Making Winword 97 work for all your computer endeavors

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.