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

TechnoZen

Don't be a phish

Oddly, in the four years or so since the MacMost.com video below was published, not much has changed in the world of phishing. Phishing commonly refers to the activity of tricking people into surrendering financial or other important information using official-looking emails.

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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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Bookmarking your document

When you create a cross-reference in a Word document, you can choose a number of different “hooks” to link that reference to. Headings, tables and numbered items might be the most popular such hooks. Sometimes, though, hooks aren’t precisely where you want them to be, so you

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Speed up your writing

The longer the document you need to write, the slimmer the chance of getting it right on the first draft. So don’t agonize over every word when you first write a document. Instead, dash through the first draft and, wherever you’re not sure about something, leave a

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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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Is your document readable?

When you prepare a document using Microsoft Word, you’re actually doing two things: writing content formatting the content Word offers many tools people can use to automate the formatting of their Word documents, thus saving them lots of time. But Word cannot help people who have not

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