Waukegan Public Library - Microsoft Word

Format copied text

Pam S — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:45:30 +0000

If you copy text from the internet or another document and paste it into your document bad things can happen. The fonts and text colors may not be the same, the background could be a different color, etc.

A clipboard will appear just below the information you pasted. Click on the clipboard and select the second option, match destination formatting. Now your new information is formatted like the rest of your document.

If you regularly copy and paste, you may want to select the last option and set the default Paste option to Match Destination Formatting.

Don’t forget to use footnotes or cite your source if you are copying someone else’s text.

Revealing word or character count in Microsoft Word

Pam S — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:50:00 +0000

When writing an essay or entering a contest you often need to know you word or character count. Microsoft Word makes this easy to track. In Microsoft 2007:

Click on the review tab
Go to the Proofing section
Click on the icon with ABC 123
The Word Count popup box contains the information you seek

Changing the capitalization of text in a document

Pam S — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 15:47:44 +0000

hAVE YOU EVER TYPED A DOCUMENT IN THE WRONG CASE? or just missed the capitalization at the beginning of a sentence. Do you need the text in all uppercase or all lowercase?

All these problems can be easily fixed in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint 2007. On the home tab, navigate to the font section and on the bottom row click the arrow next to the “Aa”. This will open up the Change Case menu.

If you prefer shortcuts you can use ALT+O+E to open the menu, or highlight your text and use Shift+F3 until the appropriate effect is applied.

Sentence case is uppercase at the beginning, all other words lowercase, period at the end.

lowercase has no capital letters

UPPERCASE IS ALL CAPITAL LETTERS

Capitalize Each Word Makes The First Letter Of Each Word Uppercase

tOGGLE cASE is used when you accidently type something with Caps Lock on.

Thanks to Sara T for submitting this tip.

Minimize and un-minimize the Ribbon in Microsoft Office

Pam S — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:37:06 +0000

Like most people, I occasionally click something and the Microsoft Office Ribbon vanishes.

The ribbon is at the top section of the page and looks like this in Excel.

When the ribbon is minimized Excel looks like this.

Having the ribbon minimized is great if that’s what you desire. You can see more of the document/spreadsheet/database you are using. I prefer to see the available options.

There are several ways to minimize/un-minimize the ribbon, I’ll show you two.

1. Right click on the word Home in the menu and click on the last option. If you see a checkmark, the ribbon will be minimized.

2. Right click on the arrow next to the Quick Access Toolbar. The ribbon option is at the bottom.

Drop Cap in Microsoft Word 2007

Pam S — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 16:37:14 +0000

Lovers of older books may recall the ornate capital letters that started each chapter of a book.

Here are the steps to recreate that effect in a Microsoft Word 2007 document.

Type your text into your document, as you would normally
Place your cursor after the letter you want enhanced
Click the Insert tab at the top of the screen
In the Text area (on the right), click the down arrow next to Drop Cap. You will see this window:

5. Select Dropped or In Margin for the style of Drop Cap you want.

6. If you select Dropped and lines to drop: 3, the text will appear underneath the capital letter as seen in this example. If you choose a different font, you can make the letter ornate.

7. If you select In Margin and don’t change the font, the capital letter will be pushed into the margin and your text will remain in the same place. To move the text further away from the letter, adjust the Distance from text.

8. If you don’t like the effect, click None and the Drop Cap will be removed.