Word Hacks: Tips & Tools for Taming Your Text

by Andrew Savikas

Overview

As one of the applications in Microsoft Office, Word is the dominant word-processing program for both Windows and Mac users. Millions of people around the globe use it. But many, if not most, of them barely skim the surface of what is possible with Microsoft Word. Seduced by the application's supposed simplicity, they settle for just what's obvious--even if it doesn't satisfy their wants and needs. They may curse the wretched Bullets and Numbering buttons multiple times a day or take hours to change the font size of every heading in a lengthy report, yet they're reluctant to dig deeper to take advantage of Word's immense capabilities and limitless customization tools.Let Word Hacks be your shovel. Let it carve your way into Word and make this most popular and powerful application do precisely what you want it to do. Filled with insider tips, tools, tricks, and hacks, this book will turn you into the power user you always wanted to be. Far beyond a tutorial, Word Hacks assumes you have a solid working knowledge of the application and focuses on showing you exactly how to accomplish your pressing tasks, address your frequent annoyances, and solve even your most complex problems.Author Andrew Savikas examines Word's advanced (and often hidden) features and delivers clever, time-saving hacks on taming document bloat, customization, complex search and replace, Tables of Contents and indexes, importing and exporting files, tables and comments, and even using Google as a dictionary! With him as your guide, you'll soon be understanding--and hacking--Word in ways you never thought possible.Covering Word 2000, 2002 and Word 2003, Word Hacks exposes the inner workings of Word and releases your inner hacker; with it, you will be equipped to take advantage of the application s staggering array of advanced features that were once found only in page layout programs and graphics software and turning Word into your personal productivity powerhouse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780596550561
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	11/22/2004
Series:	Hacks
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	396
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Savikas works in the O'Reilly Tools Group, where he helps the Production department turn manuscripts into O'Reilly books. Andrew also works with FrameMaker, FrameScript, InDesign, DocBook XML, Perl, Python, Ruby, and whatever else he finds lying around the office. He has a degree in Communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Table of Contents

	Credits	xi
	Preface	xv
Chapter 1	Word Under the Hood	1
1	Tweak the Interface	1
2	Macros 101: A Crash Course	9
Chapter 2	The Word Workspace	19
3	Hack Your Shortcut Menus	19
4	Create Custom Views	23
5	Revert to Saved	26
6	Quickly Change Your File to Open Path	28
7	Report and Review Your Options	30
8	Force Internet Explorer to Hand Off Word Documents	32
9	Tweak the New Document Task Pane	34
10	Browse All Button Images	40
11	Create a Custom Button Image	44
12	Hack the Office Assistant	46
13	Build a Better MRU	51
Chapter 3	Formatting, Printing, and Table Hacks	59
14	Insert Placeholder Text	59
15	Sample Your System Fonts	61
16	Tab Me to Your Leader	66
17	Make Styles More Manageable with Aliases	69
18	Make a Simple Bar Graph	72
19	Put Footnotes in Tables	75
20	Repeat a Section Heading Across Pages	77
21	Simplify Borders Around Imported Images	78
22	Make More Flexible Captions	82
23	Make PDFs Without Acrobat	85
24	Create a Custom Text Watermark	87
25	Include Only Part of a Heading in a TOC	91
26	Put Crop Marks on a Page	94
Chapter 4	Editing Power Tools	98
27	Crunch Numbers Quickly in Word	98
28	Unlink Every Hyperlink	102
29	Exclude Text from Find and Replace	106
30	Use Character Codes to Find or Insert Special Characters	107
31	Find/Replace in Multiple Files	111
32	Find and Replace Without Find and Replace	114
33	Quickly Create a Custom Dictionary	117
34	Create a Dictionary Exclusion List	121
35	Disable Overtype Permanently	122
36	Delete All Comments in a Document	124
37	Delete All Bookmarks in a Document	125
38	Turn Comments into Regular Text	127
39	Apply Context-Sensitive Formatting	128
40	Send a Document as a Plain-Text Outlook Email	130
41	Swap Revision Authors	133
42	Corral Basic Bullets and Numbering	137
43	Cross-Reference Automatically	145
44	Hack More Flexible Cross-Referencing	151
Chapter 5	Templates and Outlines	156
45	Create an Outline-Only Copy of a Document	156
46	Build a Better Outline	158
47	Use an Outline to Build an Org Chart	161
48	Attach the Same Template to Multiple Files	164
49	Quickly Attach a Workgroup Template	166
50	Manage Macros with Templates	168
Chapter 6	Housekeeping	172
51	Troubleshoot Common Word Problems	172
52	Control Word Startup	177
53	Sidestep Formatting Restrictions	183
54	Rename Built-in Styles	185
55	Clean Out Linked "Char" Styles	188
56	Reduce Document Bloat by Deleting Old List Templates	195
Chapter 7	Macro Hacks	200
57	Get Simple User Input for a Macro	200
58	Keep the Macros Dialog Box Tidy	202
59	Do Something to Every File in a Directory	204
60	Run Macros Automatically	207
61	Intercept Word Commands	208
62	Keep Custom Menus Under Control	212
63	Use Word Dialogs in a Macro	214
64	Optimize Your VBA Code	218
65	Show Progress from VBA	220
66	Hack Documents with For Each Loops	228
67	Store Settings and Data in .ini Files	232
68	Generate Random Numbers	233
69	Hack with Application Events	235
Chapter 8	Forms and Fields	239
70	Fake (and Easy) Fill-in Forms	240
71	Hack DATE Fields	241
72	Perform Calculations with Formula Fields	246
73	Format Numeric Field Results	252
74	Use Fields for Heavy-Duty Calculations	253
75	Include an Interactive Calendar in Your Forms	256
76	Use Custom Shortcut Menus to Make Frequent Selections	259
77	Number Documents Sequentially	261
78	Cross-Reference Among Documents	264
79	Convert Field Codes to Text and Back Again	269
Chapter 9	Advanced Word Hacks	274
80	Emulate Emacs with VBacs	274
81	Use Word as a Windows Backup Utility	278
82	Perform Power Text Searches with Regular Expressions	280
83	Show a Directory Structure as a Word Outline	286
84	Automate Word from Other Applications	289
85	Hack Word from Python	294
86	Hack Word from Perl	300
87	Hack Word from Ruby	303
88	Use Python from Word	307
89	Use Perl from Word	310
Chapter 10	Word 2003 XML Hacks	319
90	Get a Command-Line XML Processor	320
91	Create a Word Document in Notepad	321
92	Get the XML Toolbox	323
93	Use IE to Inspect WordprocessingML Documents	326
94	Transforming XML into a Word Document	328
95	Batch-Process Word Documents with XSLT	335
96	Standardize Documents with XSLT	339
97	Remove Direct Formatting with XSLT	344
98	Remove Linked "Char" Styles with XSLT	345
99	Use Google from Your Macros	348
100	Google Without Leaving Word	355
	Index	363