In earlier lessons, you learnt about Shortcuts, Navigation and Options. Now you are almost ready to learn how to change the Letter to Formatso that it will print out like the Letter Example below.
This is how the margins are set up. See how the arrows show where the measurements apply. The header takes up the upper part of the top margin and the footer takes up the lower part of the bottom margin.
A page showing top, bottom, left and right margins, with header and footer.
MSWord allows you to personalise many settings under File – Options – Advanced. Scroll down the Advanced settings to see what is available. Below I explain the Display settings.
To personalise your Display settings:
Go to the File tab and select the Options button.
In the left pane of the Word Options dialog box, select the Advanced option.
Scroll down to see the Display block. Note the position of the slider in the vertical scroll bar shown in the illustration below.
The Word Option’s dialog box showing the Display block
Show this number of recent documents. – Enter the number of items, between 1 and 50, to display in the Recent Documents list. After you press Ctrl+o, Pinned and Recent documents are displayed in the Open pane, shown below. Note that the recent documents are labelled “Today” and not “Recent”.
Recent and Pinned documents are displayed in the Open pane.
To remove a file from the Recent Documents list, right-click on the filename and select Remove from list from the drop-down menu.
To clear all the entries from the Recent Documents list, right-click on the last filename in the list and select Clear unpinned items from the drop-down menu.
To pin a document to the top of the list, select the filename and click on the ‘pin’ in the centre of the highlighted area, as shown below.
Quickly access this number of Recent Documents – Enable the Quick Access Recent documents list
Show this number of unpinned Recent Folders – (Added in 2013)
Show measurements in units of Select the measurement unit that you want to use for the horizontal ruler and for measurements that you type in dialog boxes. As you can see in the illustration, I use “Centimeters”.
Style area pane width in Draft and Outline views Type a positive decimal, such as 0.5, in the box to open the style area, which displays the names of the styles applied to text. To close the style area, enter 0. I use “3 cm”.
Show pixels for HTML features Select this option to use pixels as the default unit of measurement in dialog boxes that are related to HTML features.
Show shortcut keys in Screen Tips Select this option to display keyboard shortcuts in the Screen Tips that appear when you hover your cursor over an item in a toolbar.
Show horizontal scroll bar – Select this option to display the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the document window.
Show vertical scroll bar – Select this option to display the vertical scroll bar on the right of the document window.
Show vertical ruler in Print Layout view – Select this option to display the vertical ruler at the left of the screen. Select the Rulercheck box in the Show/Hide group on the Viewtab of the Ribbon to display the horizontal ruler at the top of the screen.
Optimize character positioning for layout rather than readability – Select this option to display character positioning accurately as it will appear in the printed document with respect to blocks of text. However, spacing between characters may be distorted so, for better on-screen readability, leave this option unticked.
Disable hardware graphics acceleration – Hardware graphics acceleration is enabled to move all graphics and text rendering from CPU to GPU (a chip on your graphics card) for better performance. However, it increases the burden on the graphics card. If you experience crashes, slowness, blurred text and cursor hanging when running Office, turning off hardware graphics acceleration should solve the problem.
Update document content while dragging – This option allows you to see what the document content will look like when you drag an object with text wrapping, or when you move, resize or rotate objects.
Use subpixel positioning to smooth fonts on screen – It just seems sensible to have this option enabled.
Show pop-up buttons for adding columns and rows in tables. I find this very annoying because it gets in the way of my cursor.
To see all the MSWord Options, go to Better Solutions.com. They have taken a lot of trouble to present the information so that it is easily accessible.
The Collins Dictionary says “A field is an area of a computer’s memory or a program where data can be entered, edited, or stored.” MSWord has fields such as date and author fields that it stores in its File Properties.
You cannot change the text in a field because it changes back as soon as you print the document. You therefore need to be able to see fields so that you do not change them by mistake. Word allows you to display the fields with a grey highlight. In order to do so:
Go to the File tab and select the Options button.
In the left pane of the Word Options dialog box, select the Advanced option.
In the right pane, under the heading, Show document content, change the Field Shading to “Always”, as shown below:
Word Options > Advanced > Show document content
If you want to change a field in the text, you must first “lock” it (Ctrl+Shift+F9) and then make your change
OR
Go to the Properties pane where the field originates and change the text there. Go to the File tab, Info option to see the Properties pane on the right. Click in a field in the right-hand column of the Properties pane to add or change text.
If you cannot see the property you want, click Show All Properties, as shown below.
Word Options > Info > Properties > Show All Properties
Six more properties are displayed, as shown below, highlighted by an orange border.
The Properties pane has two columns. The fields are in the right-hand column and the field names are on the left.
To see section breaks, paragraph breaks, page breaks, tabs and spaces:
1. Click on the File tab.
2. Click on the Options option (at the bottom left).
3. In the left pane of the Word Options dialog box, select the Display option.
The Word Options dialog box > Display option
4. In the right pane, under the second heading, Always show these formatting marks on the screen, tick the box on the left of Show all formatting marks.
5. Do this whenever you are troubleshooting.
TIP You can quickly toggle this option on or off by clicking the Show/Hide icon (which depicts a paragraph break symbol [called a pilcrow] – ¶) in the Paragraph group of the Home tab (or pressing the shortcut, Ctrl+shift+8).
To speed up the repetitive task of formatting reports, create shortcuts on your computer in its Normal template:
Open MSWord.
At the top left of your screen, click on the File tab.
A menu appears with three panes. On the left are the options, in the centre is Information About the document, and on the right are the document Properties.
In the left-hand section, at the bottom, select the Options option.
What you get when you select the File tab.
The Word Options dialog box pops up.
In the left pane, select the Customize Ribbon option.
The right pane changes into two panes. Below the right-hand one is a Keyboard Shortcuts label.
Click on the Customize… button next to it.
The Customize Keyboard dialog box pops up.
In the Categories list box on the left, drag the scrollbar all the way down so that you can select the All Commands option.
In the Commands list box on the right, scroll down to select the AutofitContent option, which makes a table fit to its contents, instead of being as wide as the page.
Place your cursor in the Press new shortcut key edit box and enter the shortcut – I suggest Alt+Shift+A for AutofitContent.
Click on the Assign button at bottom left.
Repeat for all the COMMANDS listed below.
COMMAND AutofitWindow Description Fit the table between the left and right margins Shortcut = Alt+Ctrl+Shift+A
COMMAND FormatParagraph Description Change the appearance of the selected paragraph/s Shortcut = Alt+P
COMMAND FormatStyle Description Apply, create or modify the style Shortcut = Alt+S
COMMAND InsertCrossReference Description Insert a cross-reference Shortcut = F2
COMMAND InsertField Description Insert a field Shortcut = Alt+Ctrl+Shift+F
COMMAND InsertNewComment Description Insert a comment Shortcut = Alt+Ctrl+M
COMMAND InsertSectionBreak Description Start a new section Shortcut = Alt+Return
COMMAND ParaKeepWithNext Description Keep a paragraph and the following paragraph on the same page Shortcut = Alt+K
COMMAND ParaPageBreakBefore Description Make the current paragraph start on a new page Shortcut = Alt+Ctrl+Shift+P
COMMAND TableDeleteColumn Description Delete a table column Shortcut = Alt+Shift+C
COMMAND TableDeleteRow Description Delete a table row Shortcut = Alt+Shift+R
COMMAND TableDeleteTable Description Delete a table Shortcut = Alt+Ctrl+Shift+D
COMMAND TableToOrFromText Description Convert a table to text or text to a table Shortcut = Alt+V
COMMAND ViewHeader Description Display the header in page layout view Shortcut = Alt+H
