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Showing posts with the label Word

Add a watermark to Office files, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

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Only Microsoft Word has a built-in watermark feature, but Excel and PowerPoint have a reasonable workaround to adding watermarks on those files, as well. For each of the instructions, I'm using Office 2016 for Windows. Word Word is very easy -- just 3 quick steps. Go to the Design ribbon in your Word document. Click on the Watermark icon of text found near the right end of the ribbon in the Page Background section. Select a watermark you prefer or Custom Watermark... from the menu. If you select the custom option, you have multiple options beyond just custom text. Enter watermark text (or alternatively a picture). Change the font used. Change the font size or use auto for auto-scaling. Text color. A layout of diagonal or horizontal. When you need to remove the watermark, repeat steps 1 and 2, and then select Remove Watermark found at the bottom of the menu. Excel The workaround for a watermark in Excel is done by using an image file.  Find or

Flush left and right on the same line of a Word document

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If you've ever used a Microsoft Word template, you often find the same line that has both left flush and right flush text. I had a recent need to do this and set out to figure out how to accomplish this trick. It ended up not being so difficult - it can be done with Tabs. Have the line you're working on set to left flush. Enter the text that you want to be left-flush. (Leave the cursor at the end of the text.) Select the Home Ribbon (Home tab). In the Paragraph section of the Home Ribbon , click the lower-right corner  where you see the half-square and arrow. This will open the Paragraph properties dialog box. Click the Tabs... button located in the lower-left of the dialog box. This will open the Tabs properties dialog box. There are 2 settings to make in this dialog box. Enter 6.5" for the Tab stop position . This assumes you're using 8.5" width paper and have 1" borders on the left and right sides. 6.5" was determined by this sim

Search and replace special characters in Word

Trying to find or replace special, non-viewable characters in Word? It's easy if you know how! Once you know how, you'll find many new uses. For example, I recently received a table of values in an email, and when I copied into Excel the values didn't go to the cells. With a little search and replace in Word, I reformatted the data so it was tab delimited, and then opening in Excel was a snap. In this case, I had three columns of data, all separated by various number of spaces so that it looked nice in the email. This is how to replace the spaces with tabs. When replacing several spaces at once, the trick is to find and replace the longest number of spaces first. This had some column spaces with 4 spaces, 5, spaces, and 6 spaces, so I started with searching for 6 spaces. Open the Find and Replace dialog box (Ctrl-H). Put 6 spaces in the "Find what:" field. In the "Replace with:" field, enter "^9". Note the following: No quotes "^

Office Ribbon Frustrations: Use the Quick Access Toolbar

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I continue to find new and frustrating things when using Excel 2007. For example, in most spreadsheets I want to freeze the top row and sometimes columns. To do this, I need to remember that I first need to go to the View Ribbon. If I want to use a Macro, it's not on the Insert or Data Ribbon, as I expected, but it is also on the View Ribbon. For Print Preview, you need to go to the Office Button and select the Print arrow. Needless to say, some of the most common tasks I perform are now hidden and/or further clicks away. One way to make some of these tasks easier is to use the new Quick Access Toolbar. The Quick Access Toolbar is the toolbar just right of the Office Button, above the Ribbons. By clicking the drop-down arrow to the right of the toolbar, you can customize the toolbar with your favorite shortcuts. Here's how to customize the Quick Access Toolbar. Click the drop-down arrow to the right of the Quick Access Toolbar Click on "More Commands...". This should

Fonts not displaying or printing correctly

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Ever have a Word (or other) document given you by someone else, and it didn't display the fonts correctly? Perhaps they sent you a PDF or image of the file, and it displayed correctly there, but not in the file that you want to now update. The first thing to check is to make sure you have the same fonts on your system. An easy check is to look at the font list in your application. For example, if you're supposed to display Frutiger 45 Light, but its not in the list, then it's likely not installed. If you don't have the font, and can get access to it, Microsoft has a process for installing it to your Windows machine. In some cases, you may have the font, but it still doesn't display correctly nor is it in the list of fonts in your application. This is likely due to the original file being created on a Mac. It may even occur in some applications, such as Word or QuarkXpress, but not in others, such as Photoshop. The reason is that Windows uses style-linking, while th

Word and Excel Hang on Startup

Perhaps it happened with prior versions of Word and Excel, but I definitely noticed for the first time switching to Office 2007. As a laptop user, I don't always work while connected to my office network, or it may just be that I'm connected via a much slower VPN connection. Regardless, every time I start Word and Excel, they ping the Default Printer, which happens to be on the office network. Due to this, whenever I'm using Word or Excel outside the office the applications hang for several minutes. Apparently so the onscreen display will match the Default Printer specifics, such as margins, Word and Excel will perform this action when started. When over 95% of my documents are never printed by me, and the great possibility that when printed by someone else, they won't have the same printer, I fail to see why Microsoft has chosen this path. From the research I've done, the workarounds are limited. For the Word/Excel VBA Power Users, you can write some code and have

Office Ribbon Frustrations: Switching Windows

I may be a little late to the party, but I finally upgraded to Office 2007 a few months back. While I like the new styles and themes, and I can still use the keyboard shortcuts I've learned, I'm still struggling with find other features within the Ribbons. Top of my list has been switching windows (view another open file) within Excel. In prior versions of Excel, I could go to the Windows menu and select another file. With Office 2007, you have to first select the View ribbon and then click Switch Windows, where you can select a different open file. As with many of the changes, I had to hunt for a while to find the Switch Windows option. In the mean time I did learn a new keyboard shortcut for switching windows. Use Ctrl-F6 or Ctrl-Shift-F6 to go in reverse order. As with the View >> Switch Windows menu, this also works in Word and PowerPoint as well as Excel.

Remove Paragraph Marks / Carriage Returns

I'm sure you've received an email from time to time that you need to save in Word or publish online, and there were carriage returns every line as if it was entered using a typewriter (you remember those). It can be very time consuming to manually delete each Carriage Return on every line. But thanks to a Word Macro, the job is easier. Note that once they are all removed, you still need to re-enter the appropriate paragraph marks. Create a new Macro and use code: Sub NameOfMacro() For Each Xpara In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs Xpara.Range.Select Selection.Characters(Selection.Characters.Count).Delete Next End Sub After saving, run the macro.

Word, "This file contains macros with an expired..."

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I started getting this error message when I opened Word, "This file contains macros with an expired or revoked signature." In my case, this was due to a Global Template Add-in that had an expired certificate. Word behaves differently depending on the Macro Security level. Very High : You only get a message that macros are disable for this project. High : You get an initial error message of "This file contains macros with an expired or revoked signature," before the prompt of macros being disabled. Medium: You get the option to Disable or Enable the specific macro. This dialog box will also provide some clues as to the source of the problem. Low : No warning or disabling of any macros. To change the Macro Security, go to Tools >> Macro >> Security... With an expired Certificate, if you still want to use the macro or template, you either need to set the Macro Security to Medium or Low. A Low setting can open you up for other problems, while Medium require

Word 2003 slowly launches

I had experienced problems with Word 2003 taking a long time to launch. I'm not sure when it occurred, though I suspect it was when I tested it as the email editing client for Outlook. Even though I disabled Outlook from using Word 2003, Word continued to launch slowly. I searched Google, but couldn't find much that would help. I resorted to using the Detect and Repair feature contained in the Help menu. After some processing, the Detect and Repair process asked me for my install disk. Since this is a company computer, Office was installed from a shared drive that I don't have access to, so I canceled the process. When I returned to Word, it acted as though it was the first time launching, and it now seems to open faster. Unfortunately, when I opened Outlook, it also acted like it was the first time launching. My profile was gone with my settings to access my email and the pointer to my email archives. Fortunately I keep all most of my email on the server, so I can access i

Microsoft reports a new vulnerability in WordPad Text Converter for Word 97

I suspect this will only impact a very few people, but the threat is real . If you are viewing Word 97 documents using WordPad, because you do not have Word installed and you use one of the following OSs, then you're at risk. Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 Windows XP Service Pack 2 Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 Unfortunately, unless you get a Word file in the new .docx, I don't know how you easily tell different Word versions apart. If you fit into this category of having a vulnerable system, I would suggest not opening any Word documents sent to you, unless you know very specifically what the user has sent. If you are unsure of the source, but you still want to open it, at least go through the extra work to make sure it was not created in Word 97. To do this: Right-click the Word file Click Properties Click the Summary tab Scroll down to the Application Name and make sure it does NOT read Microsoft Word 8.0 If you really must open it, find

The printer has not yet responded Error

I recently noticed a new problem with Word and Excel opening rather slow -- on a new laptop no less. And when I was connecting through our VPN to the office, I would get an error message, "The printer has not yet responded... Continue to wait?" Turns out there was a problem with my default printer definition in Windows being corrupt. I delete the old definition and created a new definition (Add Printers and Faxes) and the problem has gone away.

Always have expanded menus in Office apps

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I just got a new laptop and was reminded of a common annoyance in MS Office products. The menus never fully display immediately -- you either have to click the arrow at the bottom of the menu or wait a few seconds. There is actually a fairly easy way to keep them expanded all the time. Right-click any toolbar Select Customize Check "Always show full menus" That's it.

Word and Excel files wont open unless application already open

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I recently started having a problem where my Excel 2003 and Word 2003 files would not open when clicked, unless Excel and/or Word was already open. If the application wasn't open, it would open the application, but not load the file. I did quite a bit of searching, but couldn't seem to find the right answer. Some sites recommended checking a setting to Ignore other applications -- a setting that wasn't even available in Word. Turns out for both applications, it was the Addins that were causing troubles. To remove the offending Addin, you need to edit the Registry. Here's the process I used. Go to Start > Run... , enter regedit, and click OK . Go to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\ Addins . Right-click on Addins and select Export . This will let you re-import the keys. Delete the individual Addins one at a time, testing each time to find the offending Addin. Once you identify the offending Addin, re-import all Addin keys, and de

Tracking changes and versions in Word

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I originally started out this post with the idea of making a simple movie on how to track changes and delete those changes in Word. Realizing that I have Word 2000 and many others have moved on to Word 2003 and Word 2007, I decided to begin with some research to see what the differences were. In that research I found a great site to help with Word, so I'll point you there instead, Shauna Kelly's Making the Most of WORD in Your Business . If you are still reading, you might have been asking yourself, "Why making a movie on something trivial like this?" Well, Shauna has captured some specific examples for that too. In fact, she's listed 10 real examples where not minding those tracked changes has led to embarrassment (or more). Finally, if you just want to know more about tracking changes and versions in Word, here's the link to the article on Shauna's site.

Find and Replace special characters in Word

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I recently had a list of items that I wanted to grab from a web page drop-down list. Of course you can't copy a drop-down list, but... you can view the source and get the list. The problem though is, "how do you remove the option tags and the value?" As you may have guessed by the title, you can do it with Word. Here's a sample taken from News.com : Copy the list and paste it into Word. Open the Find and Replace dialog (Edit | Replace... or Ctrl + H). Click the More button and check Use wildcards . Here's the trick, as you need to use special characters. First, paste the string you want to remove in the Find what: field. For each greater than and less than character, place a backslash before it, i.e. < becomes \< . Replace the contents of the value field with an asterisk. Validate Word will be able to find the code by clicking the Find Next button -- the code should now be highlighted. Go to the Replace with: field and enter ^p . This will replace your

New Hole in Word

As reported by eWeek and ZDNet , there is a new problem with Word that could allow attackers to take control of your PC. Since there is no fix available yet, you should avoid opening any unknown Word files. I would expect that Microsoft would release a fix as soon as possible, but if they stick to their patch-Tuesday schedule, this may come to late to make the December release, forcing users to wait until January.