Fast fixes for five Word woes
You use your browser a lot. You use your e-mail program a lot. But the chances are better than even that you spend a big chunk of your workday in Microsoft Word. There's no way any application used by so many people for so many different tasks is going to be set up just right for you. Here are the five settings I changed to make Word work my way, more or less.
I say "more or less" because Word isn't quite the paragon of flexibility. You can make serious changes to the program's look and operation by editing its normal.dot template (it's called normal.dotx in Word 2007), or by creating a new template with the settings you prefer and telling Word to use that one by default. But I'm the impatient type, and this takes more time than I'm willing to spend on these tasks. I'd rather take the quick-and-dirty route. (I may describe the template-change approach in a future post, if I ever have the time to spare.)
Get rid of smart quotes
Many of the documents I create in Word end up on the Web. Word's curly quotes tear up HTML and make the text around them tough to read. To revert to good ol' straight quotes and apostrophes in Word 2003, click Tools*AutoCorrect Options*AutoFormat As You Type, uncheck "Straight quotes" with "Smart quotes", and click OK. In Word 2007, click the Office button in the top-left corner, and choose Word Options in the bottom right. Select Proofing in the left pane, and AutoCorrect Options in the right pane. Click AutoFormat As You Type, uncheck "Straight quotes" with Smart quotes", and click OK twice.
Set Microsoft Word to use straight quotes instead of smart quotes, and not to convert Web addresses to hyperlinks.
Keep your Web addresses unlinked
Most of the Web addresses I put in Word docs are intended as notes to myself or someone I'll be sharing the file with. They will eventually be cut from the document and pasted into another program that needs the whole URL, including the "http://". But as soon as I type them, Word strips off the URL prefix and makes them live links (though you have to press the Ctrl key as you click). The program also makes any e-mail addresses you type Ctrl-clickable, which opens your e-mail program with the address in the To: field. To retain URLs, network paths, and e-mail addresses as plain text in Word 2003, click Tools*AutoCorrect Options*AutoCorrect As You Type, uncheck Internet and network paths with hyperlinks, and click OK. In Word 2007, click the Office button in the top-left corner, select Word Options, choose Proofing in the left pane, click the AutoCorrect Options button in the right pane, uncheck Internet and network paths with hyperlinks, and click OK twice.
Change your default font
Some people are satisfied with Times New Roman, Calibri, or whatever font Word chooses for them. Personally, I bounce between Arial and Book Antiqua, but you've probably got your own preference. To reset the default font in Word 2003 or 2007, press Ctrl-d to open the Font dialog box, select your preferred font, style, and size, click Default, and then Yes at the warning.
Change your default document folder
I'm forever moving from PC to PC, so I keep my Word documents and other files on a USB thumb drive that I bring with me and plug into whatever system I'm using. For backup, I zip the folder and e-mail it to myself about once a month. I'm sure I'm violating several security "rules," but the process works for me.
Even if you prefer to store your files on your hard drive, you may want to put them somewhere other than XP's My Documents or Vista's Documents folders. To change the folder Word 2003 stores documents in by default, click Tools*Options*File Locations, select Documents (it should be highlighted by default), and click Modify. Navigate to and select your preferred storage location, and click OK twice. In Word 2007, click the Office button and choose Word Options in the bottom-right corner. Choose Save in the left pane, click the Browse button to the right of Default file location, navigate to and select the folder you want to store your documents in, and click OK twice.
Change the folder Word 2007 stores your documents in by default.
Get a new view
My eyesight isn't what it used to be, so I like viewing Word 2007 documents in Draft view (the equivalent of Word 2003's Normal view). Draft view does away with the blue borders on the left and right sides of Word 2007's default Print Layout view. To open Word files in Draft view, click the Office button and choose Word Options in the bottom-right corner. Click Advanced in the left pane, scroll down to the General section, check Allow opening a document in Draft view, and click OK. From now on, if you close Word in Draft view, your files should open in the same view when you restart the app and reopen them.
This option under Word 2007's Advanced Options dialog lets you open documents in Draft view.
Tomorrow: A simple solution for pasting plain text.
Dennis O'Reilly has covered PCs and other technologies in print and online since 1985. Along with more than a decade as editor for Ziff-Davis's Computer Select, Dennis edited PC World's award-winning Here's How section for more than seven years. He is a member of the CNET blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. 
I build templates in my page layout app and then just type in them. Oh, and, since I use a Mac, (primarily, my Mac also boots into XP) - I use Pages in iWork. I am a professional author and it does everything I need. And costs only $70 to buy...
Someday Microsoft will give up and feature overloaded apps and come back to the real world....
The real world uses a lot of features not found in iWork(or any of the other packages, for that matter), which is why we don't use them
Maybe you'll one day graduate to needing the feature set, but I somehow doubt it.
Punctuation symbols have meanings and proper usages that have evolved over centuries. To corrupt them simply because we are now too lazy to overcome the mundane technological hurdles we have imposed upon ourselves is a poverty of our culture. Word will export HTML of curly quotes with the correct embedded codes to read properly in browsers if you simply learn how to use the tool. It takes seconds if you care enough.
This is indicative of a larger, insidious cultural by-product of the desktop publishing revolution: the software industry has trained computer users to care more about their own ease of production of communications than the needs of the readers of those communications. Nobody learns anymore (other than specialists and graphic designers) how people read and what makes that reading easier, more productive, and more accurate. But people will surely get upset if you tell them they can't slather text from one side of the page all the way to the other in their Word files with 0.25" margins. The DTP mantra is ?Screw the reader, this is how I work, I can ?fit more on the page? this way, and I'm not changing....? Sad.
(By the way, the ?fit more on the page? excuse is blatant horse waste: take any Word file you've created, change it to a 2-column layout and count the words per page before and after....you'll see that multiple columns actually increases what you can fit on a page while also reducing line length and making reading easier in most cases....I use this here as an example only because it's the one I hear most from belligerent desktop publishers I'm often hired to re-train.)
Microsoft recognized the lack of concern for correct usage of these punctuation marks among its users when developing Word. And in a rare instance of cultural responsibility, Redmond built in the AutoCorrect entry for quote marks specifically to remove the technological hurdles to using them correctly. To undermine that due to ignorance and indifference is poor advice. Leave them on, learn how to use all the tools in your publishing chain thoroughly, and get serious about your communications.
Note how in my previous comment, the user interface of this comment system allows me to input straight versus curly quotes as I type, but displays the curlies incorrectly. We should be able to expect better from c|net, a technology leader, no?
I can see we're on the same page here, b_baggins...Our replies crossed in cyberspace. Uppity Typographers Unite!
I'll ruin it for you.
Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text
For those of us who don't want to go to a mac - but need a great word ( office) replacement program. go to openoffice.org and download openoffice. I have Office - and for most tasks I prefer Openoffice. It has a word processor - database - spreadsheet - powerpoint type application and more. They are VERY office compatible. Also included is a PDF generator right on the tool bar next to printer Icon, a VERY helpful and welcome addition in my opinion.
There is an app for everything these days, holy hell
- by b93950 April 27, 2008 1:24 PM PDT
- Punctuation fonts are not recognized when posting online using MS Word 2002 and Mozilla browser:
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(13 Comments)They appear as follows:
All I can say is that it?s about time these?.
When they should look like this:
All I can say is that it?s about time these?