFIC FORMATTING MARKS

Many people like to see some formatting marks on their page when they're working. They feel that revision marks help them to see where they are in the document and what kind of formatting is going on in the background. But too many formatting marks can make your document cluttered and hard on the eyes. It's important to remember that formatting marks are not all-or-nothing propositions; you can, in fact, select the kinds of formatting marks you wish to display. Choose Tools, Options and click the View tab. On this tab, you can select the kinds of formatting marks (paragraphs, spaces, tabs, etc.) you want to see individually, as opposed to having them all appear when you click the Show/Hide Formatting Marks button on the Standard toolbar. After you select the marks you want to see, click OK.

FORMATTING PROBLEMS

The problems that plague beginning Word users the most are rooted in how Word stores formatting instructions and is set to work by default. The first thing you should do when you encounter a formatting problem is click the Show/Hide button to reveal the hidden characters. Paragraph marks (also called pilcrows) are fundamental to how Word works. As mentioned previously, Word stores formatting for each paragraph in the paragraph mark.

The most common problem that new users face is, when they choose to change the formatting and then hit Enter, the text continues formatting the next paragraph using the formatting applied to the previous paragraph. Word uses the "select, and then operate" paradigm to apply formatting. Thus, to change the formatting, you must select the paragraph mark and apply the new formatting, or position the insertion point in the paragraph and then choose the style you want to use. Manually formatting text, however, doesn't resolve some of the problems generated by Word's automatic text correction and formatting features.

ADDING THE WORD COUNT FIELD TO A DOCUMENT

If you're working on a long paper that needs to hit a certain word count, it might be worthwhile to have the word count print on each of your drafts so you can get an idea of length when you review the document. First, move to the very end of your document, which is probably the best place to insert the word count field. Then choose Insert, Field; select Document Information from the category on the left; and choose NumPages from the fields on the right. Word automatically inserts a field containing the number of words in your document. Note that you'll need to right-click on the field and select Update Field in order to get a proper word count each time you print a draft of your document.

CHECKING FOR GENDER-SPECIFIC WORDS

The '90s were a time when the world took a good hard look at words and how their use could affect attitudes. For example, the use of the term "Anchorman" for the lead person on a news program became inappropriate, for the reason that many "Anchormen" were, in fact, women. The English language is structured so that all kinds of generic terms describe things in terms of men, and some people find these labels distasteful. You can ask Word 2000 to flag your use of these kinds of words by going to Tools, Options; clicking the Spelling And Grammar tab; and clicking Settings. Select the Gender-Specific Words check box, and Word 2000 will notify you any time you use a word containing "man" that might also refer to women.

INSERTING AND MOVING GRAPHICS FILES

You probably already know how to insert clip art into a document in Word 2000 (select Insert, Picture, Clip Art), but you may not have experimented with inserting other kinds of image files. But you can, you can. From GIFs to JPEGs to most image formats you can name, Word 2000 can accommodate them all. To insert an image, select Insert, Picture, From File. Browse through your files until you find the image you're looking for, and click OK. You will notice that your image is inserted along the left edge of your document, anchored to the previous paragraph. You'll probably want to move this image somewhere else. To do so, you have to change the image from being an inline graphic. Right-click on it and select Format Picture. Click the Layout tab, select either In Front Of Text or Behind Text (depending on whether you want to be able to read text through the image or not), and click OK. You can now grab the image and drag it where you wish.

A FASTER WAY TO PRINT MULTIPLE COPIES OF ENVELOPES

A while back, we wrote a tip that detailed how to print multiple copies of a single envelope by attaching the envelope to a Word document. A reader named Raoul wrote in to offer a simpler solution for those who just want to print an extra copy or two. Any time you print an envelope, you can immediately select Edit, Repeat Envelopes And Labels to print another copy (and you can repeat this process as many times as you wish). While this may not be the best solution if you have 15 copies to print, it is much easier if you're going to be printing only a few. Keep in mind that if you do any work after printing your initial envelope, this option disappears from the Edit menu, so be sure to print that extra copy right away.

CREATING SEPARATE FIELDS

When you create a data source, the data is entered into a table. Each piece of the data goes into a table cell, and Word organizes the data by field. Make sure that you give a descriptive name to each field so that you remember what it is later.

You should also consider creating separate fields for first and last names, as well as titles, instead of using a single field for a person's entire name. With this approach, you can use the names separately as you see fit. For instance, you might want to use "Mr. Smith" in the salutation but later in the letter make use of the person's first name, "John."

ADDING FILE PROTECTION

You can choose from three levels of protection for your Word documents:

• Create a password so that no one else can open the document without it.
• Create a password so that others can open the document but must save any changes to a new document.
• Recommend that the file be opened as read-only.

USING PLACEHOLDERS WHEN PRINTING GRAPHICS FILES

If you are working on a document that's rich with graphics files and you need to keep printing drafts of the document, you could find the toner cartridge on your printer draining rather quickly--and we all know how expensive toner can be. The best thing to do in these situations is to set Word 2000 to print placeholders for the graphics files as long as you're in draft mode. To do this, choose Tools, Options and click the View tab. Select the Picture Placeholders check box under Show and click OK. When you're ready to print the final draft of your document, simply go back and deselect this box.

FINDING FILES

Finding files is what Windows does best, but Word 2000 can also locate your wayward documents. (Too bad finding socks or a clean shirt isn't this easy.)

1. Summon the Open dialog box by choosing File, Open or simply Press Ctrl+O.

2. Make sure you select Word documents (*.doc) from the Files of Type drop-down list.

3. Click the Tools button.

   A hidden menu appears.

4. Choose Find.

   The Find dialog box appears.

5. Choose Text or Property from the Property drop-down list.

6. Choose the Includes Words option from the Condition drop-down list.

7. Type the text you're looking for in the Value box.

8. Click Add to List.

9. Choose drive C (shown as C:\) or another hard drive from the Look In drop-down list.

10. Ensure that Search Subfolders is checked.

11. Click Find Now.

    A cascading list of folders and documents appears in the Open dialog box. Or, if nothing was found, no files are displayed.

12. Find your document.

EASILY MANAGING WORD 2000 FILES

Here are three real-world applications to help you manage your Word 2000 files:

• If you have to create a monthly training report for your office but most of it remains the same each month, just use last month's document as a template. Simply open last month's document, and use File, Save as to rename it for this month.

• You probably create a lot of memos through the course of your work. Use folders to keep those memos organized on your hard drive. For instance, you could create a separate folder for each client you have.

• If you are publishing software, images, or other items on disk, you can save your customers a lot of trouble by including a text-only "Readme" file on the disk that contains important setup information or a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs).

CHANGING THE NUMBER OF RECENTLY USED FILES

If you commonly switch between a few different projects when using Word 2000, you probably open documents frequently using the Recently Used Files list at the bottom of the File menu. To obtain maximum functionality with this feature, try increasing the number of recently used documents visible. Select Tools, Options and click the General tab. Under Recently Used Files List, increase the number from its current value using the Up arrow. If you make it too large, your File menu could become unwieldy, but bump it up a couple notches to have quick access to more files.

OPENING MIULTIPLE FILES

In Word, you can open more than one file at a time using the Open dialog box.

1. Select the file or group of files that you want to open from those shown in the Open dialog box's window. (You may have to hold down the shift key as you select with your mouse.)

2. Click the Open button.

3. Work away

ADDING GRAPHICS TO YOUR WORD DOCUMENT

Images add an extra splash to your document. The downside: Putting images into Word really slows down your computer. The best advice: Add your graphics last so you'll continue to have fast speed as you create your document

ACCESSING HEADERS AND FOOTERS QUICKLY

When you're working on a document in Print Layout view, any headers and footers you've inserted are visible but "grayed out" (to show that the text lies outside the page margin). You probably already know that you can access these headers and footers at any time to make changes by selecting View, Header And Footer. You may not know that there's a quicker way to access this portion of your document. While in Print Layout view, you can access any header or footer simply by double-clicking in the grayed-out area. This both allows you to edit the header or footer and opens the Header And Footer toolbar.

A DESCRIPTION OF HEADER AND FOOTER COMMANDS--PART 1 OF 2

The Header And Footer toolbar is not one of the better examples of design in Word 2000. It's difficult to figure out what all the buttons mean intuitively, and you may find yourself relying on trial and error to see what they do. We'll give you a quick rundown on some of the Header And Footer toolbar buttons.

First, make the toolbar visible by selecting View, Header And Footer. Insert AutoText inserts items like the document name into the header or footer. Insert Page Number puts the page number into the header or footer. The Format Page Number button allows you to control where and how the page number is displayed. Insert Number Of Pages allows you insert the total number of pages into the footer (more on this later). Insert Date inserts either the date the document was opened or, if you print the document, the date it was printed. Same goes for Insert Time. The Page Setup button opens the Layout tab of the Page Setup dialog box. Show/Hide Document Text allows you to look at your header or footer with or without the document text to check on formatting. Stay tuned--more exciting header and footer talk is on the way...

A DESCRIPTION OF HEADER AND FOOTER COMMANDS--PART 2 OF 2

Today's tip will give a quick rundown of the rest of the functions on the oft-confusing Header And Footer toolbar.

First, make the toolbar visible by selecting View, Header And Footer. The buttons we'll cover today have to do with headers, footers, and sections. As you know, headers and footers vary from section to section in Word 2000, unless you tell the program otherwise. Most of the following buttons have to do with making comparisons between the headers and footers in different sections to see how you want the current section formatted. So, the Same As Previous button is used to make a header or footer the same in the current section as it was in the previous section. Switch Between Header And Footer allows you to jump between the two on a single page. Show Previous takes you to the header or footer in the previous section to see how it was formatted.

Show Next shows the header or footer in the next section. And Close--why, we all know what that does. It closes the Header And Footer view.

DIFFERENT ODD AND EVEN HEADERS

If you're creating a document that will eventually be bound into book form, you'll want to go that extra mile to ensure that your book looks professional. To create expert-looking pages in book form, you'll want to have two kinds of headers, one for the odd pages and another for the even. The even pages, which will be on the left as the book lies open, should have a header on the left edge; the odd pages should have a header on the right.

To tell Word 2000 that you want different headers for odd and even pages, go to File, Page Setup and click the Layout tab. Check the Different Odd And Even box in the Headers section and click OK. You'll then want to go to an even-numbered page and create a new header, preferably one that's justified to the left. Then, visit an even page and create another, right-justified header. Now you're running with the pros.

YELLOW HIGHLIGHTER

Wishing you could highlight an important piece of information on screen just like you did in your college text books with those big yellow pens? Well, you can with Word:

1. Click the Highlight button on the Formatting toolbar. (The pen with a bright yellow line under it.)

2. Drag your cursor over the text. The text will be marked with bright yellow.

3. To stop highlighting, just click the Highlight button.

TURNING OFF AUTOMATIC HYPERLINK GENERATION

You may have noticed that when you type a Web address in Word 2000 the application automatically creates in your document a hyperlink to that page on the Internet. This works because Word 2000 thinks that whenever you type

http://

you want to link to a page on the Web. You may find, though, that you have reason to type Web addresses for informational purposes only, and that identifying them as links in your document is annoying. To tell Word to lay off the automatic hyperlinks, go to Tools, AutoCorrect and click the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Deselect the Internet And Network Paths With Hyperlinks option and click OK.

A QUICK WAY TO EDIT HYPERLINKS

If you create a Word document with hyperlinks to Web pages and later find that you want to edit one of the hyperlinks, simply right-click on it. From the resulting shortcut menu, you can select Hyperlink, Edit Hyperlink to open the Edit Hyperlink box.

AUTOMATICALLY HYPHENATING DOCUMENTS

In our previous tip, we showed you how to insert hyphens manually into words. Keep in mind that these kinds of hyphens differ from those you would get just by pressing the Hyphen key--they disappear if they become unnecessary. It's also possible to have Word 2000 hyphenate your documents automatically. Go to Tools, Language, Hyphenation and select the Automatically Hyphenate Document check box. You may end up having to return to this dialog box to fiddle with the Hyphenation Zone (the amount of blank space on the right margin necessary to require a hyphenated word) and the number of consecutive hyphens (having too many in a row makes for difficult reading). When you have these settings where you want them, click OK.

HYPHENATION

Hyphenation is an automatic feature that splits long words at the end of a line to make the text fit better on the page. Many people leave this option turned off because it slows down the pace at which people read. If you want to hyphenate a document, choose Tools, Language, Hyphenation.

REPLACING EXISTING DOUBLE HYPHENS WITH EM DASHES

Our previous tip showed you how to have em dashes inserted automatically whenever you type a double hyphen. If you already created an entire document using those clumsy double hyphens, you can still convert them to em dashes after the fact. All that's required is a simple Find And Replace operation, using a special character in the Replace field. Select Edit, Replace. Type

--

in the Find box, and

^+

in the Replace box. Click Replace All, and your double hyphens will be converted to em dashes.

DE-HYPERLINKING YOUR HYPERLINKS

Ever copy and paste a URL from your browser into a Word document, only to have Word automatically format it as a hyperlink? Word thinks it's doing you a favor, but more often than not, it's just plain annoying. You can remove the hyperlink and make the URL appear as regular text by right-clicking the link and choosing Hyperlink, Remove Hyperlink.

MANUALLY ENTERING HYPHENS

Hyphens were a lot more common in the days of the typewriter. They cropped up more frequently then because sometimes you'd start typing a line near the right margin and realize too late that it wasn't going to fit. So, you'd hyphenate the word, in a way that made sense, you hoped, and move on. (Kids out there, ask your parents about typewriters.) Today, when words simply wrap to the next line, we're content to leave large chunks of space along the right margin. But sometimes this space doesn't look so hot, and hyphenation could be in order.

The beauty of hyphens in Word 2000 is that they are removed automatically if you edit your text later and the word moves to another line. So, you don't have to go back through your document looking for improperly hyphenated words. To hyphenate a long word manually, click where you want the hyphen to appear and press Ctrl-Hyphen (the key with the symbol you would normally use to hyphenate). As long as the word breaks, the hyphen will appear. If a shift in spacing joins the word, the hyphen vanishes.

SCALING AN IMAGE

Okay, you've got a great image that you're trying to work into your Word document. The only problem is the image just isn't the right size. Here's what you do to resize, or scale, the image.

To scale an image in your Word document, you must first select it. When you click on an image, Word selects the image and displays sizing handles. To scale a graphic with the mouse, you drag one of the handles until the image reaches the desired size. Dragging a handle on either center side resizes the width of the image; the top or bottom center side resizes the height of the image. Dragging any of the corner handles resizes both the width and height of the image.

To scale the image with the keyboard, select the image and choose Format, Picture to open the Format Picture dialog box where you can enter specific numeric values for the height and width of the image.

CHANGING AN IMAGE'S SIZE

To resize an image in Word, simply click on it and grab one of its eight "handles" or nodes. Drag the handle in or out to resize the image. Drag up or down to make your image taller or shorter; side handles make the image narrower or fatter. The corner handles move in two directions (diagonally) simultaneously.

INDENTING PARAGRAPHS ON THE LEFT AND RIGHT

If you need to quote someone directly on your term paper or need a paragraph to stand out on your report, try double-indenting (or indenting your paragraph on both sides).

1. Block or select your paragraph.

2. Choose Format, Paragraph.

3. Enter the amount of left indentation, say .5 for a half inch.

4. Enter the amount of right indentation, say .5 for a half inch.

5. Click OK.

USING NEGATIVE INDENTS

One cool way to make your headings stand out from the body of your text is to offset them to the left of the body text margin; this is called a hanging heading. With hanging headings, a reader can quickly scan the left margin of your document and get a feel for how the work is organized. One easy way to create a hanging heading is to indent the heading line by a negative number, thereby moving the heading text into the margin. Click on the line containing the heading and choose Format, Paragraph. Under Indentation, enter a negative number in the Left box (try -.2 inch) and click OK.

GENERATING AN INDEX

There are times when you may need an index at the end of your document or report. After you mark the items throughout the document that you want included in the index, follow these steps:

1. Place the cursor where you want the index to go.
2. Choose Insert, Index and Tables, and click the Index tab.
3. Choose Options in the Index tab of the Index and Tables dialog box. As you do so, watch the Print preview box to see what happens.
4. After you finish, click OK.

INSERT VERSUS OVERTYPE

Betcha didn't know that Word 2000 is usually in Insert mode. That means that any new text you type is inserted just before the blinking toothpick cursor. The new stuff pushes any existing text to the right and down as you type. This is Insert mode.

Insert mode's evil twin is Overtype mode. In Overtype mode, all the text you type overwrites the existing text on-screen, replacing it as you go.

To switch to Overtype mode, press the Insert key on your keyboard (shouldn't it be called the Overtype key?). Either the key labeled "Insert" or the Ins key on the numeric keypad (with Num Lock off) does the trick.

ENTERING GRAPHICS ON ADDRESS LABELS

Personalize your address labels this Christmas by adding holiday graphics or ClipArt in Word 2000. Here's how:

1. Create new labels.

2. Enter your label text in the Address section.

3. Click New Document.

4. The labels appear on-screen. Click where you want to insert the graphic to place the cursor.

5. Select Insert, Picture, ClipArt from the menu bar.

6. In the Insert ClipArt dialog box, choose a category and click a graphic you want to insert.

7. Choose Insert clip from the menu that appears.

The graphic appears where you placed the cursor. You can use copy and paste commands to copy the graphic to other labels as well. You can search the Web for free, holiday ClipArt.

PRINTING LABELS IN WORD

Your local office supply store offers many types of labels. If you need to print a sheet of identical labels, such as your name and address for return mailings, follow these steps in Word:

1. Choose Tools, Envelopes and Labels.

2. Click the Labels tab.

3. Choose the type of label you're printing on. Confirm the stock number in the lower-right corner of the dialog box with the labels you're using.

4. Type what you want printed on the label in the Address box.

5. Click the New Document button.

6. Format the labels if you like. This process is just like working in a table.

7. Print your labels.

FUN WITH LAYERS

Layering in Word enables you to place text or a graphic behind or in front of the main text in a document, creating a watermark effect.

1. With your document open, choose View, Toolbars, Drawing.

2. Select the Text Box button.

3. Drag to create a text box on top of the existing text.

4. The insertion point is positioned inside the text box.

5. Choose Insert, Picture to insert a graphic, or copy and paste a picture into the box.

6. Resize the text box or picture if necessary. The text box covers some of the text.

7. After inserting your graphic, select the text box, choose Draw on the Drawing toolbar, and then point to Order.

8. The Order pop-up menu that now appears contains six options that move the selected drawing object either forward or backward in the stack.

9. Choose Send Behind text.

10. To remove the default border, double-click the text box border to display the Format Text box. In the Line group, choose No Line from the Color list box.

AN INTRODUCTION TO LAYERS

If you work on a document that contains a series of text boxes, graphics, and shapes in addition to text, you're going to need to tell Word how you want the various objects to overlap with one another. Each object in your document will need to be assigned a layer, which will tell Word whether the object goes in front of or behind other objects.

The four different layers in Word 2000 are, from top to bottom:

• Foreground layer

• Text layer

• Background layer

• Header/Footer layer

The foreground layer is the topmost, and graphics in this layer will cover any underlying objects and text. The text layer resides between the foreground layer and the background layer, and it is reserved for text only. The background layer is beneath the text, and finally, the header/footer layer is the bottommost layer, reserved for objects you wish to use as watermarks. Our next tip will cover how to move objects between layers.

UNDERSTANDING LAYERS IN WORD

If you're inserting more than one object on the same page in a Word 2000 document, chances are that the objects will overlap. And when objects are placed next to text, do you want the text to appear in front of the objects, or do you want the objects to cover up the text?

To determine how the objects overlap with one another and with text, you need to know about layers, also known as drawing layers:

• Foreground layer: Objects on this layer cover up objects on the text layer and background layer. Only objects, not text, can appear on the foreground layer. When you insert a new object in a document, it appears on the foreground layer.
• Text layer: The text you type appears on this layer. No objects can appear on this layer. Text on this layer covers objects on the background layer; however, objects on the foreground layer can cover that text.
• Background layer: Only objects can appear on this layer. Objects on the background layer are covered by objects on the foreground layer and by text.

UNDERSTANDING SQUIGGLY LINES

If you make any typos or spelling mistakes in Word, you see them underlined with a wavy red line. That's Word's annoying real-time spell checker in action.

To "fix" the spelling error, right-click the offending word. A pop-up list of corrections or suggestions appears, from which you can choose the proper word.

Another squiggly line alerting you to the fact that Word thinks you didn't pay enough attention to your English teacher, is the green squiggly line. That's peskier than the red one. Green means a grammar mistake.

WORD'S STICKY NOTES

Sticky notes are a great way to add interesting tidbits or advice on screen. They don't appear in printed hard copies of the document, which makes them handy to use when two people are working on the same file.

To add a sticky note to your document:

1. Position the toothpick cursor where you want to make a comment.

2. Choose Insert, Comment.

3. Type your comment.

4. Click the Close button, and you're done.

MOVING OBJECTS BETWEEN LAYERS

Our previous tip introduced the four layers available in Word 2000. Recall that the text layer is reserved for text only, and the header/footer layer is reserved for watermarks. The foreground and background layers are the two standard layers for positioning your graphics, shapes, and text boxes. To move an object backward or forward between these layers, first make sure the Drawing toolbar is visible (by right-clicking the Standard toolbar and selecting Drawing), then select the object you wish to move, and, finally, select Draw, Order. The ensuing commands allow you to move your object backward, forward, in front of, and behind text.

WRAPPING TEXT AROUND OBJECTS

Wrapping text around graphics, pictures, or other objects (by right-clicking on the object, choosing Format, clicking the Layout tab, and choosing a wrapping style) is a sure way to make your document look professional. However, keep a couple of things in mind when you use this kind of formatting. One, you'll need to make sure that you have at least .6 inch of space between your object and the margins (to give enough room for your text). And two, you should probably hyphenate the paragraph with the wrapping text to make sure that the text comes as close to the object as possible (just because it looks a lot better).

USING OUTLINE VIEW

Word 2000 Outline view is a great way to see at a glance how your document is organized and whether you need to organize it differently. To take advantage of this feature, you must have used the Style menu to assign heading levels to the headings in your document. In Outline view, you can see all the headings in your document. If a section is in the wrong place, you can move it simply by dragging an icon or by pressing one of the buttons on the Outline toolbar.

To see a document in Outline view, choose View, Outline from the main menu.

To change how much of a document you see in Outline view, use these buttons:

• Headings: Click a Show Heading button (1 though 7) to see different heading levels.
• All: Click the All button to see the whole show.
• Headings in one section: If you want to see the headings and text in only one section of a document, choose that section by clicking the plus sign beside it and then click the Expand button. Click the Collapse button when you're done.
• Normal text: Click the Show First Line Only button to see only the first line in each paragraph. First lines are followed by an ellipsis ( . . . ) so that you know that more text follows.

INSERTING NUMBERED FIELDS INTO A PARAGRAPH

When working with Word 2000, if you want to 1) create a list, 2) list the items in paragraph format, exactly as we're writing this list now, and 3) be able to cut, paste, and move the text in the list without having to reorder the numbers, then you're in luck: You can do it. It's a little tricky to set up, but the extra effort will be worth it when you're manipulating the text later and you don't have to renumber everything.

First, type the complete paragraph without inserting any numbers. Next, go to the place where the first number should be inserted. Go to Insert, Field, click Numbering, and choose LitNum from the list on the right. Click OK and the number

1)

is inserted into your document. Click on the grayed-out field (don't worry, the gray won't appear when you print your document; it's just there to remind you that you're working with a field) and press Ctrl-C to copy it. Then, go to the next place in your document that requires a number and paste. Continue throughout your paragraph, and the correct numbers will be inserted. If you add or delete a number later, the fields will automatically update and your list will remain in the correct order. Now that's nifty.

ADDING SHADING TO A PARAGRAPH

Adding some shading to a paragraph is a great way to make it stand out, particularly if you're working on something like a newsletter. To add shading to a paragraph, click inside it and select Format, Borders And Shading. Click the Shading tab and choose a color from the graphic on the left. Be sure to choose something light enough so that your text is still legible. When you have a color you want, click OK. It's just that simple.

A QUICK WAY TO FORMAT ADJACENT PARAGRAPHS

Any time you need to format a paragraph--whether it involves changing the line spacing or adjusting the indentation--remember that you only need to have your insertion point inside a paragraph to format it; you don't need to select the entire paragraph. Any time your insertion point is inside a paragraph, you can simply choose Format, Paragraph to make the necessary adjustments. Similarly, you can format two adjacent paragraphs by selecting just a line or two in each. With the mouse, click and drag from the last line of the first paragraph into the second line of the next--don't worry about selecting whole paragraphs.

INDENTING ENTIRE PARAGRAPHS

When you're quoting large chunks of text, it helps to set off the quote from the body of your document by including the quote in its own paragraph and indenting it. To indent an entire paragraph, click in your paragraph and choose Format, Paragraph. Under Indentation, enter values for the Left and Right margins (try .75 inch) and click OK. Return to this dialog box to make further adjustments if your indentation looks funny.

REPAIRING WORD 2000 INSTALLATION ERRORS

If your copy of Word 2000 seems to have a few unexplainable bugs, a last-resort solution to your problems might be to check for installation errors. Word 2000 comes with a module for checking its own integrity. (Ah, what a feature--wouldn't it be nice if our politicians came with such capabilities?) First, shut down any other running programs, then choose Help, Detect And Repair. Click the Start button, and Word will give your installation a look to see whether it finds any problem. Be warned that this process takes at least 20 minutes to complete, so don't run the Detect And Repair option if you're in the middle of something important.

NUMBERING PARAGRAPHS AUTOMATICALLY

If you've ever seen an official contract, you probably noticed that the paragraphs are all numbered. This is to make things easier for lawsuit-happy attorneys. Instead of quoting large portions of text, they can simply say, "Please refer to paragraph 12 of your contract."

To make things a little easier for the next attorney representing you, always number the paragraphs in all your official-type documents. Doing so automatically in Word 2000 is simple. Just select the paragraphs you want to number and choose Format, Bullets And Numbering. Click the Numbered tab, select an appropriate numbering format, and click OK. Word numbers your paragraphs for you. Now, should you ever need to sub-number the paragraphs in your document with letters, select a paragraph and click the Increase Indent button on the Formatting toolbar. Word assigns the paragraph a subheading letter automatically.

TURNING OFF AUTOMATIC NUMBERING

Several users wrote to ask how to turn off Word 2000's automatic numbering feature. Like us, they had Word begin a numbered list every time they typed a number, followed it with some text, and pressed Enter. Unless you're in a line of work where you're making numbered lists constantly, you too may find this feature to be an annoyance. Fear not--it's simple to turn off. Select Tools, AutoCorrect, and click the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Deselect the Automatic Bulleted Lists option and then click OK.

CREATING A MAIL MERGE IN WORD (PART 1 of 5)

This is Mail Merge week. Monday through Friday you'll receive a step-by-step tip on this popular Word feature. You can use Mail Merge for a variety of projects -- perhaps to create a personalized company newsletter or a warm holiday letter to family and friends. And it's easy with Word's Mail Merge feature.

For the first step in any Mail Merge project, you need to prepare a main document, or form letter. Here's how:

1. Choose Tools, Mail Merge.

2. Click the Create button in the Mail Merge Helper dialog box.

3. Select the Form Letters menu item from the drop-down list.

4. Choose how to create your main document. Click Active Window if your form letter is already prepared or click New Main Document if you need to make one.

5. Click the Edit button that appears out of thin air.

6. Choose Form Letter or the name of the document you have prepared in Word.

7. Edit the document.

CREATING A MAIL MERGE IN WORD (PART 2 of 5)

After you've created a main document for your Mail Merge project, the next step is preparing the data source or making a file to store Mail Merge information.

1. First, click the Mail Merge Helper button on the toolbar.

2. Click the Get Data button.

3. Select Create Data Source from the drop-down list.

4. Click the Remove Field Name button until all the Field names in the header row list that you don't need are gone.

5. Type a field name, such as firstname, into the Field name box.

6. Click the Add Field Name button.

7. Repeat Steps 5 and 6 for each field you need to include.

8. Click OK.

9. Name your data source document.

10. Click Save.

11. Click the Edit Data Source button.

CREATING A MAIL MERGE IN WORD (PART 3 of 5)

After you've created a main document and a data source for your Mail Merge project, it's time to add data to your data source. From the Data Form dialog box, do the following:

1. Fill in the blanks. Remember the names for the boxes in the Data Form dialog box are the field names you created earlier.

2. Click the Add New button.

3. Repeat Steps 1 and 2 for every person to whom you want to mail your form letter.

4. Click OK.

CREATING A MAIL MERGE IN WORD (PART 4 of 5)

After you've created your main documents and data source (and put data in your data source, you're ready to place the fields -- or "the blanks" -- into your main document or form letter.

1. In your form letter, position the toothpick cursor where you want to place the field.

2. Click the Insert Merge Field button in the Mail Merge toolbar. A list of your fields drops down.

3. Select the field you want to place in the document. A code is inserted into your document. The firstname field may look like <<firstname>>.

4. Continue adding fields until the document is complete.

Up next: Merging your fields and data into personalized letters (finally!).

CREATING A MAIL MERGE IN WORD (PART 5 of 5)

Feel the urge to merge? Believe it or not, merging is the simplest part of the whole Mail Merge process. At this point, make sure that you've already created your main document and data source and that you've placed fields in your main document. To merge:

1. Save your main document.

2. Click the Mail Merge Helper button on the Mail Merge toolbar.

3. Click the Merge button, near the bottom of the dialog box.

4. Click the Merge button in the Merge dialog box.

Magically, Word creates several documents merging your main document with the information that you put into your data source. All the new documents appear one after the other, ready for printing and mailing!

FORMATTING MAILING LABELS

All decent word processors have long supported the printing of labels, and Word 2000 is no different. To format and print labels using Word 2000, select Tools, Envelopes And Labels and click the Labels tab. From here, you can choose the kind of label you have by clicking Options, selecting the correct label product, and choosing the type of label from the list in the lower-left corner of the dialog box. Once you've found the label you want to use, click OK. To enter text and print on the appropriate label, the simplest way is to select Full Text Of Same Label from the bottom and click New Document. You'll have a visual representation of the label page, and you can click in the appropriate box to enter the text.

USING LEADERS

Leaders are those dots and dashes that stretch from one portion of text to another, letting the reader know that the two groups are related. Leaders are used commonly on small lists or table of contents. For example:

Chapter 1.........How to use leaders

You could simply press the period button repeatedly to produce leaders (as we've done above), but you'd quickly find that not all items in the list line up properly. The solution is to use the Leaders feature when setting tab stops. When you're ready to enter a list that contains leaders, choose Format, Tabs to open the Tabs dialog box. Set the first tab stop where the left side of your list will be positioned, and the second where your right side will be positioned. Then click the button under Leader that corresponds to the kind of leader line you like and click OK.

RAISING AND LOWERING LETTERS

A cool way to draw attention to a heading in an informal document is to set individual letters above or below the baseline (the invisible horizontal line that all letters rest on). Select the letter you want to work with and choose Format, Font. Click the Character Spacing tab and click the Position pull-down menu. You can choose to raise or lower the letter according to the settings you enter in the By box. Raising and lowering altering letters can give a goofy, fun feel to a headline.

CREATING A HANGING INDENT FOR LISTS

Hanging indents are useful for creating lists where you'd like a single topic word to stand out on the left while the descriptive text is grouped together on the right. With a hanging indent, you can enter a word or two and press the Tab key, and then all the subsequent text in the paragraph lines up precisely with that tabbed character. You can always set up a table to achieve the same effect, but creating a hanging indent, in some cases, might be a touch quicker.

To create a hanging indent, first type the complete text of your list. Press the Tab key to separate the initial word or words (the ones that will appear in the left column) from the rest of your paragraph's text. When you have finished entering the text, select the paragraphs you want to work with and go to Format, Paragraph, click Indentation, and open the Special menu. Choose Hanging Indent and enter a measurement for your indentation in the By box. Click OK and watch as your paragraphs split into two neat columns.

ADDING THE ENGLISH POUND SYMBOL AS A KEYBOARD COMMAND

A reader wrote in to say that her work requires her to use the English pound symbol for currency, and she wants a quicker method for accessing the symbol than choosing Insert, Symbol and selecting the pound sign. Well, Ginny, you are in luck. There's a simple way to make the pound symbol accessible with the press of a few buttons on the keyboard.

First, select Insert, Symbol and click the Symbols tab. Select the pound symbol and click the Shortcut Key button. The resulting dialog box allows you to choose a key sequence for the pound symbol. Try a few different key sequences, keeping in mind that it should be both an available combination (Ctrl-S is already used for saving documents, for example) and something you can remember. We found that Alt-Ctrl-Shift-L was available and selected that. When you finish, click OK, and your new keyboard shortcut will allow you to insert the symbol with the press of a few buttons.

A KEYBOARD SHORTCUT FOR REPEATING COMMANDS

Any time you need to perform the same action in Word repeatedly, remember that there's a keyboard shortcut for repeating commands, and there's no reason why you have to keep picking up the mouse. Let's say you remember that all quoted paragraphs in your document need to be indented. You don't have to select each paragraph, choose Format, Paragraph, and adjust the proper settings. Instead, simply perform the action the first time and after that just select the paragraph and press Ctrl-Y. Ctrl-Y repeats the previous action on the current selection and can save you a lot of time.

A QUICK KEYBOARD SHORTCUT FOR CHANGING THE CASE OF A WORD

If you're like most people, you find yourself putting the wrong case on words all the time. Probably the most frequent mistake is forgetting to place initial caps onto names or titles. Fortunately, Word 2000, with its Change Case command, comes to the rescue. But rather than picking up that mouse, there's an even quicker way to access this function. Simply click inside a word and press Shift-F3, and Word 2000 automatically changes the case of the word; press Shift-F3 again to move through upper case, lower case, and title case.

Cool, huh?

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS FOR ALIGNING TEXT

If you're working in a document that requires different alignments for text and you don't feel like reaching for the mouse, here are some quick keyboard shortcuts you can use. Press Ctrl-L to left-align text, Ctrl-E to center text, Ctrl-R to right-align text, and Ctrl-J to justify text.

PRINTING A LIST OF KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

If you're the kind of user who constantly uses keyboard shortcuts, you'll be thrilled to know that there is a method for printing a complete list of all available keyboard shortcuts in Word 2000. There are quite a few steps, but the procedure is simple. Begin by choosing Tools, Macro, Macros to open the Macro dialog box. Choose Word Commands from the Macros In menu and type

ListCommands

in the Macro Name box. Click the Run button and click OK for Current Menu And Keyboard Settings in the resulting dialog box. You should see a Word document that contains all keyboard shortcuts, which you can then print normally by selecting File, Print.

DRAWING SHADOWED LINES AND SHAPES

With Word 2000, the Shadow Settings and 3-D buttons on the Drawing toolbar allow you to add drop shadows and to provide interesting 3-D effects to lines, rectangles, and ovals.

To create a drop shadow, do the following:

1. Select the drawing or line that you want to shadow.

2. Choose the Shadow button on the Drawing toolbar.

3. Choose a Shadow option.

4. Tweak and nudge as necessary to get the effect you want.

CREATING CUSTOM BULLETED LISTS

Word comes with a number of fonts that contain nothing but unusual fonts. (These fonts usually end with "MT.") You can use these fonts to create cool bulleted lists that give your document a distinctive edge. Here's how:

1. Create a document that uses Word's automatic bulleted list feature.
2. With your mouse, select the entire bulleted list.
3. Right-click the list and choose Bullets and Numbering from the shortcut menu.
4. In the Bullets and Numbering dialog box, click the Customize button.
5. Choose a custom bullet.

   You can click the Bullet button to pull in additional funky bullets from other Word fonts like Wingdings, Almanac MT, and others.

6. Click OK. The bulleted list is reformatted with the new bullet style.

Cool and customized!

CREATING NEW DEFAULT MARGIN SETTINGS

Word 2000 is preset to create margins of 1 inch on the top and bottom of a document and 1.25 inches on the sides. But that doesn't mean you're stuck with these settings as the default for your own documents. If you find that you're always resetting the margins for your documents, you'd be better off just creating your own default settings.

Select File, Page Setup and enter your preferred margin settings. Then, click the Default button. A little box pops up to tell you that your settings will now take effect each time you create a new document. Click OK and you're on your way.

CUSTOM MENUS--PART 1 OF 4

Word 2000's menus offer dozens of common commands at the click of a mouse, but sometimes they forget something. If one of your most frequently accessed commands remain inaccessible via the menu, then you should just go right ahead and make your own menu. It's easy.

First, you'll need to open the Customize dialog box by choosing Tools, Customize. On the Commands tab, scroll to the bottom of the categories list until you see an entry for New Menu. Select New Menu from the list, grab the New Menu entry from the right column, and drag it to the menu bar. You'll see black lines that indicate where the menu will appear. When you have the menu in place, release the mouse.

Now you need to name your menu. With the Customize window still open, right-click on the menu and you'll see a box that contains the menu name. Click in the box and enter a name for your new menu. In our next tip, we'll cover how to add functions to your custom menu.

CUSTOM MENUS--PART 2 OF 4

In this series of tips, we're discussing custom menus in Word 2000. Now that you have your menu named and in place, it's time to add some functions to it. Once again, choose Tools, Customize and click the Commands tab. In the left column, you'll see a long list of the various categories of commands, and on the right, you'll see the commands that fall into the selected category. You can search through this extensive list, choose any category, grab a command from the right column, and drag it to your new menu. When you finish adding commands to your custom menu, just close the Customize window and you're ready to go.

CUSTOM MENUS--PART 3 OF 4

In this series of tips, we're discussing custom menus in Word 2000. If you like the idea of creating menus but don't want to add another item to the menu bar, you should know that you can just as easily add custom menus to any of the toolbars in Word 2000. The process is very similar. Begin by selecting Tools, Customize. On the Commands tab, scroll to the bottom until you see New Menu, then select it in the left column. On the right, drag the New Menu command, and instead of putting it on the menu bar, place it where you like on any of Word's toolbars.

CUSTOM MENUS--PART 4 OF 4

In this series of tips, we've discussed custom menus in Word 2000. If you find that the custom menu you added to a toolbar or the menu bar just isn't working out and you want to get rid of it, there's an easy way. Once again, choose Tools, Customize. With the Customize window open, simply right-click on the menu in question and select Delete. Your menu bar or toolbar is back to its original state--right where you want it.

GETTING RID OF PERSONALIZED MENUS

Are you tired of seeing only a partial list of your Favorites in the Start menu? Do you want to be able to see all of your programs in the Start menu without having to click on the little double chevron at the bottom of the menu? Never fear; relief is here!

Obviously, Microsoft thought this feature, called Personalized Menus, would be helpful to the user for accessing recently used items. And it does! However, it hides the stuff you don't use all that often, and if you suddenly need to use that item for an important project, you may not be able to find it.

To get rid of these annoying little chevrons in Windows 2000, just click the Start button and choose Settings, Taskbar and Start Menu. In the Properties dialog box that appears, just uncheck the option Use Personal Menus.

However, that takes care of only Windows. You still may find those pesky chevrons in your Office applications. Why? Well, you'd think Microsoft's Windows and Office developers would get on the same page on this, but for some reason, this feature is not called Personalized Menus in Office. It's something else entirely -- and there's a different process for saying bye-bye to the chevrons. In any Office app, just choose Tools, Customize, and uncheck the item for Menus Show Recently Used Commands First.

USING THE MOUSE TO SELECT TEXT AND GRAPHICS

You can select words, sentences, and areas of text in Word 2000 by double-clicking, dragging, or pressing a key as you click.

To select lines, paragraphs, or an entire document, use the selection bar, which is the invisible area along the left edge of the text area. You can identify the selection bar by moving the mouse pointer to the left side of your document; when the pointer is in the selection bar, it changes from an insertion point to a right-pointing arrow.

The following list describes the different ways to select text and graphics using the mouse in a To Select A /Then Do B format:

• A word: Double-click the word.

• A graphic: Click the graphic.

• A line of text: Click in the selection bar to the left of the line.

• Multiple lines of text: Click and drag in the selection bar in the direction of the lines you want to select.

• A sentence: Hold down Ctrl, and then click in the sentence you want to select.

• A paragraph: Double-click in the selection bar to the left of the paragraph, or triple-click inside the paragraph.

• Multiple paragraphs: Drag in the selection bar in the direction of the paragraphs you want to select, or triple-click inside the first paragraph and drag over all the paragraphs you want to select.

• Any item or amount of text: Click where you want the selection to begin, hold down Shift, and then click where you want the selection to end.

• An entire document: Triple-click in the selection bar.

• A vertical block of text: Hold down Alt, click the mouse button (except within a table), and then drag.

If you begin selecting in the middle of a word and drag to include part of a second word, Word selects both words and even the spaces after them. To turn off automatic word selection, choose Tools, Options and select the Edit tab. Then under Editing Options, clear the When selecting, automatically select entire word check box.

You can select text and graphics quickly by positioning the insertion point at the beginning of the text or graphic that you want. Then hold down the Shift key, and click where you want the selection to end.

USING WORD'S OUTLINE SHORTCUT KEYS

When you're typing, you may like your hands to remain on the keyboard. Because of this preference, you should discover the following key combinations that work when playing with an outline in Word 2000 (they're the ones just before the colon):

• Alt+Shift+Right Arrow: Demote a topic

• Alt+Shift+Left Arrow: Promote a topic

• Alt+Shift+Up Arrow: Shift a topic up one line

• Alt+Shift+Down Arrow: Shift a topic down one line

• Ctrl+Shift+N: Insert some body text

• Alt+Shift+1: Display only top topics

• Alt+Shift+2: Display first- and second-level topics

• Alt+Shift+#: Display all topics up to number #

• Alt+Shift+A: Display all topics

• Alt+Shift+Plus (+): Display all subtopics in the current topic

• Alt+Shift+Minus (-): Hide all subtopics in the current topic

ALTERING YOUR OUTLINE VIEW

To change how much of a document you see in Word 2000's Outline view:

• Headings: Click a Show Heading button (1 through 7) to see different heading levels.

• All: Click the All button to see the whole show.

• Headings in one section: If you want to see the headings and text in only one section of a document, choose that section by clicking the plus sign beside it and then click the Expand button. Click the Collapse button when you're done.

• Normal text: Click the Show First Line Only button to see only the first line in each paragraph. First lines are followed by an ellipsis (. . .) so that you know that more text follows.

WORD'S OUTLINE VIEW

Word allows you to create an outline for your next big term paper:

1. Start a new document.

2. Switch to Outline view (Choose View, Outline).

3. You're ready to start your outline.

Don't worry about fonts or formatting while you're putting together your outline. Word uses the Heading 1 through Heading 9 styles for outlines.

USING PASTE SPECIAL TO PASTE UNFORMATTED TEXT

Word 2000 typically preserves all formatting when you cut information from a Web page and paste it into a Word document. While this is helpful a good portion of the time, sometimes it can get in the way--such as when you cut text that happens to be a hyperlink and Word 2000 inserts the link into your document. There is a simple way to avoid pasting text with all that formatting. When you're ready to paste, simply choose Edit, Paste Special and select Unformatted Text. You'll insert the words themselves, without all that extraneous formatting.

CHANGING PAPER SIZE

Although 8 1/2- by 11-inch paper is becoming more standard with each passing year, there are still those who must use other paper sizes occasionally. Some segments of the legal profession, for example, still use legal-sized paper in certain situations (though even this is declining). Whatever your reasons, adjusting paper size for print jobs is simple in Word 2000.

Select File, Page Setup and click the Paper Size tab. In addition to the preset paper sizes that encompass nearly every English and Metric paper size imaginable, you can specify your own height and width if you have special printing needs. When you find the paper size you need, click OK.

CHANGING THE DEFAULT PAGE LAYOUT OPTIONS

In our previous tip, we showed you how to change your paper size for special printing needs. If you work in a situation where you want to change the layout of your Word 2000 documents permanently for every new document you create, you can do so.

As you click through the Page Setup options, you'll notice a small button in the lower-left corner that says Default. Clicking this button after you adjust Page Layout settings will render your new settings as the default settings for all new documents created using the Normal template. Remember to use this option only in cases where the majority of your documents will be created with specific page layout settings--you don't want to have to make manual adjustments each time you create a new document.

PLACING PAGE NUMBERS IN THE LEFT OR RIGHT MARGINS

When you insert page numbers into a document, they typically appear in either the header or footer of the document. If you're a freewheeling type who likes to be a little different, you can also put page numbers into the left or right margin. It requires an extra step, but what's a little elbow grease when you're expressing your individuality?

To insert page numbers into a margin, first select Insert, Page Numbers as you would normally. Then go to View, Headers And Footers. Move your cursor over the number, and the cursor will turn into a directional icon. Grab the small box that contains your page numbers; drag the box into the left or right margin, wherever you would like the page numbers to appear; and release. Your subsequent pages will follow suit.

REMOVING THE PAGE NUMBER FROM THE FIRST PAGE OF A DOCUMENT

You may have noticed in the countless papers you've reviewed in your lifetime that many documents don't contain a page number on the first page. The thinking here is, when you're starting to read a document, you probably already know you're on page one, right? A page number here could be seen as insulting your reader's intelligence. And you don't want to do that. So, remove that page number from the first page. It's easy.

First, go to File, Page Setup and click the Layout tab. Next, select the Different First Page check box. From the Apply To menu, select Whole Document, then click OK.

GETTING A SPECIFIC NUMBER OF LINES PER PAGE

A reader wrote in asking how to ensure that she gets a certain number of lines per page. Her job required that each page of her documents have exactly 25 lines, and she was tired of having to try all sorts of formatting tricks to make it come out precisely. Our solution is to create a document template that includes paragraph formatting appropriate for exactly 25 lines.

Although this takes just a minute, you'll have to format this document only once. In Diane's case, open a new document and type 1 through 25 along the left edge, pressing Enter after each number. Next, issue the Select All command (by pressing Ctrl-A) and choose Format, Paragraph. Under Line Spacing, choose Exactly, and experiment with different point sizes to see which fills a page with exactly 25 lines. (We found that 25 pt. type, ironically, actually works for 12 pt. Times New Roman.) When you've found it, delete all the excess text, then select File, Save and choose Document Template. Choose a name that seems appropriate and then open this template the next time you need exactly 25 lines per page.

STARTING NEW PAGES

You can choose two ways to start a new page in Word -- the horribly-wrong-yet-obvious way and the impressively neat way:

• Horribly wrong: Keep pressing the Enter key until you see the row o' dots that denotes the start of a new page. Yes, this technique works. But it's horribly wrong.
• Impressively neat: Press Ctrl+Enter. Voila! New page.

Pressing Ctrl+Enter inserts a hard page break into your document, demanding that Word begin a new page On That Very Spot. This is the preferred way to start a new page.

NUMBERING PAGES WITH ROMAN NUMERALS

When you prepare a lengthy document that consists of sections--such as a table of contents, an index, or a glossary--it's customary to number the different sections of the document differently. Tradition dictates that your table of contents be numbered with Roman numerals, both to set it off from the actual text and to avoid confusion when referring to numbers in the early part of the main section. To number a section with Roman numerals, select View, Header And Footer, and click Format Page Number. Under Number Format, choose Roman numerals (the fourth selection from the top). Also, be sure to select Start At instead of Continue From Previous Section under Page Numbering so that the numbering of your section begins with i. When you finish, click OK and close the Header And Footer toolbar.

A RULE OF THUMB FOR NUMBERING PAGES

Page numbering in Word 2000 can be confusing. You can insert page numbers from the body of your document or in the header or footer, and in each case, you can format the page numbers in many ways. The most important thing to remember when you're deciding how you want to number the pages of your document is that if you have any information in your header or footer, it's best to insert the page number from there. When you choose Insert, Page Numbers while in the body of your document, Word assumes that your footer will be blank and it numbers accordingly. If you add text to your footer after inserting page numbers from the body of your document, your footer gets jumbled, and the layout looks awkward. So remember, if you have text in your footers, insert your page numbers using the Header And Footer toolbar.

SHOWING CURRENT AND TOTAL NUMBER OF PAGES

On some kinds of formal documents, you may want to have both the current page number and total number of pages listed on every page, as in "Page 3 of 26." This kind of notation lets the reader know both where she is and how far she has to go. Rather than inserting this kind of notation manually, there's a simple method to have Word 2000 do it automatically, complete with updates. Select View, Header And Footer and switch to the footer (if that's where you want to put this notation). Type

Page

and then click the Insert Page Number button. Then, type

Of

and click the Insert Number Of Pages button. Finally, click Close. Both these fields will update automatically, changing as your document changes.

VIEWING SEVERAL PAGES SIMULTANEOUSLY

It's possible to look at and edit several pages simultaneously in Word 2000 by using the Zoom tool. Although you would need a good-sized monitor to really take advantage of this feature, it's a nice way to see how your documents are laying out without having to fiddle with Print Preview mode. To view several pages at once, first make sure you are in Print Layout mode (by choosing View, Print Layout) and then select View, Zoom. Click the Many Pages button and then choose how many pages you want to view by clicking on the icon just below it. (Click and drag to increase the pages, much as you would when creating a table.)

FORMAT A TRI-FOLD PAMPHLET IN WORD

In Microsoft Word 2000, you can easily create a tri-fold pamphlet or brochure. It's essentially a regular sheet of paper turned long-ways (landscape) and folded twice.

To turn a document long-ways, follow these steps:

1. Choose File, Page Setup.
2. Click the Paper Size tab.
3. Select the Landscape option from the Orientation area.
4. Ensure that the Whole Document menu option is selected in the Apply To drop-down list.
5. Click OK.

To make the three columns for the brochure, follow these steps:

1. Choose Format, Columns.
2. Select Three from the Presets list.
3. Ensure that the Whole Document menu option is selected in the Apply To drop-down list.
4. Click OK.

Now your document is formatted for three panels that fold over on a single page.

MAKING SURE A PARAGRAPH APPEARS AT THE TOP OF A PAGE

Sometimes you'll want a specific paragraph to appear at the top of a new page no matter what other kind of editing you do. For example, if a paragraph announces the beginning of a new chapter, it won't do you any good to have this paragraph appear at the bottom of an existing page. In cases like this, the best thing to do is designate the paragraph to appear at the top of a page.

First, click somewhere inside the paragraph. Then select Format, Paragraph and click the Line And Page Breaks tab. Check the Page Break Before box and click OK. The designated paragraph will automatically insert a page break just before it.

ADDING SHADE TO A PARAGRAPH

If you're quoting an extended passage in a document, you might want to set the quoted material apart by adding some shading. Select the paragraph you'd like to shade and choose Format, Borders And Shading. Choose the type of shading you like and click OK. Be sure and choose a color or shade that allows you to read the original text, or the person reading your document might not appreciate your efforts.

CREATING PARAGRAPHS IN A NUMBERED LIST

If you're entering text in a numbered list and you find yourself frustrated because you need to add paragraphs but you can't do so without adding numbers, you should know that there's a simple solution. Press Shift-Enter instead of just Enter. Word 2000 recognizes Shift-Enter as a line break and not a paragraph break, and it doesn't insert a new automatic number. When you're finally ready to move on to your next numbered item, just press Enter as you would normally.

INDENTING PARAGRAPHS AUTOMATICALLY

Those who learned how to type on typewriters remember all too well the unpleasant task of pressing the Tab key each time one started a new paragraph. If you're still performing this action in Word 2000 manually, you're not taking advantage of the program's features. Setting up your document so that paragraphs indent automatically is simple.

Choose Format, Paragraph, and click Indents And Spacing. Choose First Line from the Special menu and enter the measurement you'd like paragraphs to indent (half-inch is pretty standard.) Click OK, and all your paragraphs will indent automatically each time you press the Enter key.

MUSICAL PARAGRAPHS

Here's a weird -- but ultimately very cool -- Word 2002 trick: Select a paragraph of text, or any old chunk of text. To move that text up one paragraph at a time, use Alt+Shift+Up Arrow. Every time you do this, the block moves up one paragraph. The Alt+Shift+Down Arrow shortcut moves the selected text block down one paragraph.

WHO NEEDS THE POST OFFICE?

Word enables you to print USA postal zip code bar codes on labels and envelopes to help your envelope get to its destination more efficiently. What's a zip code bar code? Glad you asked. Have you ever wondered what those little vertical bars above your address are on mail you received? Well, those are zip code bar codes.

Just choose Tools, Envelopes and Labels, and then click Options. Check the Delivery point barcode option, and Word will insert the correct bar code for whatever zip code you type in when you print your envelope.

PREVIEWING BEFORE OPENING

Did you know that you could preview a document in Word before opening it? This can be a great time-saver if you who have numerous files your sifting through. Here's how you do it:

1. Choose File, Open.

2. Click the down-arrow by the Views button (it's the icon near the top of the dialog box that looks like a little chart).

3. Choose Preview from the menu.

The Preview mode appears. Any file you chose on the left side is previewed on the right.

CHOOSING TO PRINT IN REVERSE PAGE ORDER

Have you ever printed a long document and then had to manually reverse the pages so they are in the correct order? In this digital age, having to arrange pages like this is simply unacceptable. And you don't have to. There's a little feature in Word 2000 that reverses the print order automatically.

Go to ToolsPrint Order under Printing Options, and Word will begin , Options and click the Print tab. Select Reverse with your last page and work its way toward the frontyour print job is finished, your first page will be on top, . When right where it should be.

CHANGING YOUR PRINT TRAY

It's a real luxury having more than one print tray on your printer. You can load letterhead on one tray and plain white paper in the other and never have to worry about changing over. All you need to know is how to tell Word 2000 which print tray to use. Select File, Page Setup and click the Paper Source tab. Here, you can specify which tray to use for the first page and the rest of your document (most people use letterhead only for the first page of a letter). Choose the appropriate paper tray settings and click OK

MAKING A QUICK EDIT DURING PRINT PREVIEW MODE

Viewing your document in Print Preview mode (by going to File, Print Preview) is a nice way to get a look at how it will lay out on the page before you waste any paper. Sometimes, when viewing a document in this manner, you may find a mistake you hadn't noticed before, and you want to make a quick little edit. There's no need to close Print Preview mode to make this change. Simply click the Magnifier button on the toolbar and your cursor changes to the familiar arrow; you can now click on the document and start typing.

CREATING A PRINTER ICON ON YOUR DESKTOP

One of the fastest and easiest ways to print all kinds of documents on your computer is to just keep an icon of your printer available on your desktop. With this icon visible, you can drag and drop all kinds of files to it and your printer will print them automatically, without having to launch the application separately.

To add a printer icon to your desktop, in Windows choose Start, Settings, Printers. Select the printer you have installed on your system and right-click it. Choose Create Shortcut from the context menu, and Windows will tell you that it can create a shortcut for this item on the desktop. Click Yes, and an image of your printer appears, ready for the dragging and dropping.

INSTALLING A PRINTER TWICE FOR SPECIAL PRINT SETTINGS

If you routinely print two different kinds of documents, each requiring its own printer settings, you've probably found it cumbersome to have to reenter all the printer properties every time you change documents. You might find it easier to actually install the same printer twice, but with different names and settings. This way, you can simply select the "printer" (actually the group of print settings) that you like the next time you execute your print job.

To install the printer with new print settings, select Start, Settings, Printers, then click the Add Printer icon. Install the printer as you would normally, inserting the driver disk if you have it. When you come to the screen where you give your printer a name, name it something that differentiates it from your default printer and lets you know what the printer settings are. When you finish, right-click on your new printer and select Properties. Enter the print settings for your new printer icon and click OK. Now, when you want to print using the new printer settings, you can just select the name from your program's Print dialog box.

BACKGROUND PRINTING

Word has the capability to print a document while you do something else with your computer. This is called background printing.

To ensure that the background printing option is turned on, click the Options button in the Print dialog box. Check the Background Printing box in the upper part of the dialog box under Printing Options. You're all set

DRAG-AND-DROP PRINTING

Document files in Word can be printed by dragging the files and then dropping them on the printer icon in the Printers folder. These files can be dragged from a folder window, the Windows Explorer, or the Desktop to the printer's icon of its queue window. (The queue window appears when you double-click the printer icon, and shows the status of any printing jobs.)

If you drag more than one file to the printer icon, a message box appears and asks if you're sure that you want to print multiple files. Click Yes, if you do.

If you create a shortcut on the desktop for your printer, you can quickly print files by dragging and dropping those files on the printer shortcut icon. To place the printer icon on your Desktop, drag the printer icon from the Printers folder to the Desktop. When you release your mouse button to drop the icon, a message box appears and asks if you want to make a shortcut. Click Yes.

PRINTING A SPECIFIC PAGE

Follow these steps to print only one page of your document:

1. Move the toothpick cursor so that it's sitting somewhere in the page you want to print.

   Check the Page counter in the lower-left corner of the screen (on the Status bar) to ensure that you're on the right page.

   You can use the Go To command (the F5 key) to go to any specific page in your document.

2. Choose File, Print, or press Ctrl+P.
3. Select the current Page option in the Print Range panel.
4. Click OK.

The dialog box closes and that one page prints (it may take some time to print as Word organizes its thoughts).

The single page prints with all the formatting you applied even though it's only a single page that prints.

PRIORITY PRINTING

Whew! You just finished a report that you worked on feverishly to meet the deadline. You've sent it to the printer and now you're waiting . . . and waiting. What's the holdup?! Maybe someone's document is stuck in the printer (ask him to cancel it) or perhaps there are 10 documents ahead of yours.

Tick tock -- beat the clock. Move your document to the head of the line:

1. Click on Start, Settings, Printers.
2. Double-click the icon of the printer you're using. You'll see the list of jobs waiting.
3. To change the order of the jobs in line, just click on a document and then drag it to its new position.

PRINTING A SELECTION FROM A DOCUMENT

If you're working with a large document and you don't want to print the entire thing, you can always instruct Word 2000 to print only selected pages. Sometimes, though, you don't even need to waste that much ink (that stuff is expensive!) and you just need to print a line or two from a document. You can choose to print only selected text from any document in Word 2000. Simply select the text you want to print and choose File, Print. Then click the Selection button and click OK.

PRINTING TWO-SIDED DOCUMENTS

The more ecologically conscious among us like to print documents on both sides of the paper. If everyone did this, it would immediately halve the number of trees cut down in the world, right? Think of it! The paper industry certainly doesn't want you to consider this possibility!

Anyway, the best way to print on both sides of a document is to choose File, Print and select Odd Pages in the Print options. Then you simply flip the pages over, feed them back into the printer, and select Even Pages from the Print options.

PRINTING AN OUTLINE

If you're working in Outline view and assigning headings to the different sections of your document (a good idea if you're creating a document of any length), you should know that you can print from your outline showing only as much depth as you wish. That is, whatever portions of your document are visible during Outline view will be the portions printed. This way, you can just print your headings (by minimizing lower level information in Outline view) to see how your outline lays out. You also save paper by leaving the body paragraphs off the screen.

PROOFING YOUR DOCUMENT IN WORD

Word will spell and grammatically check your document as you write it, or you might prefer to do the proofing when you're done writing your document.

To proof your entire document, choose Tools, Spelling and Grammar. You can also click the Spell tool or press F7, the Spelling and Grammar shortcut.

When Word finds boo-boos, a dialog box will appear. If a suggestion or correction in this box appeals to you, click the Change button.

ENTERING PROPERTIES AUTOMATICALLY

If you typically deal with a large amount of documents, you might find it a good idea to enter summary information in the Document Properties dialog box. Entering descriptive information about documents could be useful later when you need to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. If you like, you can configure Word 2000 to prompt you to enter Document Properties automatically. Select Tools, Options, then click the Save tab. Select the Prompt For Documents Properties option and click OK. Every time you save a document, you'll be prompted to enter description information in the Document Properties dialog box.

QUITTING WORD 2000

There are multiple ways to close your Word 2000 program. Always make sure to save any of your open Word documents before closing. Here is a sampling of the ways in which you can close Word:

• Click File, Exit.
• Click the x in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
• Press Alt+F, X.

CREATING A RESUME

To help make your job-hunting process a little less gut wrenching, use a Word 2000 resume template to create a professional-looking resume.

To create your resume, follow these steps:

1. Open Word and click File, New on the menu bar.
2. Click the Other Documents tab to bring it to the front.
3. Choose a resume template you want to use.
4. Click OK.
5. Delete the name listed on the resume template, and type in your own name.
6. Click on the corresponding highlighted text to type in your address, phone, fax numbers, and objective.
7. Continue replacing the preprinted template information with your own. To do so, first select a line of text you want to replace.
8. Begin typing. The selected text will be replaced with what you type.
9. Continue to construct the rest of your resume.

USING THE RESUME WIZARD

Who doesn't dread looking for a new job? Getting your resume together, filling out applications, driving around to interviews . . . it's enough to make standing in the unemployment line look appealing. Fortunately, Word 2000 can provide a little relief in the job-hunting department with its fine Resume Wizard. This wizard guides you step by step through the resume process and leads to a simple, attractive document. Access the Resume Wizard by choosing File, New and clicking the Other Documents tab. Double-click Resume Wizards and follow the instructions. Along the way, you'll be able to choose from three resume styles and determine what kinds of information you want to include. Once you've formatted your resume, enter your information in simple prompted text boxes, and Word 2000 fills in the resume automatically. It's easy and it works.

ACCEPTING AND REJECTING CHANGES WITH REVISION MARKS IN WORD 2000

Every writer jealously guards his text. It's enough that someone must edit, some lowly editor who seethes with jealously over the fact that the noble writer is the one who gets all the fame and glory even though it's the editor who deserves the credit. Oh, editors can be nasty. [Hey! -- Ed.] But other writers can be worse.

Revision marks are a way of tracking changes made to your document by evil people. Okay, maybe not evil, but people who change things without first making suggestions. To help protect yourself against such intrusion, you can use one of Word's many revision-tracking tools. And you can view the changes -- accepting and rejecting -- them as you go.

DON'T BOTHER WITH FAST SAVE

Fast Save is one of those ideas that sounds real good . . . until you use it. The idea is to avoid having to save everything in your document every time you use the Save command. The logic is "Why not just save the changes?" If you have Fast Save on, Word only saves the new stuff you typed to disk, which is faster than saving the whole document. Unfortunately, it can lead to problems.

To ensure that Fast Save is disabled, choose Tools, Options. Then click the Save tab. If the Allow Fast Saves box is selected, click that option to deselect it. Click OK to return to your document.

REFINING SEARCH CRITERIA TO SPEED SEARCHES

Our previous tip showed you how to search for documents on your computer using Word's Find feature. If you're searching a big hard drive or across a network, performing a Find operation can take a while unless you get more specific. The best way to speed your Word searches is to narrow down where you want Word to look. In the Look In box, try to limit the search to a specific folder, if you can remember approximately where the document you're looking for might be.

CHANGING THE LOOK OF THE SCREEN

The Word 2000 window is cluttered, to say the least, but you can do something about that with options on the View menu:

• To remove a toolbar, choose View, Toolbars. In the submenu, check marks appear beside the toolbars currently showing. Click a toolbar name to remove the check mark and remove the toolbar from the screen as well. You can also remove a toolbar by right-clicking it or the menu bar and then clicking the name of the toolbar you want to remove on the shortcut menu.
• Choose View, Ruler to get rid of or display the ruler.
• Choose View, Full Screen if you want to get rid of everything except the text you're working on. When you choose Full Screen, everything gets stripped away -- buttons, menus, scroll bars, and all. Only a single button called Close Full Screen remains. Click it or press Esc when you want the buttons, menus, and so on to come back. You can give commands from the menus on the menu bar in Full Screen View by moving the pointer to the top of the screen to make the menu bar appear. Of course, you can also press shortcut key combinations and right-click to see shortcut menus.

SPLITTING YOUR SCREEN IN WORD

Splitting the screen allows you to view two parts of your document in one window! Here's how:

1. Place the mouse cursor on the little gray thing located just above the up-arrow button on the vertical scroll bar (on the upper-right side of your document).
2. Hold down the left mouse button and drag the pointer down.
3. About halfway down, release the mouse button

SHORTCUTS FOR SELECTING ROWS AND COLUMNS

Selecting cells, rows, and columns in Word can be a little tricky until you get the hang of it. Fortunately, some easy keyboard shortcuts allow you to select what you need without having to be precise with your mouse. To select a column, just hold down the Alt key while clicking in a column. To select a row, position your cursor in the first cell of the row and press Alt-Shift-End. To select a single cell or several cells in a row, position your cursor in a cell and hold down the Shift key while moving the arrows.

SEARCHING FOR SIMILAR-SOUNDING WORDS

If you find yourself working on a Word document that's extremely long and unwieldy, it can be difficult to find a specific, barely remembered word such as a person's name. You might just have a vague idea of what the word sounds like and nothing else. If so, Word 2000 has a feature for you.

Try searching for a word that sounds something like the name in question. Word 2000 has a primitive "Sounds Like" feature in its searching capability, which searches for words with similar pronunciation. Give it a shot. Select Edit, Find and click the More tab. Select the Sounds Like check box and click OK. Word will scour your document, looking for an occurrence of a similar-sounding word.

With any luck, you'll find the name you're looking for.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF SECTION BREAKS

Most kinds of large-scale formatting you do to a Word document apply to the section in which they were applied. If you're working in simple documents with a single section, you need never worry about how section breaks work. But if you're working in a document with any complexity, you'll probably want to break your document into sections by table of contents, chapters and indexes, and so on.

By breaking your document into sections, you can be sure that each section can be formatted exactly how you like without worrying how it will affect the rest of your document. To add a section break to a document, simply choose Insert, Break. The resulting dialog box allows you to choose from several kinds of section breaks. Next Page inserts a page break and begins the section on the next page. Continuous begins a new section but doesn't break the page. Even Page and Odd Page insert a section break on the next even or odd page, respectively. Use these breaks for printed material or reports where you want your new section to begin on a certain page (think of books, where chapters usually begin on odd pages).

USING SECTION BREAKS TO CHANGE PAGE ORIENTATION

A reader wrote in to ask how to insert a table into a document that uses a different printing orientation than the rest of the document. He needed to construct his table in the Portrait format in order to fit all of his information. The key to changing the orientation of a specific page is to insert section breaks before and after the page you want to change. Then, you can simply go to Page Layout to change the orientation of that page and apply it to the section only.

Good luck!

ADDING A SHADOW TO AN OBJECT

In our previous tip, we showed you a quick way to put a border around a picture. For an even fancier look, you can also add a drop shadow to a picture in a Word 2000 document. First, make sure you have access to the Drawing toolbar by right-clicking on the Standard toolbar and selecting Drawing. Next, select your picture or object by clicking on it. Then, click the Shadow icon on the Drawing toolbar (it's the one on the right with a slight drop shadow on it). From here, you can select the type and direction of the shadow; when you find one you like, click OK. Now doesn't that look nice?

SNAPPING OBJECTS TO A GRID--PART 1 OF 2

If you're aligning objects of any type--be they Clip Art, drawings, or text boxes--you can keep all your objects perfectly aligned by designating them to "snap to grid." When you tell Word to snap objects to a grid, the program creates invisible gridlines throughout your document, and all objects are forced to line up on this grid. This is a simple way to make sure objects line up, because you never need to look hard to make sure an alignment is perfect (the grid removes doubt by moving objects that almost line up into place).

To tell Word to snap your objects to a grid, have the Drawing toolbar open (by right-clicking on the Standard toolbar and selecting it). Choose Draw, Grid on the Drawing toolbar; select the Snap Objects To Grid option; and click OK.

SNAPPING OBJECTS TO A GRID--PART 2 OF 2

Our previous tip showed you how to snap objects in your documents to grid in order to line them up properly. Of course, the downside to the snap grid feature is that you don't get much play with where you position your objects exactly. If the invisible gridlines are too far apart, you may find yourself having to choose between two equally undesirable positions for your object. Fortunately, you can decrease the size of the gridlines for more precise alignment. On the Drawing toolbar, choose Draw, Grid. You can adjust the horizontal and vertical spacing of your grid; the smaller the spacing, the more precisely you'll be able to position your documents using snap to grid. Click OK when you've finished.

ADDING AN EMAIL SIGNATURE

As you may already know, Word 2000 provides a host of Internet functionality, including the capability to email documents directly from Word. You can even use Word 2000 to create an email signature file to be included with your messages. Start by selecting Tools, Options and clicking the General tab. Next, click Email Options and enter a name for your new signature (such as Standard Business Signature) in the line at the top of the dialog box. Enter the content of the signature itself in the larger box below (you can format the text using the formatting buttons above the box). When you finish, click OK. Your email signature becomes an AutoText entry, and you can insert your email signature into any document by choosing Insert, AutoText, Email Signatures and clicking the desired signature.

USING SPELL CHECK

You can find and correct all the spelling and grammar errors in your Word 2000 document at once. To check the spelling in your document, follow these steps:

1. Click the Spell Check button on the toolbar, press F7 or choose Tools, Spelling and Grammar from the menu.

   The Spelling and Grammar dialog box only appears if Word finds an error in your document.

2. To select one of the suggestions to correct an error, click the suggestion.
3. Click the Change button to correct the error in your document. To skip the error and continue checking your document, click the Ignore button.
4. Correct or ignore spelling and grammar errors until the dialog box appears, telling you that the spelling and grammar check is complete.
5. Click OK to close the dialog box.

USING THE DECIMAL TAB SETTING

If you find yourself creating an indented list that contains numbers, it might be helpful to make sure the numbers all line up on the decimal point, just the way your teacher showed you back in math class. Setting tab stops to align along the decimal points is a relatively painless procedure. Select Format, Tabs, then set a Tab Stop position and click the Decimal button. All numbers that you enter after tabbing to your set position will automatically line up along the decimal place. Neat, huh?

SETTING A DECIMAL TAB IN WORD 2000

Without Microsoft Word's decimal tabs, columns of numbers would never match up. This Word feature is a serious boon to anyone who writes a financial summary report, for example.

To begin, you need to set the tabs. Here's how:

To set tabs, click on the ruler. By default, the tab will be a left tab (which looks like a lowercase "L"). Click on the ruler three times, at whatever interval suits you. Then change the tab type of the last tab to decimal. To change the tab type, double click the little "L" on the ruler, opening the Tabs dialog box. Next, select the type of tab you want -- Decimal is one of the choices.

You work with a decimal tab just like any other tab. The difference is that the text to the left of the decimal comes before the tab stop and text after the decimal goes to the right.

For example, type Sweater, Tab, Mom, Tab, and then $30.00. Press the first tab, a left tab, and line up Mom on the left with other text in the column. Press Tab again to move the text over to the decimal tab stop at 3" (see the ruler). Type $30 and it moves to the left. But when you type the decimal, that determines the tab "stop," and the rest of the number moves to the right.

If you need to rearrange things (perhaps the columns are too close together), select all the lines with numbers as a block. Use your mouse to slide the decimal tab left or right on the ruler. You can then realign the numbers in the selected block all at once.

A QUICK METHOD FOR REMOVING TAB STOPS

When you add a tab stop to the ruler in Word 2000 by clicking on the ruler, sometimes you find that the tab isn't quite where you want it. Rather than selecting tab stops and deleting them manually, the fast and easy way to get rid of them is to drag them off the ruler with the mouse by hand. Once a tab stop has left the ruler, it loses its reason for existence and vanishes.

FLAGGING TEXT EDITS WITH WORD 2000

Go ahead and put away the magnifying glass. When someone else returns your Word document to you, it's a cinch to have Word 2000 compare the "new" document with your pristine original. Word flags any changes, displaying them for you right on the screen. Here's how:

1. Make sure that you have the edited (newer) document loaded and on the screen.

   The original document should be saved to your hard disk. You don't need to open it. Just open the edited document and have it on the screen in front of you.

2. Choose Tools, Track Changes, Compare Documents.

   You may have to click the down arrows at the menu's foot to see the Track Changes command.

   An Open dialog box appears, although it's named "Select File to Compare With Current Document" and not "Open." Use your finely honed Open dialog box skills to find and select the original document on disk.

3. Click the Open button.

   Word thinks long and hard. What it's doing is comparing the document on the screen with the older copy on your hard disk.

4. Peruse the changes.

   If you can't see any changes, go to your toolbar and choose Tools, Track Changes, Highlight Changes. Put a check mark by Highlight Changes on Screen; then click OK.

Ah-ha, the revision-marked-up result! The edited document on your screen is littered with revision marks, showing exactly what changes were made from the original.

Any new text added appears underlined. Text deleted appears crossed out (the strikethrough-text effect). Unchanged text remains the same.

REMOVING HIGHLIGHTED TEXT PRIOR TO PRINTING A DOCUMENT

In our last tip, we showed you how to use the Highlighting tool to point out important text in a document. If you try to print a document with highlights, you'll notice that the highlights don't look so hot on the page. So before you print, you can remove the highlights from your document by selecting the document, clicking the small arrow next to the Highlighting icon, and selecting None. If you want to keep the highlights but don't want them to show up when you print, you can hide them temporarily. Go to Tools, Options, View and deselect the Highlights option.

SELECTING TEXT IN TRICKY SITUATIONS

In certain situations, such as when you're working with a tightly packed table, selecting passages of text with precision with the mouse can be difficult. There's a handy trick to help you through these trying times. Place the insertion point where you want the selection to start, press F8, and click the insertion point where you want the selection to end. All text in between these two points will be selected, and you needn't worry about the clumsiness of the mouse.

TIME TRAVEL - WORD 2000 STYLE

We've all been there: You're typing in Word 2000 and you've activated every imaginable character formatting option (color font, bold, italics, AND background color). Now, you just want to get back to plain, basic formatting but you don't want to turn off everything that you just turned on.

Well, you can easily turn off all character formatting in one quick motion by pressing Ctrl + spacebar. This key combo turns off all formatting features and brings you back to "Formatting Ground Zero."

PRINTING A SEPARATOR PAGE FOR YOUR PRINT JOBS

If you work in a crowded office with many people sharing the same printer, you know what it's like to stand around and wait to see when your job will emerge. There's a handy feature in Windows that allows you to print a separator page for your documents, so you can easily pick apart which pages belong to whom. Click the Start button on the Windows taskbar and go to Settings, Printers. Right-click on your printer icon and select Properties. Click the General tab and select a style from the Separator Page pull-down menu. Simple separator pages are blank sheets with "Separator Page" printed on them; full separator pages have large-print text.

ADDING SOUND TO A WEB PAGE

If you are using Word 2000 to build your home page, you may find that you want to liven things up with a little music. After all, they say it tames the beast. Inserting some background sounds into your Web page is pretty simple, but keep in mind that sound means bandwidth, and a long stretch of music might have visitors to your site waiting impatiently for the download to finish--and that could definitely enrage the beast you're trying to tame.

INSERTING A BACKGROUND SOUND INTO A WEB PAGE

To insert a background sound into your Web page, you will need access to the Web Tools toolbar (right-click the Formatting toolbar and select Web Tools). Click the Sound icon (it looks like a tiny speaker) and browse for the sound you want to insert. The C:\\Windows\Media folder has a selection of pre-installed sound and music files. Select a file from here, or navigate to a sound file you created previously. After selecting your sound file, you need to specify how many times you want this file to play when someone visits your Web page by entering a number under Loop. When you finish, click OK.

CHANGING THE POSITION OF A VIDEO CLIP ON A WEB PAGE

In our previous tip, we showed you how to add a video clip to spice up a Web page using Word 2000. After you've inserted your video clip, you might find that the clip itself would look better somewhere else on the page. You don't have to repeat the entire process for inserting a video clip; instead, you can simply use the Design Mode button on the Web Tools toolbar. First, make sure the Web Tools toolbar is visible. Then, click on the button in the upper-left corner that looks like a drafting tool. You can now move the video clip window to any point on your document. If your video clip refuses to move, try right-clicking on it and selecting Format Control. Click the Layout tab and select In Front Of Text. You should now be able to position the video file wherever you like.

QUICKLY DELETING A WORD

You know you pride yourself on how fast you can crank out a document using Word 2000. Well, here's a handy speed tip that allows you to quickly delete entire words with little effort. Simply press Ctrl-Backspace to delete the word to the left of the insertion point or Ctrl-Delete to quickly delete the word to the right.

HIGHLIGHTING WORDS IN A DOCUMENT

Remember those yellow felt-tip pens that you used to highlight the important stuff in a large body of text? Well, in Word 2000 there is a digital equivalent. The highlighting feature is particularly useful for indicating key lines in a document that will be edited or reviewed by someone else prior to completion.

The quick way to highlight a chunk of text is to select the desired text and click the Highlight icon on the Formatting toolbar (it's the one that looks like a marker with the florescent yellow line underneath). If you are going to be doing a lot of highlighting, you can click the small arrow next to the Highlight icon to select a color and turn your cursor into a Highlighting tool. With the tool, simply click and hold to move the highlighter over text, just the way you used to with those smelly markers. Oh, by the way, we don't recommend using black to highlight important passages in your document.

SENDING A DOCUMENT TO POWERPOINT

Microsoft's Office applications are tightly integrated these days, and what's generally true of the suite is true of Word 2000 and PowerPoint. In fact, you can move the text from any document into a PowerPoint file (as long as you have PowerPoint 2000 installed) by choosing File, Send To, PowerPoint. If you've configured your original document correctly, each page of your Word document should correspond to a PowerPoint slide, and some of your original formatting is even preserved. You'll have to do plenty of tweaking, of course, but it's nice to know you can get your text over to PowerPoint so quickly and painlessly.

MAKING A THREE-DIMENSIONAL SHAPE

Although the Drawing toolbar is great for making all manner of rectangles, ellipses, and so on, you should know that you can easily transform any two-dimensional object of your choice into a 3-D shape. All you have to do is select the 2-D object and click the 3-D icon on the Drawing toolbar. You can select the direction and angle for your other dimensions, and by clicking 3-D Settings you can even customize the tilt, depth, and direction and lighting for your shape.

A SHORTCUT TO MAKE YOU SMILE

Can we agree that not every Word 2000 tip has to help you navigate a life-or-death word processing situation? Can't some tips be just about fun? Yes? Good. Here's a fun little tip using Word 2000's AutoText feature. Any time you type

:)

with AutoText on, Word 2000 will automatically replace the clumsy, antiquated "emoticon" with a genuine, upright, circle-and-two eyes smiley face. Now wasn't that fun?

INSERTING A QUICK TABLE

To quickly create an empty table in your document you can use the Insert Table button on the toolbar or choose Table, Insert, Table from the main menu.

Either clicking the Insert Table button or choosing from the menu displays a drop-down list thing. Drag the mouse through the thing to tell Word how big a table you want to create.

TELLING THE SPELL-CHECKER TO IGNORE TEXT

If you have a long passage in a document that consists of intentionally misspelled words (a phonetic transcription of speech, for example, or a passage of computer code), it can get annoying having all those red squiggly lines marring the page. And then when you run the spell-checker, having to click Ignore repeatedly through that section is a time-waster. To avoid these headaches, tell the Word 2000 spell-checker to ignore that passage of text. First, select the text you don't want spell-checked. Next, choose Tools, Language, Set Language. Then, select the Do Not Check Spelling Or Grammar option and click OK.

TURNING OFF THE SPELL-CHECKER FOR PASSAGES OF TEXT

When you quote a passage of text in a document that you know is going to be riddled with spelling errors (it's in another language, for example, or it's loaded with very specific jargon), you're better off telling Word 2000 to simply ignore the passage when it checks spelling and grammar. To do so, first select the text and then choose Tools, Language, Set Language. Select the Do Not Check Spelling Or Grammar check box and click OK. The next time you check spelling, this passage will be skipped.

THE UNDO FEATURE

Word 2000 remembers the last changes you made to your document. If you regret these changes, you can cancel them by using the Undo feature. The Undo feature can cancel your last editing and formatting changes. To use the Undo feature, follow these steps:

1. Choose Edit, Undo Typing, or press Ctrl+Z. Word cancels the last change you made to your document.
2. Repeat Step 1 can cancel previous changes that you made.

To reverse using the Undo feature, choose Edit, Repeat Typing, or press Ctrl+Y.

UNDOING SPELLING CHANGES

If you're cruising along, rapidly correcting your spelling mistakes in your Word document, don't be alarmed if you accidentally click Change when the original word was just fine. You can easily undo your most recent spelling changes when running the spell checker by clicking the Undo button. Click it as many times as you wish to get back to your error. Whew!

USING THE SPIKE

A neat feature of Word 2000 is the ability to hold up to 12 items in the Clipboard simultaneously. This vast storage space should be plenty for all your cut and copy needs, but if somehow you find that you want to cut or copy more than 12 items of text onto the Clipboard at one time, there's another Word tool for you: It's called the Spike.

Fear not, the Spike is not dangerous! The Spike is merely a specialized clipboard that allows you to cut an unlimited amount of material to it. The catch is, though the Spike can hold as much text as you like, it will always paste everything that has been copied to it at one time, in the order that you copied to it.

To cut text to the Spike, select text and press Ctrl-F3. Continue to load the Spike in this manner until you've copied all the text you need. When you've finished moving the text into the Spike, press Ctrl-Shift-F3 to empty the Spike in one vast chunk into your document.

INSERTING BLANK SPACE ABOVE A TABLE

In older versions of Microsoft Word, it was difficult to add blank space above a table that appeared at the top of a page. You couldn't click in the blank space to add blank space because there was no blank space to click in! Word 2000 fixes this glitch in an elegant way. If you simply position the insertion point in the first row of your table and press Enter, a paragraph is inserted above your table. Note that this technique works only when your table is at the top of a page without blank space above, which is the only time it is needed. The rest of the time, this operation inserts a paragraph into a cell of the table itself. Nice work, Word 2000 programmers.

GALLERY OF STYLE

Suppose that you're about to write a letter and you're thinking of basing it on one of the letter templates supplied with Word. To see how your letter will look, do the following:

1. Choose Format, Themes, and then click the Style Gallery button to display the Style Gallery dialog box.
2. In the Template list box, choose the template that you want to view.
3. In the Preview section at the bottom left of the dialog box, choose Example. After a few seconds, the top part of an example letter with formatting based on the chosen template appears.
4. Choose OK or Cancel.

SYNONYMS MADE EASY

A synonym is a word that carries the same or similar meaning to another -- for example, "giant" and "big" are synonyms. Word provides you with an instant Thesaurus for finding synonyms as you write. To use this easy tool, just highlight the word you need a synonym for and press Shift + F7. Or right-click on the word in your document and choose Synonym from the pop-up menu.

TABLE BUG

Microsoft Word 2000 may hang when you're trying to print a document containing a table with numbering formatted as hidden. Follow these steps to work around the problem: Press Enter after typing the last item in your list. On this blank numbered line, choose Bullets And Numbering on the Format menu. Select the Numbered (Outline Numbered) tab. Click None. Click OK.

EDITING A TABLE OF CONTENTS

You cannot directly edit the contents of a Table of Contents, because the text is composed of field codes that point directly to the headings in a document. To make a change, you need to edit the actual heading in the document and then update the TOC. You can also convert the TOC to regular text (select it and press Ctrl+Shift+F9) and then edit it. Keep in mind that after you convert a TOC to text, any changes you make to the actual headings in the document will not be reflected in the TOC.

ADJUSTING CELL MARGINS IN A TABLE

In our previous tip, we showed you a quick way to get some breathing room in your table to facilitate easy reading. But sometimes you need space not just after paragraphs, but on all sides of a table cell. This space around the text inside a table cell is called the cell margin, and increasing your cell margins is a simple process.

To adjust the cell margins in your table, choose Table, Table Properties and click the Table tab. Click Options and then adjust the Top, Bottom, Left, and Right margins much in the same way that you would the margins of a page. Keep in mind that cell margins are quite small, and the tiniest increase will result in a larger table. When you finish, click OK.

DELETING A TABLE

Last month one of our readers asked how to delete a table in Word 2000. When deleting a table, the first thing you should ask yourself is exactly what you want to delete. If you want to cleanse your table of all information but keep the structure intact, you should first click and drag with your mouse to select the cells you want to delete, and then press the Delete key. If you want to do away with your entire table, the best and cleanest method is to click on any cell inside the table and choose Table, Delete, Table.

DRAWING A TABLE

The quickest way to insert a table is by clicking the Insert Table button and dragging the cursor until you have the necessary number of rows and columns. This is a good way to go if you want a table that has equally spaced cells, but if you want a table with irregular spacing you have to get creative. Selecting Table, Draw Table allows to you to sketch the cells of your table any way you like. Your cursor turns into a pencil and away you go. Word 2000 does a pretty good job of guessing how you want your cells to line up. It takes a little practice to get the cells just how you want them, but keep in mind that you can always select and adjust them later.

HIDING TABLE GRIDLINES

Gridlines help you organize information visually while constructing a table. While grayed-out gridlines don't show up when you print your document, sometimes you want to see how the document looks without them. You can get a quick look at how your table looks without gridlines at any time by selecting Table, Hide Gridlines.

WHY DOESN'T WORD PRINT GRIDLINES IN A TABLE?

You're frustrated. You're tired. You just want that amazing table you created in Word to print, but every time you attempt printing, Word prints out your table without gridlines. Here's how to solve the problem:

A table's gridlines appear only on-screen. If you want to add lines to your table printouts, you need to apply a border to the table. The Table, Table AutoFormat command sets up predefined borders and shading. You can select the design that you want from the dialog box that appears.

However, if you want to make a custom border, you need to choose Format, Borders and Shading to bring up the Table Borders and Shading dialog box. In this dialog box, you can apply formatting to the table gridlines or to the text paragraph within a cell.

REPEATING TABLE HEADINGS

If you have a lengthy table that's going to stretch across many pages, it's helpful to be able to see the table headings at the top of each page. Make sure your top heading row repeats by selecting it and choosing Table, Heading Rows Repeat. No matter how many pages long your table becomes, your original heading rows will automatically appear at the top of each column.

SELECTING DIFFERENT PARTS OF A TABLE

Before you can fool with cells, rows, or columns in Word 2000, you have to select them:

• Cells: To select a cell, click in it. You can select several cells at once by dragging the cursor over them.
• Rows: Place the cursor in the left margin and click to select one row, or click and drag to select several rows. You can also select rows by placing the cursor in the row you want to select and then choosing the Table, Select, Row command. To select several rows, select cells in the rows and then choose the Table, Select, Row command.
• Columns: To select a column, move the cursor to the top of the column. When the cursor changes into a fat down-pointing arrow, click once. You can click and drag to select several columns. The other way to select a column is to click anywhere in the column and choose Table, Select, Column. To select several columns with this command, select cells in the columns before giving the Select command.
• A table: To select a table, click in the table and choose Table, Select, Table; hold down the Alt key and double-click; or press Alt+5 (the 5 on the numeric keypad, not the one on the keyboard).

SORTING, OR REORDERING, A TABLE

The fastest way to rearrange the rows in a Word 2000 table is to use the Table, Sort command or click one of the Sort buttons on the Tables and Borders toolbar. Sorting means to rearrange all the rows in a table on the basis of data in one column. An election column, for example, may be sorted, in descending order from most to fewest votes. A second table may be sorted on the first column by the candidates' names in ascending order alphabetically. Both tables present the same information, but the information has been sorted in different ways.

The difference between ascending and descending sorts is as follows:

• Ascending arranges text from A to Z, numbers from smallest to largest, and dates from the oldest in time to the most recent.
• Descending arranges text from Z to A, numbers from largest to smallest, and dates from most recent to the oldest in time.

When you rearrange a table by sorting it, Word 2000 rearranges the formatting as well as the data. Do your sorting before you format the table.

CREATING HIDDEN TEXT

Besides writing comments to critique a document, you can critique a document with hidden text. Hidden text is not printed along with other text unless you tell Word to print it. All you have to do to see hidden text is click the Show/Hide (looks like a paragraph mark) button.

The fastest way to enter hidden text is to press Ctrl+Shift+H and start typing. You can also choose Format, Font and, in the Effects area in the middle of the Font dialog box, click the Hidden check box. You can't see your hidden text unless you click the Show/Hide button. Dotted lines appear below hidden text on-screen.

To see hidden text, click the Show/Hide button or choose Tools, Options, click the View tab, and click the Hidden Text check box in the Formatting Marks area of the dialog box. When it's time to hide the text again, click the Show/Hide button or open the Options dialog box and remove the check mark from the Hidden Text check box on the View tab.

A NOTE ON CONVERTING TEXT TO A TABLE

If you have a text list that you feel would work better in table form, you should know that there's an easy way to convert text to a table in Word 2000. But before you convert text to a table, the first thing you should know is that the whole operation will work much smoother if there is some symmetry to the text. For example, if you have a long list of names and telephone numbers, with each person's name separated from their number with a comma, you're in business. You would simply select the original list, select Table, Convert, Text To Table, and in the resulting dialog box choose to separate the text at commas. You'll get a nice two-column table, with the names on the left and the numbers on the right.

You can also perform a similar operation for text that's separated by paragraphs, tabs, or other characters. But if you're dealing with a text list that has irregular data--for example, a list of names, some of which have telephone numbers and some of which also have addresses--you're stuck: Word 2000 won't be able to tell exactly where you'd like the columns separated, and it'll create a mish-mash table that won't do you any good.

WRAPPING TEXT AROUND A TABLE

If you're using a small table to illustrate other information in a document, you may not need to give the table its own lines. In other words, it could work better for your layout to simply wrap your text around the small table, to keep your words tighter on the page.

To wrap text around a table, you first need to click inside the table and then select Table, Table Properties. Click the Table tab and then click the Around icon in the Text Wrapping section. Finally, click OK. Your text will now make its way around your table, without wasting any space.

SETTING LINE SPACING IN A TABLE

When you're working in a table, it can be helpful to have some additional space after paragraphs in your cells. This helps to break up the text on the page, rendering it more readable. One simple way to insert some extra space into table cells is by adjusting the line spacing for your paragraphs. First, select your table by choosing Table, Select, Table. Then select Format, Paragraph. Depending on what kind of text you're using, choose a number from the After menu. A decent amount of space for 12-point text is 6 points. This inserts 6 points of space after each paragraph in your document, and since every cell automatically ends with a paragraph, it means each row of your table will have 6 points of blank space.

AUTOMATICALLY RESIZING TABLE CELLS TO FIT CONTENTS

If you know that you want your table columns to be precisely the width of your widest cell entry, you can tell Word 2000 to adjust the columns automatically. Place your insertion point somewhere within your table, select Table, Table Properties, and click Options. Check the Automatically Resize To Fit Contents box and click OK, and your table will continually adjust the width of its columns to fit your unwrapped text.

TABLE ROW HEIGHT AND SPACING

When you create a table, Word adjusts the row height automatically. Word lets you manually specify row height, if necessary. Here's how:

1. Choose Table, Table Properties.
2. Select the Row tab.
3. In the Specify height spin box, enter the height that you want and then choose At least or Exactly in the list box to the right.
4. Select the Cell tab.
5. Click Options.
6. Uncheck the Same as the whole table option.
7. Use the spin boxes to specify different margins for the cells in the row.
8. Choose OK twice.

MOVING TABLE ROWS QUICKLY IN OUTLINE VIEW

If you're working with a rather large, unwieldy table and you find yourself having to move rows up and down regularly, you can always use the tried-and-true cut-and-paste method (selecting a row, pressing Ctrl-X to cut it to the Clipboard, positioning the insertion point where you want the row to appear, and pressing Ctrl-V to paste it). But you might find it easier, if you are performing this operation with some regularity, to simply move the table rows up and down with the click of the button.

The key is, make sure you're using Outline View to work with your table (by selecting View, Outline). Once you are in this mode, you can place your insertion point in the row you want to move and click the arrow buttons on the Outline toolbar to move the row up or down one position. Repeat as necessary, and you can easily get the row where you want it.

EDITING A TEMPLATE

Our previous tip showed you how to make a document template that includes special paragraph formatting. Now, suppose you look at this template later and decide you want to modify it. You can't just open it, change things, and save it, because templates open a new blank document with a name like "Document 1." The way to modify a template is to either open it from within Word (without double-clicking on the icon, by selecting File, Open) or to right-click on the icon and select Open. It's the double-click on the icon that triggers the template to open a copy of a new document using the template, instead of the template itself.

ADDING COLORS AND LINES TO A TEXT BOX

When you insert a text box around text or create an empty text box, Word adds a single-line border around that box. You can use the Colors and Lines tab of the Format Text Box to add interest. The Fill Color arrow displays a palette of colors as well as a Fill Effects option. The fill effects include special gradients, textures, patterns, and pictures that you can apply to a text box.

LINKING TEXT BOXES

Lately we've been playing around with text boxes, seeing how they can enrich the look of our documents with their unique text placement attributes. Today we're going to examine how to link a series of text boxes so that text flows from one into the next without cutting or pasting. Think of this operation as similar to the idea of columns. Once text reaches the bottom of a linked text box, it automatically wraps to the next one in the series.

To link two text boxes together, first insert all the text boxes you'll need into your document by using the Text Box icon on the Drawing toolbar. Then, select a text box and right-click on the Formatting toolbar to bring up the Text Box toolbar. Next, type or paste all the text into the first text box. You will probably notice that all the text isn't visible; to allow the text to flow into another text box, click the Create Text Box Link icon, and you'll see your cursor turn into what looks like a small pitcher. Click the next text box in the series, and the words will flow into the box; repeat the process for as many boxes as you need.

MOVING TEXT BOXES

We've been exploring the wonderful world of text boxes. With these handy little concoctions, you can have a lot of fun laying out text. Half the pleasure of text boxes is derived from the fact that you can grab and move them around like pictures and all the formatting you've already established in the box remains the same. You can move a text box by clicking on it once to select it and moving the insertion point over the edge until the direction cursor appears. At this point, grab the text box and move it wherever you wish. Throw caution to the wind and experiment with placement; note how the text in the body document moves to accommodate the text box.

REMOVING BORDERS FROM TEXT BOXES

To wind down our discussion of text boxes, we should touch on borders. Adding borders to text boxes is similar to adding other kinds of borders in Word 2000. If you're laying out a document and you use a text box to highlight a quote from the larger text, you'll probably find that the text box looks better on the page without the border, surrounded only by the body text. To remove the border, select the text box, right-click on it, and select Format Text Box. On the Colors And Lines tab, click Color and select No Line.

DRAGGING-AND-DROPPING TEXT - QUICKLY!

A speedy way to move or copy text in Word 2000 is to use the drag-and-drop method:

1. Select the text you want to copy or move.
2. Slide the mouse over the selected text until the cursor changes into an arrow.
3. Copy or move the text:

   To move: Drag the text to a new location. As you drag, a small square appears below the mouse pointer to show that you are moving text.

   To copy: Hold down the Ctrl key while you drag the text elsewhere. A square with a cross in it appears below the pointer.

4. At the place where you want to move or copy the text, let up on the mouse button.

One neat thing about dragging and dropping is that you can copy or move text without disturbing what's on the Clipboard -- text isn't copied to the Clipboard when you drag and drop.

SELECTING A LINE OF TEXT WITHOUT THE MOUSE

Having to reach for the mouse when you're typing always slows down your work. Here are a couple of useful keyboard shortcuts for selecting a single line of text in Word 2000: To select everything on a line to the right of the insertion point, press Shift-End; to select everything on a line to the left of the insertion point, press Shift-Home.

SHOWING THE TIP OF THE DAY

Well, for those who hunger for tips, you can tell Word 2000's Office Assistant to offer you a fresh tip every time you launch the program. Right-click on the Office Assistant (if he's not visible, go to Help, Show The Office Assistant), click the Options tab, and select the Show The Tip Of The Day At Startup check box. Click OK, and the Assistant will provide you with a fresh tip whenever you launch Word.

TURNING OFF AUTOMATIC STYLE DEFINITION

A reader wrote in to say that she was frustrated with Word's propensity for changing a tab at the beginning of a paragraph into a first-line indent style that carried over into subsequent paragraphs. She wanted to add tabs to her documents at her leisure without having to worry about Word monkeying with her formatting, and she wondered how to turn off this feature. Lisa experienced this problem because of her AutoFormat settings. To disable this automatic formatting, select Tools, AutoCorrect, then click the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Deselect the Define Styles Based On Your Formatting option and click OK.

DECODING THE STYLE SYMBOLS

When you select a style from the drop-down menu on the left of the Formatting toolbar, those symbols on the right edge of the style's title box give you some clues as to what the style actually does. For example, let's look at the symbols that accompany the default Heading 1 style in the Style drop-down menu (you can look at these by clicking the Style menu once and not selecting anything). We see the horizontal lines lined up along the left, which tells us that the style is left justified. We see the number 16, which tells us that the style uses a 16-point font. We see the paragraph symbol, which tells us that this style is a paragraph style and not a character style. And in the typeface for the Heading 1 style itself, we can see that the font for this style is Arial. (You have to know what Arial looks like to know this--styles are always listed using their own fonts.)

DELETING A STYLE

Styles can be very useful, so useful in fact that you may soon start creating them at the drop of a hat. Pretty soon, your documents are filled with styles you no longer use. When that happens, it's time to prune your style garden back, deleting styles you no longer use.

Fortunately, deleting styles is easy. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Select Format, Style from the main menu.
2. When the Style dialog box appears, choose the style that you want to delete from the Styles list box.
3. Click the Delete button.

SELECTING AN UNDERLINE STYLE

Although it may seem like overkill, you may be interested to know that you can choose from no less than 17 different styles for underlining text in Word 2000. Choose Format, Font to open the Font dialog box, then click Underline Style and look at the myriad underlining possibilities. You can choose any one of these underlining styles by selecting it and clicking OK to exit the Font dialog box.

APPLYING STYLES TO TEXT IN WORD 2000

Word 2000 provides a variety of methods for applying styles to text:

• Using the Style command in the Format menu
• Using the Formatting toolbar
• Using shortcut keystrokes
• Following one style with another automatically
• Applying heading styles in Outline view
• Using the Edit, Replace command to find and replace styles
• Using AutoFormatting

Some of these methods are more obvious than other ones. The usefulness of automatically following one style with another or quickly applying the same style to several different items in your document may not be apparent at first, but they help to reduce the tedium of formatting.

NOTES ON STYLES--PART 1 OF 5: BASING ONE STYLE ON ANOTHER

Styles in Word 2000 are a collection of formatting specifications that are collected and saved together under a single name--the name of the style. Remember that any time you base one style on another (by modifying a paragraph, clicking in the Style Menu box on the Formatting toolbar, naming your style and pressing Enter), the new style will always be subject to the changes made to the style on which it was based. So, for example, if you modify a paragraph created using the Normal style and then save the style as something like "Letter Paragraph," your Letter Paragraph style will change whenever your Normal style changes. To avoid this hassle, try creating styles from scratch by using the Style dialog box, which you access by choosing Format, Style.

NOTES ON STYLES--PART 2 OF 5: DELETING STYLES

If your Style menu becomes cluttered with more styles than you think you can use, you can get rid of the deadwood by deleting any unnecessary styles. First, select Format, Style and choose User-Defined Styles from the List pull-down menu (these are the only ones you can delete; you can't get rid of the styles that came with Word 2000). Select any style you don't need from the list and click the Delete button. Click Yes when asked to confirm and then click Close. Before you delete any style, however, be sure that you have no other styles based on the style you wish to delete. If you do, these styles will be rendered unusable.

NOTES ON STYLES--PART 3 OF 5: UPDATING STYLES AUTOMATICALLY

Any time you modify a style by clicking in a paragraph and choosing Format, Style, you can have the style update automatically whenever you make any changes to it. This means that if you change a paragraph created in this style from, say, single to double spaced, all other paragraphs in your document created using this style will change accordingly, and all your paragraphs will remain identical no matter what changes you make to an individual one. Keep in mind that all future paragraphs composed in this style will automatically be formatted using the most recent changes you made to the automatically updated style. If you're sure this is what you want to do, select the Automatically Update option the next time you modify a style.

NOTES ON STYLES--PART 4 OF 5: COPYING STYLES BETWEEN DOCUMENTS

When you copy paragraphs between documents, keep in mind that if the paragraph you are copying from was created using a style with the same name as in the document you are copying to, the paragraph will revert to the style of the copied-to document. So, for example, if your Normal style is different from the Normal style of a document you're copying into, you can expect your text to be formatted using the latter's formatting. Be sure to have your paragraphs formatted using a unique style name if you wish to preserve all the formatting when copying to other documents.

NOTES ON STYLES--PART 5 OF 5: TURNING OFF AUTOMATICALLY ASSIGNED STYLES

When you're creating a document, sometimes Word 2000 will look at the kind of work you're doing and assign style names to some of your paragraphs. The program will automatically make some of your paragraphs headings, for example, if it looks like you're giving headings to different areas of your document. This is an example of Word trying to be helpful but potentially doing more harm than good. You can tell Word not to assign styles automatically by choosing Tools, AutoCorrect. Click the AutoFormat As You Type tab and deselect the Define Styles Based On Your Formatting option. Finally, under Apply As You Type, deselect the Headings option, then click OK.

SEEING WHICH STYLES ARE IN USE

Formatting your document with styles is a great way to have all the proper spacing, fonts, tab stops, and so forth changed automatically. But sometimes you may look at a document created by somebody else and have no idea what all the styles in use are. There's a little trick in Word 2000 for viewing the styles in use in a document. Go to Tools, Options and click the View tab. Under Outline And Normal Options, enter a number in the Style Area Width box (around .5 inches should do it) and click OK. You'll now see the styles in use along the left of the screen when you view your document in Normal or Outline view.

SYNONYMS MADE EASY

A synonym is a word that carries the same or similar meaning to another -- for example, "giant" and "big" are synonyms. Word provides you with an instant Thesaurus for finding synonyms as you write. To use this easy tool, just highlight the word you need a synonym for and press Shift + F7. Or right-click on the word in your document and choose Synonym from the pop-up menu.

QUICK SYNONYMS

A thesaurus is a book of synonyms. A synonym is one word that carries the same or similar meaning to another. Like "giant" and "big" or "wee" and "small." English is full of these and Word's Shift+F7 Thesaurus command shows you a lot of them.

A handy way to get some quirky and commonly used synonyms for any word in your document is to right-click on the word and choose Synonym from the pop-up menu. Included among the list is even an antonym (a word that means the opposite of the original word.)

SEND IN THE TEMPLATES

To save space, Word 2000 does not install all the templates on your hard drive during installation. A template is not installed on your computer until you choose to use it.

The first time you select a template, you will probably be prompted to insert your Word 2000 (or Office 2000) CD into the CD-ROM drive. Follow the on-screen instructions to install the template.

WHERE ART THOU, MIGHTY TEMPLATES

To save space, Word 2000 does not install all the templates on your hard drive during installation. A template is not installed on your computer until you choose to use it.

The first time you select a template, you will probably be prompted to insert your Word 2000 (or Office 2000) CD into the CD-ROM drive. Follow the on-screen instructions to install the template.

ANIMATING TEXT

A reader wondered if it was possible to animate text in Word 2000. It is indeed, but if you have any appreciation for subtlety (or a predisposition for light-triggered seizures), text animation should be used sparingly. To animate text in a Word document, select it and choose Format, Font. Then, click the Text Effects tab, where you can choose from a half dozen different text effects--from "Las Vegas Lights" to "Marching Red Ants." Go ahead; knock yourself out.

INSERTING AND OVERWRITING TEXT

When you insert text into a line, Word 2000 moves the existing text to the right to make room for the new text.

To type over existing text, switch to Overtype mode by double-clicking OVR on the status bar at the bottom of the Word window or by pressing Insert.

To switch back to Insert mode, double-click OVR or press Insert again.

THE QUICKIE THESAURUS

A thesaurus is a book of synonyms. A synonym is one word that carries the same or similar meaning to another, like giant and big or wee and small. The English language is full of these, and so is Word. Synonyms are as close as a right-click of the mouse: To find the synonym of any word, right-click that word in your document. From the pop-up menu, choose the Synonyms submenu to see a list of words with a similar meaning.

INSERTING TIME AND DATE

Word can lighten your load a bit by automatically inserting the correct time and date into a file. Here's how:

1. Open a document and place the cursor where you would like the current date to appear.
2. Begin typing the date. Watch for the AutoComplete tips, which Word displays after you type a few characters.
3. Press Tab to accept the AutoComplete tip, and then press Enter.

To insert the time to the document, do the following:

1. Select Insert, Date and Time from the menu bar.
2. Select the time format from the Available Formats list.
3. Place a check mark next to the Update Automatically check box and click OK.
4. Word inserts the current time into your document.

To update the time, right-click the time and select Update Field from the shortcut menu. The time is automatically updated.

ADDING A BUTTON TO A TOOLBAR

Word 2000 toolbars are generally laid out logically, and they cover most commands you need in the course of a standard word processing situation. However, sometimes the preset buttons are not enough. Sometimes you need more. If you've ever wished you could add your favorite menu command to the Word 2000 toolbar, today is your lucky day.

Begin by choosing Tools, Customize and clicking the Commands tab. From here, you can browse the classes of commands on the left and insert the specific commands on the right. To insert a command on the toolbar, simply grab it in the window in the Customize dialog box and place it on the toolbar above your Word document. It's a little confusing at first, because you're probably not accustomed to grabbing something from a dialog box in this manner, but once you get used to it, this trick is a snap.

ADD A TOOLBAR BUTTON IN WORD 2000

If you find yourself using a particular Word command quite often, why not make that command a button on the toolbar? To add any button to any toolbar, follow these steps:

1. Click the down-arrow at the far right end of the toolbar.

   The down-arrow is found on all of Word's toolbars. You want to click the down-arrow on whichever toolbar you're adding a button to.

2. A menu drops down when you click the down-arrow triangle thing.
3. Select Add or Remove Buttons.

   A huge pop-up menu appears, detailing the buttons available or already on the toolbar.

   If the button you want appears in the pop-up menu, select it from the list. You're done.

   If the button you want isn't there, move along to Step 3.

4. Select Customize from the menu.
5. In the Customize dialog box, click the Commands tab.
6. Locate the command you want to add.

   The commands are organized like the Word menus. So, if you want to add a text format, select Format from the Categories list, then find the format command you want in the Commands list.

7. Drag the toolbar button you've found up onto the toolbar.

   This is the tricky part. When you find the command you want, drag its icon from the Customize dialog box onto the toolbar. When the mouse is over the toolbar, a large "I" thing tells you where the command will be inserted. Release the mouse button to drop the command onto the toolbar.

8. Continue adding buttons, if you like.

   Repeat Steps 5 and 6 as necessary.

9. Click Close to close the Customize dialog box.

Your new toolbar is awaiting its first use.

ADDING A HYPERLINK TO A TOOLBAR

In our previous tip, we showed you how to add a button to a toolbar. Today we'll show you how to add a button that is hyperlinked to a Web document. Let's say you want to put a link on your Word 2000 toolbar to the Dictionary.com Web site. Choose Tools, Customize to display the Customize dialog box, then click Commands. Insert a random button from the list on the right (it doesn't matter what the button is because we're going to change it) using the trick we showed you in our previous tip--by clicking the button and dragging it to a spot on the toolbar. Once your button is on the toolbar, select a new image for it by right-clicking on it and clicking Change Button Image. With your new icon in place, right-click on the button and select Assign Hyperlink, Open. In the resulting dialog box, enter the name of the Web site you want to link to, in our case:

http://Enterprise\index.htm

and then click OK. This Web page will be launched in your default Internet browser when you click the button.

MOVING BUTTONS BETWEEN TOOLBARS

In previous tips, we've shown you how to insert new commands on a toolbar and how to add a hyperlink to a toolbar. There is another easy customization feature available any time you have the Customize dialog box open (select Tools, Customize). You can grab any button on any of the visible toolbars and drag it to another location on any other visible toolbars. Try this if you feel that you have a better idea for the arrangement of the toolbar icons. When you finish, click OK in the Customize dialog box.

MOVING TOOLBARS IN WORD 2000

You can move a toolbar in Word by dragging it with its grabber, located on the far left side of the toolbar. When the mouse pointer changes into a four-way arrow thing (see margin), it means you can drag the toolbar hither or thither to move it around.

Be careful how far you drag, though. If you drag a toolbar into the document part of Word's window, it becomes a floating palette -- a little mini-window that can hover over the top of all your other windows with its own Close button.

To move a palette, drag it by its title bar. To see its menu, click the down-pointing triangle (at the furthest left) next to the toolbar's title. And to close the palette, click its X close button in the upper-right corner.

To convert a floating palette into a toolbar, drag the palette to the top or bottom of Word's window. When you find the sweet spot, the palette changes to a toolbar.

CORRECTING TYPOS ON THE FLY

Unless you or someone else has messed with the AutoCorrect settings, the invisible hand of Word 2000 corrects certain typos as you enter them. You can have Word correct the typos that you make often, and with a little cunning, you can even use the AutoCorrect feature to enter long company names and hard-to-spell names on the fly.

To change the settings and make AutoCorrect work for you, choose Tools, AutoCorrect. The AutoCorrect dialog box appears.

• Remove the check marks from the AutoCorrect features that you don't want.

  For example, if you enter a lot of computer code in your manuscripts, you don't necessarily want the first letter of sentences to be capitalized automatically, so you should click the Capitalize First Letter of Sentences check box to deselect it.

• If you want, remove the check mark from the Replace Text as You Type box to keep Word's invisible hand from correcting idiosyncrasies in capitalization and spelling as you enter them.
• Scroll through the list and take a look at the words that are "autocorrected."

  If you don't want a word on the list to be corrected, select it and click Delete.

• If a word that you often misspell isn't on the list, you can add it to the list and have Word correct it automatically.

  Enter the misspelling in the Replace box, enter the right spelling in the With box, and click the Add button.

• If you don't like one of the replacement words, select the word on the list, enter a new replacement word in the With box, and click the Replace button.

UNDOING RECENT KEYSTROKES

You probably already know that you can press Ctrl-Z at any time to undo your most recent commands. (If you didn't know that, your word processing experience just improved immensely!) You may also know that Word 2000 stores your 99 most recent commands or keystrokes, so that you can return to something you did a while back and undo it. You may not know, however, that you can pull up and access a list of your 99 most recent commands.

Click the down arrow next to the Undo icon on the Standard toolbar (it's the one that looks like a curved arrow pointing backward). A list of your five most recent commands appears, but you can scroll through all your recent commands and select the specific operation you want to undo by selecting a command and clicking the Undo button again. You should know that Word 2000 will not only undo your selected operation, but all the operations between that one and your most recent.

ADDING A VIDEO CLIP TO A WEB PAGE

Although video clips are large, unwieldy files that many will not have the patience to download, putting one on your Web page fulfills the multimedia promise of the Internet. When you create Web pages in Word 2000, you can add a video file to a page as easily as you can a picture or sound file. But keep in mind that Internet bandwidth has not kept up with the other computer innovations, and cluttering your page with huge video files will do little to encourage repeat viewings of your page.

To add a video clip to a Web page, first make sure the Web Tools toolbar is visible by right-clicking on the Standard toolbar and selecting Web Tools. Position the insertion point where you would like your video clip to appear, and click the Movie icon (it looks like a small video camera) on the Web Tools bar. Click the Browse button and select a video file. When you finish, click OK. Word will ask you if you want to include an image in case the person browsing your page isn't able to include video files. If you want to do so, browse for a file using the Alternate Image box. Otherwise, click Continue. Your page will now play your selected video clip when loaded into a Web browser.

VIEWING YOUR DOCUMENT IN FULL SCREEN MODE

Particularly if you're laying out a document with graphics files, you might find it useful to see how the document looks without all the clutter of toolbars, the desktop, and so on. Select View, Full Screen to see your document in its purest form. Simply click the Close Full Screen box to return to your previous viewing mode.

CHANGING VIEWS

You can manage Word's view options from the View menu (hence the name), which enables you to change to any view. You can also use the tiny buttons on the far left of the horizontal scroll bar to change views. With these buttons, you can switch between Normal, Web Layout, Print Layout, and Outline view.

SAVING A WEB PAGE AS A WORD DOCUMENT

If you create a Web page in Word 2000 and then decide that it should be in regular document format instead, you can save the Web page as a Word document. Open the Web page in Word and click Save As (File menu). In the File name box, type a new name for the document. In the Save as type box, click Word Document, and then click Save.

WHITE ON BLACK TEXT

White text in a black box is an eye-catching technique: First you create a black background, then white-colored text.

1. Mark your text as a block.
2. Choose Format, Borders and Shading.
3. Select the Shading panel (make sure it is forward).
4. Click the black square in the Fill area.
5. Click OK to exit the Borders and Shading dialog box.
6. Click the Capital A or Font Color tool on the toolbar.
7. Choose White.

OPENING A NEW DOCUMENT USING THE WINDOWS TASKBAR

There are many ways to open a new document in Word 2000. You can select File, New and double-click the blank document icon; you can press Ctrl-N; or you can click the New icon on the Standard toolbar. The method that we use most frequently, though, has to do with how we set up our taskbar in Windows 98.

As you probably know, you can drag any shortcut icon from your computer's desktop to the taskbar to create an icon that you can click once to open the application. You can also click this icon to open a new document in Word 2000, which makes sense, as the computer responds, "Hmm, Word 2000 is already open--I think my owner wants me to open a new document." Remember, if Word is already open, any attempt to launch the application will give you a new document.

WORD COUNT

Remember dreaded high school assignments such as, "write an 1,000 word essay on U.S. Relations with the People's Republic of China from 1940 to 1970?" No longer do you have to halt the presses and count each word by hand to see whether you've met the quota. Let Word do the work for you.

At any time during your report writing, choose Tools, Word Count. The Word Count dialog box will display a summary of your document's pages, words, characters, paragraphs, and lines. Just click the Close button to return to your document.

PULLING A WORD COUNT

Word eliminates the horrible chore of counting every word in your document by hand. Word not only keeps track of word count for you, it goes so far as to count pages, words, paragraphs, lines, and individual characters. This includes things you may usually ignore, such as spaces and punctuation. Counting characters in a long document would be virtually impossible to do by hand.

To pull a word count in Word, do the following:

1. Open the document you want to get a word count for.
2. Select Tools, Word Count from the menu bar.
3. Review the statistics of your document and click Close.

AUTOMATICALLY EXECUTING A WORD MACRO WHEN WORD LAUNCHES

A reader wrote in to ask if it was possible to have a Word macro run whenever Word 2000 was launched. It is indeed. Naming your macro Autoexec when you create it (by selecting Tools, Macro, then entering the name in the Macro Name text box) is your way of telling Word 2000 to run the macro whenever Word launches.

PRINT A BLOCK OF TEXT IN WORD

After you've marked a block of text on-screen, you can print out only this block. Here's how:

1. Choose File, Print.
2. Tickle the button by the word Selection (located in the Page Range area).
3. Click the OK button.

SAVING WORD SEARCHES

Our previous few tips have discussed Word's built-in document searching features. As long as you enter detailed information in the Document Properties dialog box, you can search for your documents within Word itself, which gives you more flexibility than Windows' Find feature. With all the different criteria you can search for, you've probably noticed by now that Word's Find feature is a useful tool for helping you organize documents. This is even more apparent when you realize that you can save your Word searches for later use. By saving searches, you are using the Find feature as a document organization tool similar to folders. For example, if you classify your document according to keywords that you assign in the Document Properties dialog box, you can save searches for each of these keywords and automatically call up a list of the documents with those keywords with just a couple clicks.

To save searches in Word, select File, Open; click the Tools button; and select Find. Enter your search criteria as you would normally, then click Save Search. You'll be prompted to give your search a name. Once you do, Word saves the search criteria in a file. The next time you want to run a search with the same criteria, simply click the Open Search button and select the search from the resulting list.

DISAPPEARING WORDART

"I inserted a few WordArt texts in my MsWord 97 document to create a flier. Everything went fine and I printed it. Then I saved and opened it in my next session only to find that all the word art texts disappeared leaving only their placeholders. The document printed with the word art place holders showing with no text in them. Can anyone help me?"

We can try!

But our only suggestion is checking the Options to see if graphic display is turned off:

1. Open Tools + Options.
2. Click on the View tab.
3. Click to put a checkmark in the Drawings checkbox. You don't want that box empty and the Picture Placeholder box checked.
4. Click on OK.

That might just fix the problem.

CORRECTING YOUR COMMONLY MISSPELLED WORDS AUTOMATICALLY

If you find that you consistently misspell the same word in the same way (some of us never learn), you should tell Word 2000 to fix the error automatically whenever it comes up. When checking spelling (by selecting Tools, Spelling And Grammar), instead of clicking the Change button when you encounter the misspelled word, select the correct word from the Suggestions box and press AutoCorrect. The next time Word encounters the word misspelled in that particular way, it will silently correct the word for you, and you may never even know you made a mistake.

USING WILDCARDS TO CHECK MISSPELLED WORDS

Ever almost know how to spell a word but can't quite do it? For example, you might know how a word begins but you can't remember the last three or four letters. Word 2000 contains a little feature that can help. You can ask the spell-checker to look for words by using what are called wildcard characters to represent the letter or letters you don't know.

Word 2000 recognizes a question mark as a wildcard. For example, if you can't remember what the fourth letter in Albuquerque is, type

Alb?querque

and run the spell-checker on it. Word 2000 offers Albuquerque as a possibility, and you can select it and move on.

CHECKING YOUR WORK ON THE FLY

In Word 2000 you may prefer to compose your documents without turning on the spelling and grammar checkers, but use these features from time to time as necessary. First, turn off both features in the Options dialog box. Then, as you work, select text you want to check and click the Spelling and Grammar button on the toolbar. If you don't like using the mouse, press F7 on your keyboard. Word checks only the selected text, though you are given the option to check the rest of the document as well.

Looking for additional grammar advice? Visit English Plus+ [ http://englishplus.com/ ] to download a free trial copy of Grammar Slammer, a supplemental program to your current grammar checker.