Herb Tyson Word Bible Blog

If you’re an early adopter of Word 2010, and you’ve been sitting on the edge of your chair waiting for co-authoring to arrive, your wait is over! As of this afternoon (EDT), co-authoring is now enabled on SkyDrive accounts.

How can you tell? In this screen shot, notice that Block Authors is available and not grayed out. In this shot, the first paragraph has been set aside so that nobody else can edit it. You can tell by the icon at the left and the dotted bracket.

Also in this screen shot, the Number of Authors tool is showing in the Status Bar. Here, it shows that there are two people currently editing this file.

While editing a co-authored document, you can click the Number of authors tools to see who else is currently editing the document. Here, I’ve signed on as two different entities from two different computers so you can see what co-authoring looks like.

I’ll have more to say about Word 2010 and co-authoring in the weeks and months to come. For more on co-authoring right now, check out chapter 52 in the Word 2010 Bible.

The Microsoft Office 2010 Filter Pack Is Here!

Get it here.

The Filter Pack includes:

• Legacy Office Filter (97-2003; .doc, .ppt, .xls)
  
• Metro Office Filter (2007; .docx, .pptx, .xlsx)
  
• Zip Filter
  
• OneNote filter
  
• Visio Filter
  
• Publisher Filter
  
• Open Document Format Filter
  

Sadly, the Recover Text From Any File feature in Word still does not work correctly for *.docx files, even though the filter pack itself lets you search archived folders (*.zip). The Recover… feature does not take advantage of the filter.

Because docx files really are zip file, treating them as if they contained ordinary text does not yield the expected results. If you want to recover text from a docx file, you would do well to add a .zip extension to it, unzip to a folder, and then drill down to the word folder and look at document.xml. For example, consider a file named Doc4.docx. Any salvageable text will be here:

Doc4.docx.zip\word\document.xml

I recently discovered that if Windows 7′s “Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse” feature is enabled, it can affect the ability to insert symbols using the Symbol dropdown (sometimes) and Symbol dialog box (always) in Word 2007 and Word 2010.

So, if you have activated this setting and suddenly notice that you can no longer insert Symbols, this is probably the reason.

One work-around is to use the keyboard to navigate the Symbol dialog. Use the arrow keys to move around, and use Enter or Alt+I to insert the selected symbol.

When using the Symbol dropdown, click the symbol you want to insert, and then click back in the document to complete the action (if the symbol doesn’t appear immediately when you click on it). I find that I encounter this issue less often than when using the Symbol dialog box.

My own work-around was to abandon the feature. I found that it was more annoying than useful. But, YMMV (your mileage may vary).

In any file dialog box that displays the Favorites list, you can drag a shortcut from the current location or any location shown to the Favorites list. As you probably already knew, you can drag any selected location and drop it into Favorites, as shown here, where I’m dragging a shortcut to the ODEP folder into Favorites. Note that this is redundant, since that shortcut already exists. So, I won’t really do it. But, that’s how it’s done.

Apparently, some of you didn’t know you can also drag from the location bar at the top. First, click in it so that the > Libraries > Documents > format is replaced with the standard file location notation. This also selects the current location (and coincidentally, this is a good way to get a copy of the current location into the clipboard). Move the mouse over the left end of the location, and drag down to the Favorites area, as shown here.

Of course, here, this would be redundant, since the folder I’m dragging already has a shortcut. But, as above, you see the point.

While we’re here, I should tell you that you can also navigate to higher locations by clicking the segments shown in the address bar. Notice that here, Users is highlighted when I hover the mouse pointer over it. If I click on Users, the view now switches directly to that folder, without a need to ride the elevator stopping at My Documents and Herb.

A while back, I blogged about the fact that Windows’ Narrator does not work correctly with Word 2007. Windows 7′s Narrator doesn’t work correctly with Word 2010, either. However, there’s some good news. Excel has had a Speak Cells feature for quite some time (I’m not sure how far back, but I know it was in Excel 2007, and I think it was in Excel 2003). In any event, Word 2010 has added a Speak command to its repertoire, as well. So, even though Narrator continues to not work, Word 2010 users now have a working method for hearing their documents!

How to put Speak onto your Quick Access Toolbar (QAT).

At the right end of the QAT, click the dropdown arrow, and choose More Commands, as shown.

In the Customize Quick Access Toolbar dialog box, set Choose commands from to All commands. In the list, click on Speak, and then click the Add button to add it to the list on the right, as shown. Finally click the OK button.

Now, you should see the Speak button on your QAT, as shown below. To use it, simply select the text you want to hear, and click on the Speak button. While it’s speaking the selected text, you can shut it up by pressing Esc, or by clicking the Speak button again, which becomes while it’s talking.

Assign a Shortcut key to the SpeakStopSpeaking Command

You can, of course, assign a keystroke, if you prefer. After all, if you have limited vision, you might find a keyboard shortcut somewhat more accessible than using the QAT. Here’s the keyboard-only way to do this—or, feel free to use any other method you’re comfortable with:

1. Press Alt+F, t, c, Alt+T. This will open the Customize Keyboard dialog box.
2. Press Alt+C, a, a. This selects All Commands in the Categories box.
3. Press Alt+O, t (this takes you to Commands starting with “t”), PageUp four times (takes you to the SpacePara1 command), Down arrow three times (takes you to the SpeakStopSpeaking command).
4. Press Alt+N (takes you to the Press new shortcut key box.
5. Press the key(s) you want to assign to the SpeakStopSpeaking command.
6. Press Alt+A (assigns the keystroke).
7. Press Esc (dismisses the dialog box).

Your assigned key is a toggle that toggles the speaking of selected text on/off. You can, of course, use the Esc key to interrupt speech.

A while back, I published an article in Dian Chapman’s TechTrax about how to create a keyboard shortcut for pasting the contents of the clipboard as plain text. That article, entitled Paste Special Unformatted Text at Your Fingertips, was mostly about Word 2003 and earlier. Here’s a quick update on how to do the same thing in Word 2007 and the upcoming Word 2010.

Word 2007 and Word 2010

There are several ways to accomplish the underlying goal. If you want unformatted text to be the default when you press Ctrl+V, click the Office button and choose Word Options ? Advanced. In the Cut, Copy, and Paste section, set the first four Paste options to Keep Text Only, as shown here. If you ever want a different action, then you’ll need to use Paste Special, which is assigned directly to Alt+Shift+V in Word 2007 and 2010.

Another method is to assign the following macro to the desired keystroke:

Sub PasteUnformatted

Selection.PasteSpecial Link:=False, DataType:=wdPasteText

End Sub

Yet another method requires three keystrokes, starting with Word 2007 and Word 2010′s, Paste Special keystroke: Ctrl+Alt+V. So, using this method requires that you press Ctrl+Alt+V, tap the “u” key, and press Enter.

Word 2010 Only

In Word 2010, there finally is a dedicated built-in command that can be assigned directly to the keyboard, without need for an intervening macro. If you’d like to have a “paste text” keystroke while leaving the default paste keystroke intact, then assign the PasteTextOnly command to the desired keystroke. Shown here, I’ve assigned it to Ctrl+Shift+V, no longer using the macro I’d been using for the previous ten years.