More tips and tricks for working in Word

Zatni Arbi, Columnist, Jakarta, zatni@cbn.net.id

Once we start using the computer to do most of our work, we never stop learning. There is always something new that we weren't aware of before. Tips and tricks are among the most interesting things to learn and here are some of the time savers that I have learned recently.

Some people have the habit of putting more than one single space between words, or between a period and the first word of the next sentence. It is rather mind-boggling, as Microsoft Word's Grammar Checker will automatically alert us if it finds more than one single space between two consecutive words.

In the past, to get rid of these extra spaces I would press Ctrl-F to call the Find dialog box. Once on screen, I would press Alt-P to move to the Search and Replace section. Just by accident, I have just found out that Ctrl-H will immediately open the Search and Replace dialog box. Perhaps I never thought of this shortcut because it was not intuitive at all. There is an H in the words "Search and Replace", but it is not pronounced.

Now, once the dialog box is there, it is very simple to discard all the extra spaces: just tap the space bar twice in the box next to "Find what:", hit the Tab key once to move to the "Replace with:" box below and hit the space bar once. Then I press Alt-A to tell Word to replace every two consecutive spaces with a single space.

Of course, I will have to do this repeatedly until Word reports that it has made zero replacements.

I have also learned that to call up the shortcut menu -- the drop-down list of commands that will appear each time we click the mouse right button -- can also be invoked with Shift-F10.

So, for example, to find the synonyms of a particular word, I no longer have to take my hands off the keyboard. All I need to do is place the insertion point (also known as the I-beam) on or inside the word in question, press Shift-F10 and then press the Up Arrow once to go down to the Synonym menu item, before hitting Enter to call up Word's thesaurus.

Another keyboard shortcut that can be particularly useful when working on a long document with a lot of footnotes or endnotes is the combination of Alt-Ctrl-Home. This will call up a small palette on the bottom right corner of the screen. It contains eight icons, and we can move around using the arrow keys.

If we need to find text in a document, we can choose the Find icon with the arrow keys and then hit Enter. Of course, Ctrl-F will be much simpler in this case.

However, this shortcut will become very handy when we need to browse through all the footnotes in a document. We just have to select the Browse by Footnote icon and then hit Enter. We have to repeat the step in order to move to the next footnote in the document.

When copying a page from Internet Explorer into a Word document, we sometimes copy some unwanted elements, such as graphics and photos.

If what we want to copy is a column of text, the job can be done very easily. First, we need to click once at the beginning of the text body to be copied, press and hold down the Shift key, and then click once again at the end of the text body. Once the entire body is highlighted, all we need to do is copy and paste it into our Word document.

Sometimes, however, the layout of the Web pages are such that one or more photos, tables, charts, etc. are embedded inside the body of text and they get copied along with the body of text. Getting rid of these unwanted objects can be challenging -- unless you know a simple trick.

Just remember that when the mouse cursor is placed close enough to the top of any frame box it will turn into a very tiny arrow. When we click the mouse once, the box underneath the small mouse cursor will be selected. If we press the Delete or Backspace key, the content will be cleared but the box will remain.

Here is the trick: Once the box is selected, click on the Table menu, Delete and then Table. This will wipe out the entire selected box and all of its content.