A complete tutorial about making a news- letter appears. Click disclosure triangles to expand topics.
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Turning AutoCorrect on and off
A lot of people wish Word weren’t so presumptuous about how things ought to be. In particular, when Word is autocorrecting things, maybe it’d be better if Word started by asking you what you want done. Unfortunately, Word isn’t a mind-reading, context-sensitive robot. You have to turn correction features on or off on your own.
Now there just happens to be a simple setting in AutoCorrect that allows you to turn off the entire AutoCorrect feature. Choose this magical sequence:
Word➪Preferences, and then click the AutoCorrect button and deselect the Automatically Correct Spelling and Formatting as You Type check box. When you have time, you should go through all of Word’s settings and decide which ones you want to turn on and which ones you want to turn off so that Word behaves exactly the way you want it to.
Setting compatibility preferences
AutoCorrect isn’t the only feature that affects how Word behaves. In addi- tion to the AutoCorrect preferences, take a peek at the compatibility prefer- ences by way of choosing Word➪Preferences➪Compatibility. The
Compatibility preferences dialog (shown in Figure 1-14) lists a wide variety of specific behaviors of Word that have changed over the years. Turn spe- cific behaviors on and off here, such as the following:
✦ Font Substitution: If you open a document that used a font that isn’t available on your computer, Word substitutes a font that you do have for the font that you don’t have. If you’d rather choose the font, click the Font Substitution button and then choose the font you want.
✦ Recommended Options For: This pop-up menu has preconfigured com- binations of settings from the behavior options. You can change Word 2011 to behave like older versions of Word or even WordPerfect.
✦ Options: You can turn individual Word behaviors on and off in this list by selecting or deselecting check boxes. The choices are eclectic.
As you make choices, the Recommended Options For pop-up button changes to let you know which set an individual choice you check belongs to.
✦ Default: Click this button to use the settings you’ve made as the default behavior for Word from now on. If you click this button, you must allow the Normal.dotm template to be modified in order to permanently change Word’s behavior.
✦ Compatibility Report: In this section, select the Check Documents for Compatibility check box to activate the Compatibility Report feature.
Click the Reset Ignored Issues button to tell the compatibility checker to recheck the entire document and also flag problems you had previ- ously told it to ignore. Click Reset All Issues button to tell compatibility checker to recheck all documents for incompatibilities even if you told
214 Making Word Behave the Way You Want It To
If you want to check whether a document is compatible with other versions of Word, choose Toolbox➪Compatibility Report.
Figure 1-14:
The Compatibility preferences dialog.
Customizing Word’s keyboard shortcuts
Being able to speed up your work is always a good thing. Keyboard short- cuts are one of the best ways to increase your productivity, and customizing these shortcuts makes your computer more personalized.
Mac OS X has its own keyboard shortcuts in addition to Word’s keyboard shortcuts. When you press a key or a key combination, Mac OS X searches first to see whether a task is assigned to that shortcut in Mac OS X system preferences. If Mac OS X has a shortcut defined for what you pressed, the keyboard shortcut is carried out by the operating system. However, if Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts aren’t defined for what you pressed, Mac OS X tells Word what you pressed on the keyboard. If you want to use a particular key- board shortcut in Word, you have to check to make sure that your desired shortcut isn’t already assigned to do something else by Mac OS X.
Showing keyboard shortcuts
Apple has a lot of nice keyboard shortcuts already defined for Mac OS X, and you can easily get a complete list of them:
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1. In Finder (the Desktop), choose Help➪Mac Help.
2. In the Ask a Question search box, type shortcuts and then press Return or Enter.
Help responds with a list of relevant topics.
Likewise, Word also has a generous assortment of keyboard shortcuts right from the start. If you switched to the Finder application in the preceding steps, switch back to Word. The shortcuts in Word are available by search- ing Word’s Help for Keyboard Shortcuts. You can set up Word so that it automatically displays keyboard shortcuts in menus and toolbar ScreenTips:
1. In Word, choose View➪Toolbars➪Customize Toolbars and Menus from the menu bar.
2. On the Toolbars and Menus tab of the resultant dialog, select the Show Shortcut Keys in Screen Tips check box.
3. Click OK.
Making your own shortcuts
You can assign keyboard shortcuts to Word commands and change the ones that Microsoft assigned. Word doesn’t force you to stick with the default shortcuts. You can assign and reassign shortcuts as you wish. Figure 1-15 shows the Customize Keyboard dialog. To access the Customize Keyboard dialog and set a keyboard shortcut, take these steps:
1. Choose Tools➪Customize Keyboard.
This opens the Customize Keyboard dialog, shown in Figure 1-15.
2. In the Categories list, select a category, and in the Command list, choose a command.
For example, we selected Edit in the Categories list and EditPasteSpecial in the Commands list.
3. To assign (or reassign) a keyboard shortcut for the selected command, type in a customized keyboard shortcut combination for the selected command and then click the Assign button.
4. Click OK twice.
Save a document with one or more custom shortcuts as a template so that when you open that template, the keyboard shortcuts you customized apply only to the documents created from that template.
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Figure 1-15:
Customizing keyboard shortcuts.
As shown in Figure 1-15, these features and commands are available while using the Customize Keyboard dialog:
✦ Categories: Lists general categories of Word commands that can accept keyboard shortcut assignments.
✦ Commands: Lists commands within categories that can accept keyboard shortcut assignments.
✦ Current Keys: If the selected command already has a keyboard assign- ment, it’s displayed here.
✦ Press New Keyboard Shortcut: Press a key combination for the com- mand, then click the Assign button to assign the combination as a shortcut. If you try to use a shortcut already assigned by Mac OS X, the shortcut will execute, or you may hear a beep instead of seeing the key- board combination appear.
✦ Currently Assigned To: If you type a shortcut that has already been assigned, the current assignment is displayed. You can override the cur- rent assignment by clicking the Assign button.
✦ Description: Describes the selected command in the Commands list.
✦ Save Changes In: Select from this pop-up menu to determine whether the keyboard shortcut is saved in the current Word document or in Word’s Normal.dotm template:
• If you save to a document, the assignment works only for that particu- lar document.
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• If you save to Normal.dotm, the assignment works from now on whenever you open a new Word document. Choose this option to save in your copy of Word so that it works on your computer from now on.
You can transfer shortcuts from one document template to another and to the Normal.dotm template with the Organizer tool. We explain the Organizer tool in Chapter 3 of this minibook.
Reading and Working in Full Screen View
There’s a new Full Screen view in Word 2011 that lets you edit or simply read a document without the clutter of the Ribbon, rulers, and other distrac- tions. Full Screen view is actually two views in one: You can choose Reading mode or Writing mode. In Reading mode, there’s little to disturb you as you turn pages and read a document. Writing mode provides a sleek, minimalist, unobtrusive toolbar.
Switching to Full Screen view
You can display your document in Full Screen view. As described earlier in this chapter, you can click the Full Screen view button in the lower-left por- tion of the window.
The toolbar hides itself. Move the mouse to the top of the window to display the toolbar while working in Full Screen view. You can navigate by clicking the mouse, clicking in the Navigation pane, using arrow keys, and by using the navi- gation controls at the top of the window.
You can use the Media browser, the Toolbox, and custom toolbars in Full Screen view if you turn them on before switching to Full Screen view.
Full screen view uses a lot of video resources on your computer. If switch- ing between Read and Write modes is sluggish or doesn’t work, try to make more video RAM available by closing other windows.
Working in Writing mode
Writing mode, shown in Figure 1-16, reaches out to people who want a single, simplified toolbar to make basic Word documents. This simplified work- space is great for beginners. If you’re one of the people who find Word’s reg- ular interface daunting, give Writing mode in Full Screen view a try. Another group likely be attracted to this new view is people who know keyboard shortcuts well enough that they don’t rely on menus or toolbars and want to work in a clutter-free environment. Remember, you can use keyboard short- cuts and right-click in your document while in Writing mode.
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Figure 1-16:
Exploring Writing mode.
Font Text formatting
Bullets & Numbers Justification
Insert Comment
These controls appear only in Full Screen view:
✦ Write: Switch to Writing mode (also called Writing view). Nothing hap- pens when you click this button if you are already in Writing mode.
✦ Read: Switch to Reading mode (also called Reading view), discussed later in this chapter.
✦ Options: Figure 1-17 shows a close-up of these Options:
• Find: Changes the toolbar into the Search input field.
• Track Changes: Toggles track changes on or off.
• Show Comments and Changes: Submenus take you through tracked comments and reviewing.
• Show Original / Final Document: Submenus let you accept and reject tracked changes.
• Toolbox and Media Browser: Toggle these tools on or off.
• Background: Choose a background from the pop-up menu, which is larger than shown in Figure 1-17.
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Figure 1-17:
Choosing an option.
Reading in Reading mode
Reading mode is the simplest of Word’s views, shown in Figure 1-18. Word’s Navigation pane displays to the left. If your screen is wide enough, your doc- ument displays as two pages side-by-side as shown in Figure 1-18, but you can toggle the display to Show One Page on the Options menu.
In Reading mode, you have most of the options of Writing mode. Instead of Toolbox and Media Browser, there is a Margin control menu. When a single page is displayed you can choose from these turning animations: fade through, page curl, or none.
When in Reading mode, you can’t edit your document, but you still have access to lookup and research functions by right-clicking in the document.
Figure 1-18:
Reading in Reading mode.
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