Herb Tyson Word Bible Blog

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.

Are you using the Office 2010 public beta? It’s pretty darn stable and I’ve been using it since November. One thing I like in particular about Outlook 2010 is that the Navigation Pane font can be changed directly at long last. No longer are you stuck with the default 8 point font, or having to experiment with system fonts to see which one affects the list, and then trying to find something that works here while not breaking something else.

At the bottom of the Navigation Pane, click the Configure buttons dropdown arrow, shown below, and then click Navigation Pane Options.

In the Navigation Pane Options dialog box, click Font. Finally, in the Font dialog box, choose a font and size that work better for your vision, assuming that Segoe UI 8 isn’t something you’d choose.

Many Word 2007 users miss the ability to press Shift+F5 to return to the last place editing occurred in a document they open. Shift+F5 executes Word’s built-in GoBack command. It continues to work just fine in a document you’re editing, cycling among the current and last three places editing occurred. However, it does not work for a document you’ve just opened in Word 2007.

If you’re up for a little bit of very simple VBA programming, you can create the ability to automatically return to the spot where the cursor was the last time the document was saved. It works like this. When you close a document based on Normal.dotm, if you have a macro named AutoClose, that macro gets executed each time you close a document. When you open a document, if you have a macro named AutoOpen, that macro gets executed.

Note that you can set this up in other templates as well, but putting the system into the default global template—Normal.dotm—will handle most of the documents most people edit.

So, the first step is to create AutoClose (if you don’t already have an AutoClose macro), and include in it the instruction to insert a bookmark. I named this bookmark LastEdited. You could call it whatever you want. You could call it UncleFreddy or AuntPetunia. It doesn’t matter, as long as the act of setting it is contained in an AutoClose macro. The macro looks like this, at minimum:

Sub AutoClose()

    On Error Resume Next

    ActiveDocument.Bookmarks.Add Range:=Selection.Range, Name:=”LastEdited”

End Sub

So, each time you close a document based on the template that contains the AutoClose macro, a bookmark named LastEdited is created. I’ll bet you can see where this is going.

Each time you open a document, if the underlying template contains a macro named AutoOpen, it gets executed. So, guess what we’re going to have that AutoOpen macro do! Right! We’re going to have it take us to the LastEdited location. At a minimum, the AutoOpen macro will look like this:

Sub AutoOpen()

    On Error Resume Next

    Selection.GoTo What:=wdGoToBookmark, Name:=”LastEdited”

End Sub

That’s it! Creating the macros and setting the security is up to you. I said “at minimum,” because you might want your AutoOpen macro to do other things, like set the zoom at 140%, put the file location into the title bar, or fix you a cup of tea. These frills are entirely up to you.

You might be wondering what the On Error Resume Next is for. That’s there in case the macro encounters some kind of problem. The first time you open a document, for example, there will be no LastEdited bookmark. Without the error handling statement, you’d get a nastly little dialog box. Or, what happens if you’re editing a protected document and can’t create a bookmark. Same deal. The error handling statement keeps you from getting an error message.

One side effect of this system is that you will always be asked whether to save the file. That’s because inserting the bookmark is an edit. If you say No to saving changes, then the bookmark will not be saved.

So, what happens if there’s already a bookmark named LastEdited? Simple—it gets overwritten by the new one. If you think there’s some chance that there’s an unrelated bookmark named LastEdited in any of your documents, then give this one a different name… like TheInsertionPointLocationTheLastTimeThisDocumentWasSaved.

The Open dialog box in Word 2007:

When trying to register my wife’s WordPress blog with Word so she could blog directly from Word, we kept getting the message Word cannot register your account. I got this message periodically when I registered my own blogs, but it eventually worked. So, kept it up. No joy.

After failing for several days, I finally decided to see if something more was known about the problem to try to see if it was a “you gotta live with it issue. Eventually, I found the answer! As it turns out, it’s a setting in WordPress’ Dashboard. I don’t recall seeing this setting a few years ago when I registered my blogs, so it might be something new they added to make things less hit-or-miss. In any case, it worked! Here’s the fix.

1. At the bottom of the left column, under Dashboard, click on Settings. This will expand the list of settings sections.
2. Click Writing.
3. Under Remote Publishing, enable XML-RPC. If you think you’ll ever use Atom, then enable it, too, just for the heck of it.

At the bottom of the Dashboard window, click Save Changes. And Bob’s your uncle!

Yesterday, I installed Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). Along with it, I installed a new version of the Google Toolbar (beta). Mind you, I normally use Firefox rather than IE8. Its logic better fits my way of thinking, and it has some features I deem essential. But, I’m a new-version-aholic, so when something new appears, I have to try it, and since I’m a big fan of the Google toolbar in Firefox, I figured I’d try it as well.

Within a few minutes of installing, however I discovered that the new Google Toolbar had hijacked Ctrl+Space to make its own quick search box work. I use Ctrl+Space in Word and many other applications to clear character formatting. So, having it suddenly made unavailable was unwelcome. That first time I pressed Ctrl+Space, instead of seeing the character formatting reset to normal, I saw this:

Cute, perhaps, but unwelcome, since I already use Ctrl+Space for something else. Unfortunately, I don’t see any way to change this assignment to something less invasive and more useful. Fortunately, you can turn it off—and that’s what I did. Right click the Google toolbar in IE and choose Google Toolbar Options. In the Search Tab, turn off Enable quick search box to search outside the browser, and you get Ctrl+Space back.

If it were just in Word that I use Ctrl+Space, I could reassign the function to a different key combination. But, this handy shortcut works in a variety of programs—most of which do not permit key reassignment. So, instead, I’m saying No to Google’s offer.

Moving from Word 2003′s toolbars and menus to Word 2007′s ribbon can be a bit of a shock to many users of earlier versions of Word. Some of this shock can be eased, however, by making your most-used tools from Word 2003 as visible as possible in Word 2007.

Contrast the interfaces for Word 2003 and Word 2007. Here, I’ve told Word 2003 to show the Standard and Formatting toolbars on two rows:

Notice that right above the ruler, you see the style name, the font name, and the point size. For the most part, no matter what you’re doing in Word, this information is always there where you can see it.

Now, take a look at the default view for Word 2007:

Here, too, you see the style, font, and point size, at least initially. However, there is room for only a limited number of styles in the gallery. There is no guarantee that the style of currently-selected text is visible in the horizontal list of styles.  Moreover, if you move out of the Home tab, style, font, and point size are no longer knowable at a glance.

I’m guessing that the programmers at Microsoft aren’t writers. I can tell this because no veteran Word writer would put up with not knowing at all times the current style, font, and point size. These are vital pieces of information. Well, perhaps you don’t agree. If you don’t, then this post isn’t meant for you. It’s meant instead for users who want to know at all times what’s in their document.

A solution is at hand, however, in the form of the Quick Access Toolbar, or QAT as it’s more affectionately known. First, look at where the Quick Access Toolbar is. It’s up there in the stratosphere, thousands of miles above where you’re working. This means that to see it, you’re going to have to look way above where you’re accustomed to looking. It also means that you’re going to have to move the mouse quite a bit more than you did when accessing the Formatting toolbar in Word 2003 and earlier.

So, let’s move it. Right click the QAT and choose Show Quick Access Toolbar Below the Ribbon, as shown here.

Great. Now the QAT is closer to the battlefield, even if the selection of tools is somewhat lacking. Let’s address that problem right now.

First, let’s add a style tool to the QAT so you can see what you’re wearing, so to speak. Right click the QAT and choose Customize Quick Access Toolbar. Set Choose commands from: to Commands Not in the Ribbon. Click in the list of commands and tap the T key to accelerate to just below the last command that starts with “S”. Scroll up a few commands and look for one that says Style. When you hover the mouse pointer over it, you see this:

The word Classic is the clue that you’re in the right place. With Style selected, click Add to move the command into the right-hand panel. Click the up arrow to the right of the right panel until Style is at the top:

Click OK. Let’s see what it looks like now:

Great! Now we can always tell what style is applied at the insertion point. Not so great, however, is that unless the Home tab is displayed, you can’t necessarily tell what font and point size are selected. Let’s fix that.

In the Home tab, right click the font tool’s dropdown arrow, and choose Add to Quick Access Toolbar. Next, right click the point size tool’s dropdown arrow and choose Add to Quick Access Toolbar.

This done, you’re almost there:

But, there’s a visual problem. If you came here from Word 2003, you’re used to the three tools–style, font, and point size–being side by side. In the list of commands currently on the QAT, click on Font, then click the Move Up arrow to move it to just below Style. Move Font Size the same way.

Once that’s done, the three new formatting tools you added will now be side by side and where you’re used to seeing them.

If you like, you can set up the newly positioned Quick Access Toolbar as a combination of Formatting and Standard toolbar tools so that the tools you need most often are right in front of you:

From left to right, we now have: Style, Font, Point size, New, Open, Save, Bold, Italic, and so on. But, notice which ribbon tab is selected: Review.

Now, no matter which ribbon tab is displayed, you’ll always have those tools at the ready. But, most important, if the style, font, or point size in the current document ever look a little strange to you, you’ll be able to tell at a glance what’s what.

When you need to remove whole cells, rows or columns from a table, users rightly expect that when you select the cell(s), row(s) or column(s) and press Delete, they will be deleted. This does not happen, however. Instead, if the selection contains text, the text is deleted, but the structure remains intact. This is great if that’s what you want to do. However, if you really want to trim the structure, Delete doesn’t make it happen.

The simple but not-terribly-well-known solution is to use the Backspace key instead of the Delete key. When just cells are selected, Word will prompt for what you want to do.

If a whole row or column is selected, the Word will go ahead and delete it.

Of course, you can also right-click the selection and choose Delete Rows, Delete Columns, or Delete Cells… However, pressing the Backspace key—for me, anyway—is a lot more direct and satisfying. This works when the whole table is selected, too. Delete empties the table, while Backspace zaps it completely.

In trying to finally figure out why date AutoComplete “randomly” seems to stop working in Word 2007, I’ve been doing some experimentation. I’ve finally solved this annoying mystery that has been plaguing me for well over a year.

Word 2007′s date AutoComplete does NOT work if the window is zoomed to a level that requires display of the horizontal scroll bar beyond a certain point. My usual zoom for Word–so I can read comfortably–is 160%. At that zoom, the horizontal scroll bar has decidedly kicked in, and date AutoComplete does not work.

I went through many iterations of renaming the Data key, renaming Normal.dotm, turning off add-ins, rebooting, creating a new Windows user, etc. Ultimately, each time I thought I had the problem licked, it would rear its ugly head once again when I stopped experimenting and started to do some real work. I finally noticed that the common denominator appeared to be that real work required zooming the text big enough to read it.

With the Word window maximized, in Print Layout view, I start at 100%, and date AutoComplete worked fine. If I increase the zoom in 5% increments, the horizontal scroll bar appears at 170%. Date AutoComplete still works at that zoom level. At 175% however, date AutoComplete stops working. If I back down to 170%, it works again.

Date AutoComplete works all the time in Draft view, regardless of zoom.

In Web Layout, it’s the same problem as in Print Layout. The first zoom nudge that makes the horizontal scrollbar appear doesn’t kill date AutoComplete. The second zoom nudge above that, however, does kill it.

If you’ve been hankering for Office Ultimate 2007, are a student, but can’t afford it, perhaps you can now. For now through December 31, 2010, students with valid .edu addresses enrolled for at least half a credit can get Office Ultimate 2007 for $59.95. Take a look here:

http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-us/default.aspx

As far as I can tell, this beats the best deals on the stripped-down Home &Student version by a mile.