Making Winword 97 work for all your computer endeavors

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): When you install Microsoft Office 97 over the older version of Office, you may wonder why you no longer have the Shortcut Bar. Some of you may not really use the bar very much when working and therefore you don't really miss it. Some other people, including my boss, find the bar indispensable and make a lot of fuss about its disappearance.

The Setup CD-ROM of Office 97 doesn't automatically install the shortcut palette. If you choose the Typical installation method, the bar will not be installed while the old one will be erased during the setup process. So, if you believe your life will be a tad dull without the bar, choose the Custom method instead.

When you see the list of Office components to be installed, go to the Office Tools item at the bottom and click on the Change Option button. Don't choose the Select all button, since this will install components that you may not need, such as the support for Lotus VM Mail. When the list of Office tools appears, put a check in the box in front of Microsoft Office Shortcut Bar. All you have to do next is press on the OK and Continue buttons.

If you've already installed Office 97 and just want to add the bar, you should choose the Add/Remove method. Or, if you want to have a clean slate, which I actually prefer, you can use the help of Office 97 Setup program to remove the entire suite programs first and reinstall everything from scratch. Now that CPUs are so fast and so are the CD-ROM drives, this process will not take much of your time.

When the installation process is completed, Win 95 will reboot and you'll once again have the Office Shortcut Bar.

Adding buttons

Normally, you won't find the Winword, Excel and PowerPoint buttons on the shortcut bar when it first appears. To activate these shortcut buttons, click with the right mouse button on the area on top of the bar. When a list of menu items appears, choose Customize.

When the Customize dialog box appears, go to the Buttons tab. You'll see a list of commands with a check mark on their left. Scroll down the list until you see Office programs beginning with Microsoft Word. Put a check mark on the box in front of each of the programs that you want to activate. Then click on the OK button. Your shortcut bar will now have the buttons for Winword, Excel, etc.

You can rearrange the location of each button as well. On the right of the list window there are two arrows, one pointing up and the other pointing down. Click on the item you want to shift up or down to select it, and click on the up arrow to move it up the list or the down arrow to move it downward.

Incidentally, if you want to hide any of the many buttons on the bar, just click with the mouse's right button on it and choose Hide Button.

One feature that still few people know is the Auto Hide capability of the shortcut bar. When this feature is activated, the bar will appear only when you move the mouse pointer near the edge of the screen where it is located. When the mouse is away from it, the bar will fold into a thin grey line along the screen edge, giving your application more screen space.

Show margins

In Lotus Ami Pro, we normally see the page margins clearly because they are in a different color. This feature is not tremendously important when you work with a regularly shaped documents. But for certain purposes -- for example, when you're laying out and paginating a 100-page book or your margins change from one page to another -- you might want to be able to see the demarcation for your text.

Winword has a nifty way of displaying the text border lines. It helps a lot, too, since this option will also show you the borders for the header and the footer, making it easier for you to visualize your page layout.

To activate the text borders option, click on the Tools menu item, then on Options. When the Options dialog box appears, go to the View tab, and click on Text boundaries. Then click on OK.

Using styles

Applying the Styles is a fast and efficient way of formatting your document and ensuring consistency of look, and almost every serious word processor comes with this under-utilized tool. A style is basically a set of format parameters that you can apply over and over to different parts of your document. Just highlight the text, and then choose the style from the style list found on Winword's Formatting toolbar.

In Winword, different styles belong to different document templates. For example, the Normal document template, which is the default template you get each time you create a new document, comes with several standard styles.

For instance, there are three different styles for your heading or subheading, and there is the Normal style for the body of your text. You can add as many more styles as necessary. Remember, though, if you have too many of them, you'll have difficulty remembering what effects each will create.

To add a new style to the style library after you've created a new document is not as complicated as it may seem. Click on Format, then on Style. When the Style dialog box appears, click on the New button. Give a name to the new style you're creating, and then choose the existing style you want to base it on. For instance, based on the Normal style you create a style called Quotation.

You might use a lower font size for every quotation in your document and you might want to indent both sides of the paragraph. To adjust these format settings, click on the Format button on the bottom of the dialog box. From the drop-down list that appears, choose Font to modify the font size. Choose Paragraph to alter the paragraph settings for this style. You do these exactly the way you format your document's paragraph.

This style facility is very helpful when you format a long document with a hierarchical organization of ideas.

Red underline

When you write in Indonesian, you may get irritated by the thin red and green underlines that appear as you type in your words. This is because the dictionary could not find a match for what you're typing, so it thinks you're making a typo. The grammar checker is at work, too. If it finds anything which is ungrammatical in English, it will highlight it with the green underline.

To disable this on-the-fly spelling and grammar checker is very simple. Click on the Tools item on the menu bar and then click on Options. In the Options dialog box, go to the Spelling & Grammar tab. Deactivate both the Check spelling as you type and Check grammar as you type options, and you'll no longer see the red and green lines underneath the text.

You can reactivate these functions again when you type something in English. Just follow the same steps.

Stick together

When formatting a long document, it sometimes happens that the subheading becomes the last piece of text on a page. This doesn't look good, as the subheading should always stay together with the paragraph that follows it.

To stick the subheading with the following text, select it and click on Format and then on Paragraph. In the Paragraph dialog box, click on Line and Page Breaks. Activate the Keep with next option.

Finally, if you want a paragraph to appear entirely on just one page, you just need to activate the Keep lines together that you can find in the same dialog box. This will prevent page break from cutting your paragraph into two. If you have tables, it's a good idea to tie the lines together, as well.