The problem is that this function is glitchy in Word. Sometimes you just can’t get the text to be marked as “moved.” After checking that the Preferences for Track Changes (see figure below) are indeed set to mark moves, try these two solutions:
Continue reading Tracking Moved TextThe difference between – and — is one of those dog-whistle edits that people in the know find make a document elegant versus incorrect, and literally nobody else even notices in the slightest. One of the challenges in using dashes correctly is simply seeing which one is in use: en or em length. In some font families, the dashes are nearly identical length! While editing, you can make this blazingly obvious by colour coding the various dashes so they stand out while you work. At the end, simply remove all highlighting.
Proceed with your edit as usual. Then, at the end, select all and set Highlighting to No Color. (See Troubleshooting below.)
*The colour of highlighting you choose for each doesn’t really matter; that can be your choice. What matters is that they are different colours from each other and that they are different from any other highlighting you use to colour-code your manuscript. That way you can remove highlighting from these characters later without removing highlighting you want to keep.
Side-by-side, it’s easy to tell the various dashes apart, but the highlighting will help you identify them without effort when they appear alone.
Of course, you could put this in a macro that runs at the beginning of your edit along with removing double spaces, setting the language, the zoom, etc. For instructions on how to do that, look inside the book.
Pro-pro Tip: Add this sequence to your start-up macro and it will happen automatically every time.
If there is highlighting in your document that you need to preserve — such as highlighting instructions to production about inserts or special characters — do not remove all highlighting at the end by setting the whole document to Highlight > No Color. Instead repeat Step 2, selecting No Color for the highlight, then do Steps 3 to 7 to remove highlighting from just the dashes and hyphens.
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Previous posts showed you how to align table cells and numbers in columns using the ruler. It’s also possible to set margins, an indent, a hanging indent, and more on the ruler! Watch the demo at the end to see how, or just drag the related element where you want it.
To remove tab marks, just pull them off the ruler.
Note you want to do this for all affected lines at once; select the lines in the document before changing the ruler.
Can’t see the ruler? Select it in the Show group on the View ribbon.
If you can’t see the margin markers on the ruler, try Draft view and scroll wayyyyy over. Or, change which style that paragraph is in, then change it again (do not “undo”).
Moving the waffle that marks the column border changes only that column. The other columns stay as they were, so the right margin will get pushed around and may go outside of the page margins. Adjust all the columns until they sit right. (See also table resizing.)
Too many tab marks? Or, having trouble selecting them? Double-click on a tab mark to open the Tabs dialogue, then delete or change the tabs there.
Check out all the other posts in this series about Working with Tables and learn all about them in the multimedia ebook self-study course!
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Q: I keep resetting the width of a column in my table, but when my client opens it, the column snaps back to 6″ wide! The same thing happens to me if I open the file on another computer.
A: Ugh, this is a great example of why Word is not the best choice for document design. But, there are three settings you can change to try to stop the table from resizing at least until the file goes to layout. These options are not fail-safe, but they’re your best bet:
The usual culprit behind endless resizing is found on the Column tab in the Table Properties dialog. Open that by clicking the Properties icon on the (Table) Layout ribbon. Deselect the option that sets a preferred width. Make sure the cursor is placed in the offending column, first.
Deselect the “Automatically resize to fit contents” option? Find that from the Options button on the Table tab in the Table Properties.
Selecting “Fixed Column Width” (see pic) from the menu that opens when you click the AutoFit icon on the (Table) Layout ribbon.
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This is as simple as select, click, drag, release. To rearrange columns and rows, just select the row or column and then drag it where you want. Release the mouse to place the contents. Watch the demo below to see some of the snafus in action, as well as how to avoid them.
Click and drag too finicky? Page scrolling out of control? Use cut and paste instead. Cut the entire column or row, then place the cursor where you want to insert the text — be sure it’s at the beginning of the text in the first cell of that row/column — and then paste.
Merged cells (like spanning heads) can wreak havoc. Try inserting a blank row/column and move the selection there, then erase the blank.
Check out all the other posts in this series about Working with Tables and learn all about them in the multimedia ebook self-study course!
Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.
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If you’ve found this series on editing tables helpful, try our course! The course includes a downloadable resource with all the information in one, updated ebook and extra demos, plus you’ll get exclusive access to a checklist for quality control and a self-check exercise with answer keys for various style guides.
Continue reading Working With Tables
Since it will be hard to take anything seriously today, on this Word Wrangling Wednesday that lands on April Fool’s, we bring you what some might think of as silliness with Word. This is both a “trick” and an actual function. Try it out!
If you’ve watched my demo videos, you have seen some nonsense text that I use in them. Word can generate this “random” text right inside a document — though it seems to pull text from the help files, so it’s more “dummy text” than it is random. Simply type the phrase below into a document, replacing x with the number of paragraphs you want and y with the number of sentences. Then hit Enter to generate the text.
=rand(x,y)
To generate classic Lorem ipsum text instead, use the same approach as above, instead writing Lorem where rand appears. For example:
=Lorem(2,4)
And to satisfy your typing teacher, you could even generate the classic phrase “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” over and over again, by typing this:
=rand.old(x,y)
Of course, the problem with placing this dummy text in a document is that some of it may survive through production and live on forever in the final product. User beware.
Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.
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Formulas are built right into Word, so you can check totals with a click! Errors love to lurk in tables, checking the numbers can make an editor look like a hero. Just click the Formula icon on the right edge of the (Table) Layout ribbon. But watch for the snafus (see Troubleshooting).
Address most of these issues by pasting the table into Excel and using its more sophisticated formula functions.
The “ABOVE” parameter stops at empty cells, as shown in the demo. It’s possible to specify a row range instead e.g., 3:11) but it’s unclear how Word numbers the rows.
Check out all the other posts in this series about Working with Tables and learn all about them in the multimedia ebook self-study course!
Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.
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With this post, our series on working with tables in Word moves into more uncommon situations. For this post, we will again talk about documents that are being finalized in Word — without moving the manuscript into a design program — as is often the case with internal reports and proposals.
Tables longer than one page usually need to have their column headings repeated on every page. Word can do this automatically! And Word will keep those headings at the top of each page even as you manipulate the table contents and structure.
Watch the video demo below, or follow these steps:
At any point in the creation of the table, select the rows you want to repeat, then click the Repeat Header Rows icon in the Data group at the right end of the (Table) Layout ribbon.
Alternatively, select the header row(s), then click the Properties icon on the (Table) Layout ribbon to open the Table Properties dialog shown below. On the Row tab, check the box that says “Repeat as header row at the top of each page.” Then click OK.
When a table is set to have text wrap around it, the header will not repeat on subsequent pages. On the Table tab in Table Properties (shown above), make sure that Text Wrapping is set to None, not Around.
Check out all the other posts in this series about Working with Tables and learn all about them in the multimedia ebook self-study course!
Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.
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In the first post in this series, we learned how to convert a manual table to a true table. After examining seven other aspects of tables, it’s time to look at the reverse: converting a table into simple text. There’s no need to click and drag contents out of their individual cells, Word will convert it with just a couple of clicks:
Keep a copy of the original so you can check that the content is still in the right order.
You may have to delete empty lines and do a little more consolidation after the conversion.
Check out all the other posts in this series about Working with Tables and learn all about them in the multimedia ebook self-study course!
Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.
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© This blog and all materials in it are copyright Adrienne Montgomerie on the date of publication. All rights reserved. No portion may be stored or distributed without express written permission. Asking is easy!
