Copywriter, technical writer, translator (FR>EN, ES>EN, IT>EN), journalist

Posts Tagged format

Avoid using manual tabs in Word

Want to line up specific elements over several rows, to make them look like individual columns? You can do this using tabs, but to do so means that if you want to change the spacing later, you need to change each line one at a time. There’s

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Viewing two pages at once

It’s easy enough to do when you read a dead tree book – just put your thumb in the table of contents or index while you flip from page to page looking for the stuff you want. You can easily view two documents on screen as well,

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Creating image captions

Need to explain images you put in your document? You can do so in the surrounding text, and you can also create text that’s clearly associated with the images using captions.

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Resizing images

Look at what happened when I dragged a photo from a web page into a Word document. (This photo was taken from a Toronto Star article dated September 20, 2011.) Word’s Normal style kept the image properly left-aligned, but the image went well beyond the right boundary

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Inserting images

The cliché bears repeating: a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s why you find graphs in financial reports and photos in memoirs, among many other uses. You can easily bring photos, graphs, scanned drawings and other graphical information into a Word document. The key is to

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Word TOC shortcoming

I contributed to an anthology of work by 18 Canadian writers called Prose To Go: Tales From A Private List (a fine read, if I do say so myself. Pick it up if you get the chance.) I contributed not just an essay but I also set

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Creating fields

In my work as a copywriter and journalist, I use a Word template that provides important information about the document I’m writing – word count, document name, current section of document (according to heading style) and so forth. Word automatically fills in most of this information since,

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Troubleshooting tables in Word

Sometimes you use the quick “text and tab” method to create tables, only to have Microsoft Word tell you that your proposed table has more or less columns than you meant to create. Time to roll up your sleeves and do a little troubleshooting.

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Out with unused styles!

Chances are you’ll copy text from other places and paste them into your Word document. When you do, you’ll bring along not just the text, but the style(s) from that source document. This isn’t a big deal, but it can on occasion cause minor formatting headaches which

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Inserting table rows

Adding rows to a Microsoft Word table is pretty easy to do, but this keyboard-based method might be the easiest of them all.

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