[July 31, 2008]

Wow! Can you believe that July is over? I sure can't! As Calvin used to say in Calvin & Hobbes, "There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want!" Sometimes I feel like I will never get caught up! I have decided that when I retire I am going to sit down and learn all the things that I don't have time to learn now, but I will probably be so old by then my brain will be a little slow.

We just got back from a long weekend in West Palm Beach and boy oh boy, was it ever hot! I like summertime but I wouldn't want to have that heat all the time. It was a lovely place to visit and we were able to visit with old friends and catch up on each other's lives. We had a wonderful time and now I am trying to catch up on everything on the home front!

Please help me to welcome Charles, Susanna, Carole, and Ronald, our newest Premium subscribers. Welcome to the family!

I hope you are all enjoying your summer wherever you are. Remember to take some time to enjoy...

Let's get to the tips now!

Carol's Signature

Table of Contents

Paragraph Shading in MS Word 2007 - Dress up your documents!

Simulate Templates in MS PowerPoint - A nifty trick.

Share your AutoText Entries on a Network - It's always nice to share!

Paragraph Shading in Word 2007

You can put color behind your text in a word document - not just highlight it, but add color to the entire paragraph! It is fairly straightforward to do in Microsoft Word 2007.
Follow the steps below to learn how:

  1. Launch MS Word 2007 if it is not already open.
  2. Key in the text to your document.
  3. In the Home tab on the Ribbon, in the Paragraph group, you will see a button that looks like can of paint. This is the Shading button.
  4. Click on the down arrow and on the resulting menu you will see a palette of colors that you can choose from to shade your paragraph.
  5. Select your color of your choosing.
  6. You get a live preview, as you roll your mouse over all the colors that you are considering.
  7. Click on the one that suits best suits your need!

It doesn't get much easier that that does it?

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Simulate Templates in MS PowerPoint

Although MS PowerPoint limits you to one template per presentation, you can fool it by simulating more than one. \
To eliminate the graphic portions of a template for any given slide, follow the steps below:

  1. Click on Format | Custom Background.
  2. Check the Omit Background Graphics From Master box.
  3. Select Apply.
  4. To change the background Color, use the drop-down list above the check box or choose Format | Slide Color Scheme.

Pretty nifty trick isn't it?

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Share Your AutoText Entries in a Network

Hopefully you are all aware of the AutoText feature in MS Word. It allows you to assign text, graphics and other elements to a mnemonic in your MS Word documents and then replace that mnemonic with the expanded text any time you like. I love this feature. I find myself typing "in the above-captioned case" all the time and so I now use an AutoText named "cap." I only have to type cap and bingo I am finished!

Many companies have asked me to assist them in developing company specific AutoText entries for them and I have been happy to oblige them. I specialize in law offices and create quite a few for them and they always ask me "How can we share these with everyone on the network?"

The answer is simple. AutoText entries are one of the items stores in MS Word's templates and that means that if you have already developed a set of templates, you just have to make sure that the AutoText entries are included in the templates!

To make the templates with the AutoText entries available to be shared by everyone on the network, you simply place the templates in a shared directory on the network file server.

Users can then either change their MS Word configuration to load the templates when starting or attach the templates to their documents as they see fit.

 

Included in the Premium Newsletter:

  • Rename an AutoText Entry in MS Word
  • MS Excel's Top/Bottom Rule Allows Rapid Data Analysis
  • Use the Organizer to Manage your Macros in MS Word

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