Archive for the ‘Customization’ Category

Setting Up Microsoft Word for Use in Publishing

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Out of the box, Microsoft Word is set up for the most generic of users--someone who needs to type an occasional letter or compose a memo for the boss. It works well for such purposes, offering lots of automated corrections and formatting for someone who doesn't want to think about ...

Changing Word’s Memory Allocation

Wednesday, April 28th, 2004

Editors are often afraid to work on big documents in Microsoft Word. I routinely work on documents larger than 300 pages, so I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. I do believe in having plenty of RAM (random access memory) on a computer (at least 256 megabytes), so ...

Show Me the Menu!

Wednesday, April 14th, 2004

In the 1996 film Jerry McGuire, Tom Cruise shouts "Show me the money!" I know the feeling, but right now I want Microsoft Word to show me the *menu*--all of it! In Word's default state, many menu items are hidden until you click the little arrows at the bottom of ...

Customizing Shortcut Menus

Wednesday, February 20th, 2002

Don't you love Word's shortcut menus? You know--the ones you get when you click the right mouse button. (If you're a Mac user, you can access the shortcut menus by holding down the Control key while pressing the mouse button.) Share

Resizing Drop-Down Lists

Wednesday, December 19th, 2001

I work a lot with styles in Microsoft Word, and I like being able to look up at the drop-down style list on the formatting toolbar to see the name of the current paragraph style. I also like giving my styles long, descriptive names, such as Normal Text 2, Normal ...

Hidden Features in Microsoft Word

Wednesday, August 8th, 2001

Microsoft Word comes with lots of features, many of which do not appear on menus or toolbars unless you put them there. Some of these features aren't even documented. Nevertheless, some of them are very useful for editing, writing, typesetting, and other publishing tasks. From time to time I'll write ...