Maybe I’m just dense, but I’ve found another Word feature that I’ve been wanting but didn’t know existed–document preview. If you’ve read the past couple of newsletters, you know I’ve been spending a lot of time poking around Word’s Open dialog, and this is my latest discovery. To use the feature:
Last week’s newsletter introduced the idea of using Microsoft Word to search for Word documents to which you’ve assigned certain properties, such as categories or keywords. This week we’ll look at how to sort by those properties in a folder. I’ve learned, however, that this will not work in Windows 95 or 98. In XP, it works great, and it may work in some other versions.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about document management–that is, how to keep better track of all those Microsoft Word files I have floating around my computer. One tool I’ve neglected is Word’s Properties feature. If you work in a law office, you probably know all about it. But if you work in a publishing house, like me, you may not even know this tool exists.
The Styles and Formatting Task Pane in Word 2002 is a useful feature, but, keyboard junkie that I am, I just hate reaching for the mouse every time I need to create or modify a style–and the Task Pane doesn’t seem to work with the keyboard. Isn’t there a way to get back Word’s old Style dialog? Or better yet, how about a way to access Word 2002’s fancy new Modify Style dialog (which has the most commonly used options right there) without having to drill down through the Task Pane and a couple of other dialogs?