Herb Tyson Technical Blog

Some Word 2010 users do not like the default paragraph spacing. For most users, two simple steps are all that’s needed:

1) In the Home tab, click Change Styles – Paragraph Spacing, and under Built-In, choose the kind of spacing you want.

2) In the Home tab, click Change Styles – Set as Default.

That’s it. If a document is displayed, Word will show a live preview of the different options as you hover the mouse over them.

For additional information–or if you encounter problems–keep on reading.

Either open an existing document OR, in a new Word document, at the beginning of a line, type the following so you will be able to see a live preview of the different paragraph spacing options:

=rand(5,4)

and press Enter. This will create five paragraphs of dummy text, each containing four sentences.

Next, in the Home ribbon tab, choose Change Styles – Paragraph Spacing, and hover the mouse over the choices shown. As you move the mouse, the text in the document will show a live preview of the result. If you don’t want any space between paragraphs, for example, then click on No Paragraph Space, as shown below.

Note that if the Built-In choices don’t do what you want, you can use the Custom Paragraph Spacing… option to roll your own.

Set the Before: and After: spacing as desired, and click OK. Now, to make your selection/setting your new default (regardless of which spacing option you select), immediately choose Change Styles – Set as Default, which is right under Paragraph Spacing. After doing this, check to verify that your spacing has changed—not only in the current document, but in new documents as well. Press Ctrl+N to create a new document. At the top of the document repeat the =rand(5,4) exercise.

To finally cement the deal, you need to save Normal.dotm. Unless you’ve changed the defaults in Word—or unless something else is amiss, this will happen automatically when you close Word. If you’re prompted for changes to Normal.dotm when you close Word, you’ll need to say Yes to saving changes to Normal.dotm. If Normal.dotm is protected for some reason–i.e., so you cannot save changes to it–then this will not work. You’ll first need to get rid of whoever in your company is locking Normal.dotm against changes. Good luck with that. Or, you might need to find the location of Normal.dotm, and make that location a Trusted Location. To do this, choose File – Options – Trust Center – Trust Center Settings… – Trusted Locations – Add new location.

Browse to the desired location, and click OK until all dialog boxes are closed. For this to take effect, you will need to close and then re-open Word.

In Microsoft Word, if you need to type something like albóndigas, résumé, or español, there’s an easy trick. Just add the Ctrl key to the accent you need, and then press the letter you want accented. For example, if you need í, then press Ctrl+’ and then type a lowercase “i” . For ñ, you would press Ctrl+Shift+` followed by the “n”. Since ` is the lowercase character on the ~/` key, you need to add the Shift key in order to get the ~. Hence, you press Ctrl+Shift rather than just Ctrl. However, if you want è (in contrast to é), press only Ctrl+` followed by “e”.

For the circumflex (^), press Ctrl+Shift+6 (the ^/6 key), and then press the needed vowel, e.g., û or î. For the umlaut, there is no sideways : on the standard U.S. keyboard. So, instead, press Ctrl+Shift+; (the :/; key), and then type the letter you want umlauted, e.g., ü, ö, etc. For the ã in São Paulo, the ~ works with the “a” key just as it does for the “n” key. If you need ç, press Ctrl+, followed by the “c” key. For the å type accent, precede the accented letter with Ctrl+@. And use Ctrl+/ for things like ø and Ø.

The trick words with capital letters, as well. For É, press Ctrl+’ and then Shift+E. But, what if the accent you press isn’t supposed to work with the letter you choose? When that happens, Word makes a little dinging noise.

If you ever need ¡ or ¿, just press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+! or Ctrl+Shift+Alt+?. Although, you’ll probably need to use more than just one hand.

And what if you want something else, and you don’t know how to create it? Then use Insert – Symbol – More Symbols. In that menu, if there is an existing shortcut for something, it tells you, as shown here:

And if there is no existing shortcut key—or if you prefer something else—then click the Shortcut Key button and assign a keystroke.

A friend writes:

I have a document in MS Word .docx Word 2007 with hyperlinked text. That is fine for converting to pdf and e-book formats, but I want to create a printed hard copy version, so I need endnotes for the printed version. Is there a way to convert the hyperlinks to endnotes, numbered as they occur in the document? I understand I might have to then fill in the text/description of the endnote, but at least I’d have the endnote number where the hyperlink was and can fill in the endnote that corresponds to the former hyperlink.

Yes. You can do this with a macro. Macros require assumptions. The first assumption is that you don’t want to eliminate the hyperlink—you want it to continue to work in the document, but you want something in the document that also displays the URL. A second assumption is that the URL currently is not displayed in the text. Otherwise, you wouldn’t really need a macro, since the URL would be plainly visible. As third assumption is that you don’t have hundreds of these to convert. Otherwise, we would need some kind of looping control to run the macro until all of the hyperlinks were converted. A fourth assumption is that you are going to put the insertion point at the beginning of the hyperlink before running the macro. The fifth and final assumption is that you know how to create a macro and to set up macro security so that it works in your environment.

With those assumptions in mind, let’s manually do what the macro will do:

1. Move the insertion point to the beginning of the hyperlink.
   
2. Press Ctrl+K, or right-click and choose Edit Hyperlink.
   
3. Select the text in the Address field, and copy it to the clipboard.
   
4. Close the Edit Hyperlink dialog box.
   
5. Select References tab – Insert Endnote.
   
6. Type Source:, and then paste the contents of the clipboard.
   
7. Return the insertion point to its previous location in the text.
   

I like to record macros. When you try to record this as a macro, however, you discover that the macro recorder doesn’t record anything in steps 2 through 4. So, you either need to use VBA to get the contents of the URL Address field, or you do something else. I’m not a VBA expert, however, so I have no clue how to use VBA to get the contents of the address field. Instead, I use some trickery. I toggle the hyperlink field display on (Shift+F9), then I search for everything between two ” marks… this selects the address. I then copy the selection to the clipboard.

To make a long story short[er], the following macro does all that:

Sub ConvertHyperlinkToEndnote()

Selection.Fields.ToggleShowCodes

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting

With Selection.Find

.Text = “”"*”"”

.Replacement.Text = ” ”

.Forward = True

.Wrap = wdFindContinue

.Format = False

.MatchCase = False

.MatchWholeWord = False

.MatchAllWordForms = False

.MatchSoundsLike = False

.MatchWildcards = True

End With

Selection.Find.Execute

Selection.Copy

Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=3

With Selection

With .EndnoteOptions

.Location = wdEndOfDocument

.NumberingRule = wdRestartContinuous

.StartingNumber = 1

.NumberStyle = wdNoteNumberStyleLowercaseRoman

End With

.Endnotes.Add Range:=Selection.Range, Reference:=”"

End With

Selection.TypeText Text:=”Source: ”

Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdPasteDefault)

Selection.TypeBackspace

Application.GoBack

Selection.Delete Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1

Application.GoBack

Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=3

Selection.Fields.ToggleShowCodes

End Sub

Important Note: WordPress seems to want to convert straight quotes to directional/smart quotes. Note that all quotes in the above should be straight quotes—not directional quotes.

So, click the Developer tab in Word, then click Macros… and, oh, yeah. Assumption five assumes you know what to do now. If not, there are plenty of already-written macro-how-to instruction manuals online, so that I won’t reinvent that particular wheel here and now. Google is your friend.

Caveat: macros are environment-specific sometimes. So, what works for me right now the way I have Word configured might not work for someone else with a different version of Word or a different configuration. I did this in Word 2010, but I don’t see any reason it shouldn’t work equally well in Word 2007. That said… let me know if it works.

Earlier this week, I sent a draft report to a client. Figure 19 looked something like this:

My client edited and sent it back, and when I opened it, it now looked like this:

Much had changed, and none of it good. My theory is that many rounds of editing had somehow trashed the link between the graph and the Excel file where it was born. I have a feeling that the F9 key (update links) was involved, since I’d seen this kind of thing happen before. Ultimately, it was faster to completely recreate the graph than to try to resuscitate it.

The problem is that this sort of thing never happens to me when I’m the only one working on a report. It almost always happens, however, once a client has edited the report. I can’t be sure what the client is doing, but the result isn’t healthy for linked charts.

If this sort of thing ever happens to you, there is a defensive strategy you can employ. First, save a copy of each and every version of products you send out for editing and review. Second, you can explicitly break the links so that the charts become impervious to accidental F9 updates. How do you do this?

Caution: Do not do this if you think you’ll need to link back to the source ever again!

Still here? Okay. Proceed with caution. Note: I do this all the time—without regrets. But, this comes after years of seeing charts, graphs, and other items trashed. So, it’s a well-honed defensive strategy for me. But, we’re all different, and you might not be as fed up with this sort of thing as I am (yet). When you reach that point, however… That’s what this article is for.

In Word 2010, click File, and in the lower right side of Info tab’s panel, look for Edit Links to Files.

Click that sucker. This will bring up the Links dialog. There, select all of the Charts (or whatever else you might want to inoculate against malignant updates), and click Break Link. Word will ask if you’re sure. If you are sure (I am), then click Yes.

The source files will now all say NULL.

And… you’ll be protected against this particular kind of disaster.

What about locking the links?

That’s certainly an option—and one you see right there. If you’re sure a client won’t unlock it, go for it. I’ve had them unlocked, however. So, I’m at the next step in my defensive journey.

May the force be with you.