Editorium Update

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 such things. But for people who work in the publishing industry, Word needs considerable tweaking. For one thing, if you’re editing, typesetting, or indexing in Word, you don’t *want* all that automated stuff; you want *control.* No automatically capitalizing the first word of a sentence, for example, or setting the ends of ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) as superscript.

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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 that helps. Also, most of my documents don’t include graphics, which I know can bog things down in Word.

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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 a menu. For example, if I click the Format menu, only five items show up. If I click the little arrows down south, I get about four times that many. I’m really tired of having Microsoft decide what I can and can’t see. If you are too, here’s how to remedy the situation:

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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.)

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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 Text 2 No Indent, Normal Text 2 Block Quotation, and so on. The problem is, Word’s drop-down style list isn’t wide enough to display the entire name of the style, so I usually end up looking at something like this:

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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 about these features in Editorium Update. For now, I just want to show you where the features are so you can start exploring them and putting the ones you like on menus, toolbars, and keyboard combinations for easy access.

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