Word Trick Makes Letters Merrier

It is the Holiday time of year. (Is it just me, or did 2008 pass-by rather quickly?) Today I'm going to demonstrate some tricks to make your Season's Greetings letters more joyous, and your docs more visually interesting.

Tip of the day: Add some festivity to your documents with fonts and color. MS Word has a lot of features and options built into it that allows for some very creative elements to be added to your correspondence, and is not at all limited to cold, "professional" documents. I'll use Word for this demo, but you can do this in most text editors, and e-mail composers.

Today I'm going to use a hypothetical holiday greeting letter to show how to add some fun. By default, Word sets the font to Times New Roman at 12 "points" in height. I have typed in my text, to get things started, and will demonstrate using this letter's "opener". As it is a header, I have "centered" the text. As you can see, this font and text does not quite convey the joy and cheer and "best wishes" I am hoping to express. In fact, this may as well say, "Memo from Giganti Corp." Yawn! So first thing I'm going to do is 'tweak' the font style, and make some word bigger (louder), to express a less formal tone. I "highlighted" Season's Greetings, and used the Font drop-down arrow and selected a cursive font-- Lucida Handwriting (explore Words various fonts, and find the one you like best). I set the point size to 36. I repeated the process on the second sentence, but set the type smaller.. only 18. I think you'll agree, this is much more "friendly" than the default's look. But this is just not Festive enough! Let's use some color and improve things some more. I have again "highlighted" season's greetings to select this font, and then clicked the Font Color button on the Formatting toolbar (If this is not showing, click here to read how to customize your toolbars). I then clicked on the little red box in the color-picker. Now season's greetings is red. I want to alternate letters in green, so I hold down the Ctrl key and use my mouse to "select" every other letter. I didn't really like the greens available on the color-picker, so I clicked on "More Colors".... ... and selected a green that contrasted nicely with the red-- as the box in the lower right corner shows. This is the result of these steps. Much more jolly! But, something's missing... Let's add one more thing-- a picture of a candy cane. I went on the Internet and found a Royalty-free graphic (though a piece of Clip Art would do just as nicely) and...Voila!I could 'go crazy', and get carried away with adding things here... but I hope you will be able to see by this little demonstration -- using only two of Word's functions -- that you are limited only by your own creativity, and that it's easy to personalize and 'spice up' your documents.Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Quick Tip: Restore Word's Default Settings

Today's "quick tip" is in response to a reader question, and I think it is one of those that can be helpful to 'everyone'.

Q: I created a newsletter using Word. I used Segoe Script sized to 16. Now whenever I want to write a new Word document, it is stuck on that setting, and I have to tell it to use Times New Roman, and change the size each time.
It never used to do that. How do I make it like it was before?

A: The answer lies in the fact that when you create a new Word document (File > New > Blank document), Word uses its default "style template"-- which is known as Normal.dot (note the "t", for "template".
This "normal" template has the predefined settings we've all come to know and love: Times New Roman (font), 12 (pts), Left (Align), etc.

Somehow, the reader has Saved the style they used in the newsletter to the Normal.dot (maybe they selected "Save As", and then "Template"?), or Normal.dot has just gotten corrupted.

There's two ways (at least) to repair this behavior-- the manual way and the automatic way.
1) Create a new default template:
* Open a new blank document.
* Change each setting to how you want your Word docs to look each time (such as Times, 12, Left, etc.).
* Now click "Save As". Select "Document Template" in the File type box, and type "Normal" (no quotes) in the File name box.
* If warned that Normal already exists, do you want to overwrite the file?, answer "Yes".
Now, whatever options you've selected will be what Word uses when creating a new blank document.
[note: this is how you get rid of Times New Roman for good, if you're a sans serif type.]

2) Automatic replace Normal.dot:
* Use the Search tool to find the Normal.dot file on your drive. (Start >Search >Files and Folders)
* In the Results pane, right-click on Normal.dot and select "Rename". Rename it to anything other than Normal.
* Close, and then restart Word (in some cases, a computer reboot was required)

Word will discover that there is now no Normal.dot, and it will create a new "factory fresh" one for you automatically.

Today's free download: Foxit Reader (Ditch Adobe Reader)
" Incredibly small:  Breezing-fast: Annotation tool: Foxit Reader allows you to draw graphics, highlight text, type text and make notes and then print out or save the annotated document. Text converter: You may convert the whole PDF document into a simple text file.

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

View PowerPoint presentations without Office

I was reminded of this "quick tip" topic while I was doing research for an upcoming Tech--for Everyone article, and the information I wanted to read was contained in a PowerPoint slideshow (aka "presentation") archive, available online.. a ".ppt" file.

Normally, this is no problem: you click on the "view" hyperlink; are asked if you want to "Open" or "Save" the file (since all I wanted to do was read it, I chose "open"). Here is where I was reminded that the machine I was surfing on was new and did not have Office installed -- "Windows cannot open this file:"

You may have seen a window like this in your computer career...

(My article on what to do to resolve this can be read here.)

Fortunately, a quick visit to the Microsoft Download Center is all that's required to enable my machine to view PowerPoint Presentations (and cool slides of airshows).

Tip of the day/Today's free link: If you are not using the Microsoft Office suite of programs, download and install the free PowerPoint Viewer 2007.

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

Open Office 2007 files with older versions*

A while ago I wrote about solving the problem of opening documents that Windows does not recognize, and I used as an example two text documents received as email attachments (click here to read Cannot open attachment...help!). While the point of that article was how to identify unrecognized file types, the fact that I mentioned a .docx (a Word 2007 document) received the most attention from readers.

Tip of the day: Open Office 2007 documents with older versions of Office. Some time ago now, Microsoft released a new version of its Office suite, called Office 2007. Besides having a new "look" and new toolbars, this suite of programs uses a whole new format (a way of encoding) for the documents it produces, which Microsoft calls "Open XML" (for more on this, click here); and to signify this, has added an "x" to the file extension.. so the familiar ".doc" of MS Word has become ".docx".

This change to the coding does improve the flexibility of the document, and "modernizes" the way machines interact with it, and yet allows Microsoft to maintain proprietary control.. thus ensuring that sales of Office continues. The trouble is, owners of MS Word cannot open the new .docx formats, which produces great dissatisfaction from folks who have shelled out the bucks to own the most commonly used word processor in the world. (And largely done so simply to be able to open other people's documents.) It also smacks of forcing people to spend a couple hundred bucks to upgrade.

Microsoft swears this is not the intent. Of course they want you to upgrade, but to do so because of the improvements and new features. They do, in fact want current MS Office licensees to be able to read the new Open XML 'standard', and so they have made available a tool for the older versions of Office.. which is today's free link.
As more and more people use the new 2007 suite, the more .docx's you're going to run across; so if you're happy and comfortable with your current version, and aren't ready to relearn the Excel and Word toolbar, relax. Keep reading and download the Microsoft Office compatibility tool.

[Note: If you are the one using Office 2007, and you know you're going to be sending your document to folks who are using an older version, use "Save As" to save the file as a Office 97-2003 document (no "x").]

Today's free link: Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. Open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the file formats new to Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix