PowerPoint: Create handouts in Word

So, you've finished designing your presentation in PowerPoint and it's time to you’re your final preparations.

One thing you will need is handouts for your participants. It is easy to use Microsoft Word to create custom handouts for your PowerPoint presentation.

First complete the presentation so the slides are all is complete select the Office button and choose Publish > Create Handouts in Microsoft Office Word.

When the Send to Microsoft Office Word dialog appears, select the layout for the slides and text. There are various combinations of slides, notes and blank lines that you can choose from.

Select either the Paste or the Paste Link button depending on whether you want to embed the slides in the Microsoft Word document or simply link to them.

When you are done, click Ok and wait as Microsoft Word opens and the slides, notes and blank lines are created automatically for you in a new Word document.

Once the handouts are complete, you can format the document as you wish and add a cover page, headers and footers as desired and then print your slide handouts for distribution at presentation time.

Instant text boxes in Microsoft Word

Just a short tip today, I just tripped over this and thought "WOW! I didn't know that!" so I wonder if you know it too?

Ok.. step back a bit. I'm doing a column on columns in Word and I'm showing how to place a text box or image in a document laid out in 2 columns so the text box or image travels with the text and how to take it out of the line of text so it floats independently.

To create the text box, I select my text, then realize I need to create the text box first and click the Text box button without deselecting the text. [insert WOW moment in here].

What happened was that the text box got created automatically and the selected text appears inside it - just like that - how cool is that?

So, next time, instead of creating a text box and then copying and pasting text into it, select the text and click the Text Box button on the Drawing toolbar in Word 2003 and earlier and it will all be done automatically for you in one smooth step. The same process works in Word 2007 too but you must click the Insert tab, click the Text box button and choose Draw Text Box for it to happen.

Instant text in text boxes in Microsoft Word - can't ask for anything more simple than that.

Better character spacing in Word

First the explanation:
Look at any book and the characters in it don't look quite like those you print on your printer. The reason? the characters in the book are placed closer together than those on your printed page.

Now the technical stuff:
Character spacing is the amount of space between characters of type. If you reduce the amount of spacing just a bit, you get a nicer look to your font, it just looks that little bit more professional.

Now the how to big:
To alter the spacing between characters, select the text to alter and select Format > Font > Character Spacing tab. From the Spacing list box select Condensed and in the By: textbox set the reduced spacing value to somewhere between .1 pt and .3 pt - the results will be subtle but noticeable and your text will look lots nicer.

Preview image in Word

You'll have seen preview images when you open a file in Word. If you choose File > Open and, from the Views option list you choose Preview, you will see either a small image of the full page or some of the text on the page. All this begs the question of what determines what you see?

The full page preview is an option when you save a file in Word. To configure it, choose File > Properties > Summary tab and enable the Save Preview Picture checkbox. Now, when you save the file it will have a preview image saved with it which will show in the preview area.

To ensure the Properties dialog appears everytime you save a file the first time so you can configure the Save Preview Picture option, choose Tools > Options > Save tab and enable the checkbox for Prompt for Document Properties.

Remove spaces - Microsoft Word

I'm sure it's happened to you just as it has to me. You copy and paste some text in from the web or an email message and it comes in with leading spaces - on evey line. There are lots of ways to remove the problem starting with hitting the delete key way too many times. Stop already!

There is, however one very smart way to do it without getting a repetitive strain injury. Select the lines of text and press Control + E to center the text. With the text still selected press Control + L to left align it and voila! the spaces are gone.

Sticky spaces in Word

Picture this, you have a line of type in Word with a phone number in it. But... when ever you type it the first part of the phone number goes on one line and the next part scrolls around to the next line. It just won't 'stick' all together.

What you need is a hard space. This is some thing that looks like a space, prints like a space but sticks things together. To use it, remove the space that is between the two pieces you want to stick together then press Control + Shift + Space Bar and you have your hard space.

Word also has a sticky/hard hyphen. It shows between two words but never splits words across the end of a line. Same thing - Control + Shift + Hyphen.

Any Justification, Any Line

When Microsoft Word first included the Click and Type option it helped a lot of new users who couldn't work out how to type anywhere on the page.

For those of us used to using WordPerfect 5.1 it solved another problem entirely. It lets you include left and right aligned text on the same line. Double click at the left margin of one line and type a word - it aligns to the left. Now, on the same line, double click at the right margin and type a word - it is right aligned - both pieces of text align and work independently of each other. It's something you couldn't do easily without this tool.

Word Toolbars your way

I use the £ and ¢ symbols a lot but they're not on my keyboard. However they're on my toolbar, thanks to the ability to customize Word's toolbars.

Right click Word's toolbar and choose Customize and then the Commands tab. Click the All Commands option in the Commands list and locate and click the Symbol: entry. Drag and drop it onto a toolbar and, when the symbol dialog appears, click the symbol to attach to the button and click Ok.

The toolbar button displays the font name and the symbol number. To make it look prettier, right click the button and type a different name for it. If the symbol can be typed using the keyboard by pressing the Alt key and typing out the numbers then do this. Alternately, click the Edit Button Image button and draw the symbol to create your own icon.

And, if you're curious, the £ symbol is Alt + 0163 and the ¢ symbol is Alt + 155 - so now you know.

Quick moves in Word

As an extension to yesterday’s tip my preference for moving items around a Word document is to hold the Shift and Alt keys together and to use the Up and Down arrow keys.

This moves a paragraph up and down a document or, if you have more than one paragraph selected, it moves all of them up and down a document.

If you do this inside a table you move the table row up and down the table - neat but there's more to come. If the table row moves past the top of a table it is broken out of the table and it becomes a table all of its own. Move some table rows from one table down into another table and they’re automatically incorporated into the second table. It’s an amazingly simple yet effective way of moving things around a Word document.

Circular images in Word

I love this tip. It's so much fun and so unexpected that you can do it. In fact, I've been working a lot lately on funky graphics stuff in Word so expect to see more in future. It seems like the fewer tools they give us the more I want to make them work for me.

So, here we go. Open a Word document and, from the Drawing toolbar, click the Oval tool and draw a circle on the page. Click the shape, right click, choose Format AutoShape and click the Colors and Lines tab. From the Fill Color dropdown list choose Fill Effects then the Picture tab. Then click Select Picture and locate and open your image by clicking Insert. Click the Lock picture aspect ratio checkbox and click Ok twice. It sounds complicated but it’s really pretty easy to do and the results.. well they’re great.

Better still, you can use any shape – it doesn’t have to be a circle… any of the AutoShapes will do.

Make "My Places" your place...

Until I discovered how to add folders in the list down the left of the Word and other Office program's Save As and File Open dialogs I spent hours navigating to get to the right folder to save a file. Some days it felt like it would be simply easier to dump everthing in the one folder and worry about finding it later on. Ok, I know - bad idea - but it was tempting.

Now I fill my My Places list with all the folders I need long term and short term so saving files in the right folders is simplicity itself. All I do is click the folder in the list on the left and I'm there - just where I want to be.

To do this yourself, from inside Excel or Word, for example, choose File, Save As and notice the My Places bar down the left of the Save As dialog. Navigate to the folder that you want to add to your My Places toolbar and select the folder. Click the Tools menu option in the top right of the dialog and choose Add to My Places. The folder will be automatically added to the bottom of your My Places bar. You can now click it to open the folder anytime you need it and it stays there from one Office session to the next.

Once you no longer need it, you can remove the folder from the list by right clicking it and choose Remove. You can also rename the folder and reorder items in the list by right clicking and choose Delete or Move Up/Move Down as required. You can also switch to small icons if there are too many folders in your My Places bar to see them clearly. The same folders turn up when you choose to open or save a file. Organization is just a click away.

Decimal alignment in Word

While you may not realize it, we all use the number of characters in a number to determine just how big or small it is. For example 1000000 written like this is harder to determine the magnitude of than 1,000,000. So when you want your users to be able to understand the numbers that you are working with not only is it handy to use commas to separate the digits but aligning the numbers using their decimal points allows a quick check of how big a number is by how far it extends towards the left hand side of the page.

When you are working in a table of figures Word provides a simple way of aligning numbers. Select the column in your table and from the Ruler bar (View, Ruler) click on the tab indicator in the top left corner by the ruler, until you see the Decimal tab option appear. When the Decimal tab indicator shows, click on the ruler where you want the decimal tab to appear in the column of numbers.

Now when you type a number into that column it will be automatically aligned on the decimal tab and there’s no need to insert an actual tab character. Of course if you do want to include a tab character remember that you must hit Ctrl + Tab in a table because the Tab key simply moves you from one cell to the next and doesn’t actually add a tab character.

Bring back my Word thesaurus tool, please!

I hate it when Microsoft replaces things I like with tools I don’t like. Of course, one man’s (or should that be woman’s) meat is another’s poison so some folks out there probably like the new thesaurus pane in Word, I dislike it a lot. It just seems to be a lot of effort for precious little result – it practically never provides anything even remotely useful for me.

So, if you’re like me and you like the old Thesaurus in Word more than the task pane version you can still use it. Add it to a toolbar by right clicking a toolbar and choose Customize, Commands tab and, from the Categories list choose Tools. In the Commands list are two Thesaurus entries, you need the first of these. Drag and drop it onto a toolbar and click Close.

To test it, select a word and click the new button and your old Thesaurus dialog will appear. Much nicer in my book.

I guess I should be thankful Microsoft hasn’t made it impossible to customize toolbars - oops - I spoke too soon, in Word 2007 it did just that!

Smart horizontal lines in Word

My history is as a WordPerfect 5.1 user if any of you can remember that far back!

WordPerfect had a great tool for creating horizontal lines and when I came to Word it took me ages to realize that Word didn’t have a tool anywhere near as useful. However Word can create horizontal lines if you know how to do it. Press the Enter key and then type three hyphens in a row and press Enter again – Voila! (well at least we hope so) - a horizontal line. If it doesn’t work for you choose Tools > AutoCorrect Options > AutoFormat As You Type tab and enable the Border Lines checkbox. Then try again. There are other line styles that you can use for example three asterisks creates a blocky line, three underscores a thick line, three equal signs a double line, three pounds [#] signs, an attractive thin thick thin line combination, and three tildes a squiggly line.

While Word’s lines aren’t as intuitive as those in WordPerfect 5.1 perhaps by giving us six different styles it’s set to win back some friends.

Hands up anyone who has ever spent hours trying to juggle a Word table to be evenly spaced. I confess to have dragged on one too many table borders in my time and all in the name of consistency.

In fact, consistency is much more easily obtained. So, I suggest you start by filling your table cells with whatever you need to put in them. Ignore that one looks deeper than the others. I like to finish all my table cell entries with two Enter keys - that prebuilds in a nice buffer of space.

Then, when you're done, go to the bottom of the bottomost cell and drag it down so the bottom cell is lots deeper than the others. Select the table - best way is to click inside it and choose Table, Select, Table. Now choose Table, AutoFit, Distribute Rows Evenly - instantly all your rows are evenly sized. If you haven't made them quite big enough, repeat the process - it's simple because Word does all the fiddly stuff for you.

Vertical text in Word

Ever been confused about how to create vertical text in Word. You deserve to be. There is this neat looking Text Direction tool that never seems to be active so you can use it. Fact is - it works on text in a table, but what if you don't have text in a table?

Luckily it works just great on text in a text box. So, to make a vertical block of text, drag a text box (Insert, Text box) onto your page. Now click inside it and type your text. Click in the box and choose Format, Text Direction and choose one of the two vertical options - Voila! instant vertical text.

Checkboxes in Word

Stuck and need a checkbox in a Word document? Simple!

Click where the checkbox is to go and choose Insert, Symbol, Symbols tab. From the Font list choose the Wingdings font. You'll see at character positions 113 & 114 are two checkboxes. Click the one you want and choose Insert and then Close. If you'd use it a lot, create an AutoText or AutoCorrect entry for it so it's only a word away.

Seeing double - split windows in Word

Long documents are harder to manage than short ones, and it can be difficult to cut and paste an item on page 1 all the way to page 20. I find it easier to do when I can see the source and target area on the screen all at once. That's why I love the Split window tool.

Here's how to use it, position the document on the screen where you want it to be split in two and choose Window, Split. Now click where you want should be. You'll get two horizontal panes each with its own scroll bars and you can move around the panes independently and show different places in the document in each. You can also drag and drop between panes.

When you're finished editing, choose Window, Remove Split.

Axing Word Smart Quotes

I like Word smart quotes most of the time but sometimes, like when I'm preparing an email or some code, they're not needed and can make a mess of the project.

You can, quite easily, stop this happening if you choose Tools, AutoCorrect Options, AutoFormat as you Type tab and disable the checkbox for "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes" and click Ok. Now you'll have straight quotes in your document.

Reverse the process to get them back.

This simple macro, attached to a toolbar button can do the toggling work for you (just make sure you put everything between the Sub and End statements appears on one line:

Sub changeQuotes()
Options.AutoFormatAsYouTypeReplaceQuotes = Not (Options.AutoFormatAsYouTypeReplaceQuotes)
End Sub

Inserting Images in Word

In recent implementations of Word they broke the image insertion tool. When you insert an image it comes in as "Inline with text" which means it won't move, it breaks up lines and, in general, looks awful.

Luckily it's fixable and permanently so. To do this, choose Tools, Options, Edit tab. From the Insert/Paste pictures as dropdown list choose something like Square or In front of Text (in fact anything other than In line with text). Click Ok and the change will be permanent. Although you can, of course, always change the setting for any inserted image if you really do want to put it inline with text by selecting the option from the Picture toolbar on an image by image basis. My bet is you won't ever do it though!