Quick and Easy Formatting Tips

Today I would like to share some simple formatting tips with you that will save you valuable time on your document preparation.

Format Painter – ‘Paintbrush’

Located on your toolbar as displayed in the graphic above, this very handy tool is a real time saver! If used correctly, you can format a long document relatively quickly, as long as you are careful with your text capture and cursor placement. For example, if the first section of the paragraph you want to ‘paint’ (i.e., copy its formatting properties) has any formatting such as italic, bold, numbering, or what have you, the ‘format painter’ will pick this up as well. Naturally, you could just use your styles, but the format painter is much faster, does not ‘overload’ Word, and is user friendly.

If your first word or line of text in the paragraph you want to ‘paint’ has formatting applied to it as noted above, just highlight the first word or sentence following, click on the ‘paint brush’ and go to the paragraph(s) you want to copy those identical properties to. Double clicking on the paintbrush will enable you to go to ‘many’ sections of your document at once.

For further assistance on this handy tool, you can use your Word ‘Help’ function via F1, or go to the ‘Crabby Office Lady’ or ‘The How-To Geek’ links provided below. Crabby and The How-to Geek are just two of the outstanding knowledge base tools available for any task or program you are likely to want to learn.

AutoText – ‘Quick Parts’

I use the Auto Text tool for text such as disclaimers, legal documents, signatures, et cetera. What a time saver – fast, easy, and efficient! You can also use the Auto Text or Quick Parts tool, as it is referred to in Word 2007, for pictures and other graphics. This Word feature permits storing text and graphics you use ‘frequently’, enabling you to insert stored data automatically into new documents by use of simple key strokes, such as the Ctrl or Alt function key combinations.

Note:

When you are working on long and/or complicated documents, as we discussed in the earlier section on ‘Time Saving Tips – Document Preparation’, you cannot afford to rely on the Word ‘Templates’, as Word gets confused easily. This is particularly true when using section headers and footers, odd page numbering features, graphics, et cetera. The paintbrush can come to the rescue in many of these cases.

http://www.howtogeek.com

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/FX101679371033.aspx