Workers' Edge

If you're familiar with keyboard shortcuts, you probably know that you can cycle through your open windows by pressing Alt-Tab. But you may not know that pressing Alt-Esc moves between your open windows in the order they were opened.

There are simply too many useful key combinations to remember, which is why I described how to create a keyboard-shortcut cheat sheet last April. Then a couple of months later I added key combinations for moving and resizing windows.

My shortcuts.txt file is getting overloaded, but it doesn't include any of the handy keystroke combos available in Word and Excel. That's why I created separate text files I refer to when I'm working in one of those two programs.

Start by browsing Microsoft's list of keyboard shortcuts for Word. Select the shortcuts, press Ctrl-C to copy the text, open Notepad or any text editor, press Ctrl-V to paste the list into a new file, and save the file with the .txt extension. (I call mine wordshortcuts.txt.)

To create a similar shortcut-reference list for Excel, go to Microsoft's compilation of Excel shortcut and function keys. Follow the instructions above to select, copy, and paste the shortcuts into a new file you save with the .txt extension.

Now get into the habit of opening your shortcut file each time you start working in Word or Excel. I keep my shortcut list in a small window I can Alt-Tab (or Alt-Esc) to when I want to refresh my memory. These shortcuts have really come in handy with the 2007 versions of Word and Excel. It's usually faster to scroll through my shortcut list to find the operation I need than it is to search through the tabs on the Office 2007 ribbon.

(Note that you can view the keystroke equivalents of many ribbon and menu options by pressing and holding the Alt key. You'll also find some key-combo references in the Excel and Word help systems, but I prefer to use the straight-ahead lists available on the two Microsoft sites I link to above.)

These shortcut lists may be overkill for people whose use of keystroke combos doesn't venture much further than Ctrl-A (select all), Ctrl-C (copy), Ctrl-V (paste), and Ctrl-P (print). Here are a handful of my favorite little-known keyboard shortcuts for Word and Excel:

• Print preview: Ctrl-F2 (also Ctrl-Alt-I in Word)
• Add hyperlink: Ctrl-K
• Increase font size one point in Word: Ctrl-[
• Decrease font size one point in Word: Ctrl-]
• Open the Format dialog box with Font tab selected: Ctrl-Shift-F (also Ctrl-D in Word)
• Open the dictionary (Word 2003) or the reference pane (Word 2007): Alt-Shift-F7
• Select a row in Excel: Shift-Spacebar
• Select a column in Excel: Ctrl-Spacebar
• Add a line to the current cell in Excel: Alt-Enter

Years ago, I promised my cousin Bill (who doesn't have a TV show, by the way) that I would convert the family tree he had created into a Web page. It was pretty easy to find various JavaScripts that let you open menus and submenus, either by clicking or simply by hovering over them.

The only problem was the unwieldy HTML coding required to ensure that the lists opened and closed, as expected. What ended up working better for me was Microsoft Word's Outline view, which lets you use headings to show and hide information in a tree structure.

The O'Reilly family tree my cousin created has about 500 names and covers seven generations, which convert to Word's headings 1 through 7. To view the entries as collapsible and expandable lists in Word 2003 and 2007, click View > Outline. Any entry with a plus sign on the left has subentries; double-click the plus sign to view or hide the entries.

Then I took the list one step further by linking the names on the family tree to a mini "Web site" with basic biographies of family members. (For obvious privacy reasons, I'm keeping this entire family database off the public Web. The individual files reside in a single folder stored on local media, not a Web server.)

I used an HTML editor to create a page that duplicates the entries and links on the family tree in the Word file. Unfortunately, HTML supports only six levels of headings, so I manually italicized the seventh-level entries to distinguish them from the tiny sixth-generation names.

You can Ctrl-click to follow the links in Microsoft Word and link back from the HTML file to the Word document. Still, I prefer to link from the HTML pages to the HTML version of the family tree, even though that version isn't formatted in collapsible lists. I guess I'm back to looking for the JavaScript or DHTML that will preserve the headings hierarchy while adding the show-hide capability of collapsible lists.

Jdjazz asked me to elaborate on a previous tip about formatting Word documents with two columns:

"I am trying to do a landscape two-column template with page numbers for each column [on] half sheets that I cut for speaking. When I choose Insert > Page number, it goes to the center in the headers over the two columns. How can I get a page number for each half page?"

In Word 2007, click the Page Layout tab, choose Size in the Page Setup area, and click More Paper Sizes at the bottom of the dialog box. In Word 2003, click File > Page setup. In both versions, click the Margins tab and choose Landscape under Orientation. Then click the Paper tab, enter 5.5" in the Width box and 8.5" in the Height box, and click OK.

To add page numbers in Word 2007, click the Insert tab, choose Footer, select a footer style, click Page Number > Bottom of Page, and pick a location for your page numbers. In Word 2003, click Insert > Page Numbers, make your selections on the Position and Alignment drop-down menus, and click OK.

Finally, click the Office button > Print > Print in Word 2007 or File > Print in Word 2003. In the Print dialog box, choose "2 pages" in the "Pages per sheet" drop-down menu. Make sure all your other print settings are as you like them, and click OK.

A friend asked if it's possible to print a subset of the addresses in her Microsoft Outlook contacts as mailing labels. You would think that such a basic operation would be a breeze for an industrial-strength personal-information manager like Outlook. You would think wrong.

The first bit of counter-intuitivity is that you use Microsoft Word, not Outlook. If you use Outlook's own mail-merge function by clicking Tools > Mail Merge, you get kicked into Word anyway. And every time I tried to run the resulting wizard, Word stalled in mid-process.

Instead, move the contacts whose addresses you want to print into a new folder in Outlook's contact list. With your new contact folder in place, click Tools > Letters and Mailings > Mail Merge in Word 2003 or the Mail Merge tab on Word 2007's ribbon.

In Word 2003, click the Labels button in the Mail Merge task pane and click Next. Now choose "Change document layout," click Label Options, select the layout you prefer, and click OK. Choose "Next: Select recipients" at the bottom of the task pane.

In Word 2007, click Start Merge > Labels, select your label layout, click OK, and choose Select Recipients. In both versions, choose "Select from Outlook contacts," click Choose Contacts Folder, and select the Outlook contact folder you just created.

In the Mail Merge Recipients dialog box, you can uncheck any names you want to remove from the list, sort the list by any category, or filter it. When the list looks the way you want it, click OK.

In Word 2003, click "Next: Arrange your labels" and choose Address Block. In Word 2007, place the cursor in the first label and click Address Block. In both versions, make any necessary changes to the address layout and click OK. Now choose "Update all labels" in Word 2003 or Update Labels in Word 2007. The address block will appear in each label following "Next Record."

In Word 2003, click "Next: Preview your labels," and in Word 2007 click Preview Results. If you're happy with the look of your labels, click "Next: Complete the merge" in Word 2003 or Finish & Merge in Word 2007. In Word 2003, leave All selected and choose Print. In Word 2007, click Print Documents. You can also choose to edit the contacts before you print them.

A shorter method of printing the addresses is to choose Directory rather than Labels in the Mail Merge task pane of Word 2003 or Word 2007's Start Merge button. This places the addresses together in a single document, but you'll probably have choose the Edit option before you print to clean up the resulting formatting.

You can use Microsoft Word for years and still find new ways to get more work done in less time. Here are a handful of fast-and-easy productivity boosters.

Create outlines out of lists
Word 2007 adds a handy outline list to the standard bullet and numbered lists available on Word 2003's Formatting toolbar (the Paragraphs section under the Home tab of Word 2007's ribbon). You can create an outline from an existing list in either version by placing the cursor in the line you want to indent (or outdent, as the case may be) and clicking the Increase Indent or Decrease Indent buttons just to the right.

Add a Save All option to Word 2007
Whenever I have Word open for more than a few minutes, the chances are good that I've got more than one file active. When quitting time rolls around, Word 2003 lets me save them all simultaneously by pressing the Shift key as I open the File menu, which converts the Save command into Save All.

To add this function to Word 2007, click the Office button, choose Word Options in the bottom-right corner, click Customize in the left pane, select Commands Not in the Ribbon under "Choose commands from," and make sure "Show Quick Access Toolbar below the Ribbon" is checked. Now scroll to and select Save All in the list of commands on the left side of the main window, and click Add and OK. The Save All icon will appear on the aforementioned toolbar.

Shift your paragraphs around
It's not unusual to need to rearrange the paragraphs in your document. Rather than the trial-and-error cut-and-paste method, you can move an entire paragraph up or down by pressing and holding the Shift and Alt keys and then the up or down arrows.

Apply formatting via keyboard shortcuts
I thought I knew all there is to know about pasting, but then I found out that you can copy and paste only the formatting of a selection, not the selection itself. To do so, select those items with formatting you want to copy, press Ctrl-Shift-C, choose the items you want to apply the formatting to, and press Ctrl-Shift-V.

Start where you left off
When you reopen a document in Word, the cursor appears at the very beginning. To jump to the place where the cursor was when you closed the file, just press Shift-F5.

Dragging a mouse to select text in Microsoft Word requires the precision of a diamond cutter, or seems to, anyway. I prefer to press the Ctrl, Shift, and arrow keys to make my text selections. Throw in a couple of function keys, and I can use my keyboard to select text faster than any mouser can.

To select a word at a time, press Ctrl-Shift and the left or right arrow key. Ctrl-Shift and the up and down arrow keys select a paragraph at a time. If you get tired of holding down the Shift key, simply press F8 to put Word into select mode. The Ctrl-arrow key operations still work, but you can also select the current word, sentence, paragraph, and section by pressing F8 repeatedly. As you might guess, pressing Shift and F8 deselects in the opposite order.

The real power of Word's select mode comes from combining it with the Find and Go To functions. Suppose you want to select from the cursor to the next occurrence of the word "wolverines." Simply press F8, F5, and Alt-D to open the Find and Replace dialog's Find tab. Type in the word you want to select to and press Alt-F (or Enter if the Find Next button is selected).

If you want to select to a specific page, heading, footnote, or other element, press Alt-G to highlight the Go To tab, select the element in the "Go to what" drop-down menu, enter the appropriate option in the text box to the right, and press Alt-T (or Enter if the Go To button is highlighted).

To exit select mode, just press the Esc key. It will also close when you cut, copy, or format the selection.

Here are a couple more helpful key combinations for selecting in Word:

Shift-Home/End selects to the beginning/end of the current line.
Ctrl-Shift-Home/End selects to the beginning/end of the document.
Shift-Page Up/Down selects one screen up or down.
Alt-Ctrl-Shift-Page Down selects to the end of the current window.
Ctrl-Shift-F8 and the arrow keys selects a rectangular block of text.

I recently finished working on a project that generated a dozen separate reports published together in a single booklet. Each report was from three to eight pages long, and most of them included at least one table or chart.

When we were done, several of my co-workers commented on how nicely the reports were laid out. All I had done was create a Word template with a simple two-column layout for long text sections.

To create this template, open a new document, type a dummy document title on the first line, choose a font type and size (I used 12-point bold lucida sans, for example), and center the line by choosing the appropriate icon in the formatting section of Word 2003's standard toolbar and under the Home tab on Word 2007's ribbon.

On the next line, enter dummy text to represent the document summary. The quick way to do so is to type =rand(p,s) (where "p" is the number of paragraphs and "s" is the number of sentences) and press Enter. Don't go nuts, though. This is supposed to be a "summary."

Choose a font type and size for the summary, which will appear in a single column. Now press Enter to move the cursor to a new line. In Word 2003, click Insert > Break > Continuous > OK. In Word 2007, click the Page Layout tab, choose Breaks in the Page Setup section, and click Continuous in the drop-down menu.

In Word 2003, click Format > Columns and choose the two-column icon under Presets. In Word 2007, click the Page Layout tab on the ribbon and click Columns > Two. (Note that this important step was inadvertently excluded from the original version of the tip; my apologies.)

Paste in more dummy text by typing =rand(p,s) (where "p" is the number of paragraphs and "s" is the number of sentences) and pressing Enter. Format the font size and type, or stick with the document defaults.

Finally, save the file as a template: In Word 2003, click File > Save As, give the template a name such as "Two-column layout," choose a location for the file (more on this below), select Document Template (*.dot) in the Save as Type drop-down menu, and click Save.

In Word 2007, click the Office button, choose Save As > Word Template (or choose one of the other "Template" options on the "Save as type" drop-down menu), and click Save.

To have your new template listed under My Templates in Word's New dialog, save the template to this folder in Vista:
C:\Users\your logon ID\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates

Or this folder in XP:
C:\Users\your logon ID\AppData\Microsoft\Templates

Or click the Templates entry under Favorite Links in Vista or Trusted Templates in XP's Save in dialog. Note that once you've opened it, the template will also appear in the Recent documents list in both Word versions.

In a comment on my last post, cdotspace asked about how to keep Microsoft Word 2007 from crashing. When I had this problem, I solved it by starting Word with no add-ons, and then enabling the add-ons one at a time until the problem recurred. I removed the troublemaker, which was actually a macro of my own poor devising, and no more crashes.

That got me thinking about how difficult it is to figure out the cause of application crashes. Back in March, I described ways to diagnose applications that won't close properly. But when it comes to finding the source of software problems, look to the Web.

The best software-support sites
Start by getting a free software checkup with the Secunia Personal Software Inspector, which scans your computer and lets you know if there are security updates available for Windows and your applications. PSI is free for home, non-commercial use; Secunia's commercial Network Software Inspector costs $32.83 per seat. Note that PSI and NSI are intended to supplement rather than to replace your antivirus, firewall, and other security software.

Two forums on ExtremeTech include dozens of posts about software problems. Only about one out of 10 posts in the Software and Development forum are specifically on software glitches, but a good number of these include replies with possible solutions. The Windows Help forum is much more focused on solutions to Windows problems.

One of the categories at the Tech Support Guy Forums is Business Applications, though fewer than half of its postings relate specifically to Office apps. The site has a sophisticated search feature that lets you narrow your search by date and number of replies, and it features a search tag cloud similar to Flickr.

The Office and productivity software forum on CNET also lets you filter your searches by number of responses, date, and even message author. You might need these and other methods to filter your search results on this forum. When I searched "Microsoft Word crash," I got more than 100,000 responses. I knew the program was buggy, but that's ridiculous!

If you create custom AutoCorrect entries to speed up your typing in Microsoft Word as I described on Monday, you might need to move those entries to another PC someday.

Years ago, Dave Rado wrote a Word macro for backing up and restoring the program's AutoCorrect files. It still works for Word 2007--or at least it did on my PC.

First, make sure macros are enabled. In Word 2003, click Tools > Macro > Security > Security Level, and select either of the bottom two options. In Word 2007, click the Office button, choose Word Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Macro Settings, select "Enable all macros (not recommended; potentially dangerous code can run)," and click OK twice.

With Word's macros enabled, double-click the AutoCorrect.dot file inside the AutoCorrect.zip download. Choose Backup, and when the Save As dialog box opens, select the removable medium or network address you'll use to transfer the settings to the other system.

Repeat the steps on the second system, but choose Restore rather than Backup when the macro runs, click Yes at the warning, point to the backup file you created, and click Open.

Tomorrow: a free program warns you about potentially dangerous sites just before you click the link.