Posts Tagged ‘paragraph’

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Keep your Table on One Page in MS Word

Monday, January 30th, 2012

When you create large, complex documents (i.e., technical manuals, theses, etc.) you will find that you are adding tables to them. It has been my experience that most tables in these documents are not very long and can very easily fit onto one page. Having said that, it can be problematic when there is a page break smack dab in the middle of your table.

Follow the steps below to prevent such behavior:

  1. Select all rows in your table.
  2. Display the Paragraph dialog box by clicking on Format | Paragraph in version 2003 and in versions 2007-2010, click on the Home tab of your Ribbon and click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Paragraph group.
  3. Be certain the Line and Page Breaks tab is selected.
  4. Select the Keep Lines Together check box.
  5. Click on OK.

Having done that, you now need to repeat the steps, with two very minor changes.

  1. First, in step one, select all the rows in your table except the last one.
  2. In step four, make sure the Keep with Next check box is selected.

This will make sure that your table stays together as a unit rather than staying with teh paragraph that follows it.

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Posted in Microsoft Office Word, Word 2003, Word 2007, Word 2010 | No Comments »

Highlight Information in MS Word Using Shading

Monday, January 9th, 2012

Word provides you with a very handy method of shading text in your documents. Shading can be added together with any border you may specify for your paragraph. This is a great little feature – it even allows you to precisely control the level of shading.

 Follow the steps below to learn how:

  1. Place your cursor in the paragraph that you would like to highlight.
  2. Click the Home tab of your Ribbon.
  3. In the Paragraph group, click the down-arrow to the right of the Shading tool that resembles a paint can to display the shading palette.
  4. Select one of the ten theme colors at the top of the palette. Each color has options under them to represent a different level of shading for that particular color.

If you are using an earlier version of word:

  1. Place your cursor in the paragraph that you would like to highlight.
  2. Click on Format | Borders and Shading to display the dialog box.
  3. Click on the Shading tab.
  4. Using the Style drop-down list, select a degree of shading you want to use for your paragraph.

  • Click OK.

Highlighting your text using the shading settings is completely different than highlighting text using the highlighter tool.  Personally, I think it is easier to do using shading and you have a lot more flexibility as well.

You can apply the shading technique to styles and create a character style that incorporates shading. You can then apply the character style to anything you would like to shade and you can easily remove the style, replace it with other formatting or search for the style.

The process is much more inolved when working with highlighting that has been applied using the highlighting tool.

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Posted in Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Word, Word 2003, Word 2007, Word 2010 | No Comments »

Deleting all Tab Stops in MS Word

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

A reader wrote to me recently inquiring whether there was a keyboard shortcut to delete all tab stops in her document.

Unfortunately there is no keyboard shortcut to accomplish this task. You must use the Tabs dialog box instead.

Follow the steps below to learn how:

Click CTRL + A to select your entire document.

Display the Home tab of your Ribbon.

Click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Paragraph group to display the dialog box.

Click the Tabs button at the bottom-left to display the Tabs dialog box.

Click the Clear All button.

Click OK.

In version 2003, simply click on Format | Tab | Clear All.

I have read different posts that suggest a quick way to delete tab stops is to select all the text and then click CTRL + Q. This removes all explicit paragraph formatting from your text.  While the tab stops are a paragraph format, CTRL + Q just removes any explicitly added tab stops and sets the paragraphs back to whatever formatting is defined for each paragraph’s style. So if the underly paragraph style has tab stops defined, those stops remain after CTRL + Q is clicked and not all tab stops are removed.

More importantly, you should know that when you get rid of your paragraph stops, Word’s default tab stops automatically take place. The default tab stops in MS Word are set for every half inch. You can set them to a different setting, but you cannot cleanse your document of all tabs completely. There is no method to do this.

Should you need to remove tab stops from a large number of documetns you may want to use a macro to accomplish the task for you. The macro below will remove all tab stops from all paragraphs in yoru document:

Sub TabsGone()

     ActiveDocument.Paragraphs.TabStops.ClearAll

End Sub

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Posted in Microsoft Office, Word 2007, Word 2010 | No Comments »

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