Word IT your Way
Ensure you too can word it with customised settings

Most of us will use an application such as Microsoft Word for years and rarely if ever change its default settings. Instead, we tolerate what we perceive to be the program's shortcomings. Consider the Style drop-down list located at the far left end of the Formatting toolbar in Word 97 and 2000 (its default setting is Normal). Why stick with the list's default styles if they don't suit your needs? It's easy to change Word's Style defaults to make your documents look the way you want. (These steps work for all styles except Normal).

Open a new document, type some text on a line, select it, click Format, Style, and choose the style you want to alter from the list in the left pane of the Style dialog box. Click Modify in the Style dialog box. In the resulting Modify Style dialog box, check Add to template and Automatically update, and then click OK; finally, click Apply on the next screen.

Now you can use Word's normal formatting tools to alter the font, the font size, the paragraph spacing, or any other characteristic. As you format the new text, the style you chose will be updated automatically with the formatting you apply.

If you want to alter any other styles, simply repeat the steps given above.

When you exit Word, you'll see a box asking you to confirm the changes you made to the normal.dot template (where the default settings are stored). Click Yes. Thereafter, your style changes will remain in place until you repeat this process.

You can't alter the default Normal style with this procedure. To change the Normal style, you must select Format, Style in a paragraph formatted with that style and then click Modify in the Style dialog box. In the Modify Style dialog box, click Format and choose the appropriate commands from the pop-up menu to access the Normal formatting dialog boxes. When you're done with your selections, check Add to template. Click OK and Apply. Once again, you'll be asked to confirm the changes to normal.dot when you exit Word. If you change the Normal style's font, all styles that are based on Normal will be changed to that font as well.

Launch Apps From Word
Word 97 and 2000 users can launch other Office applications faster from within Word than from the Start menu, but the toolbar that makes this possible isn't among the choices that appear when you select View, Toolbars. To display this toolbar, select Tools, Customize, then click the Toolbars tab in the Customize dialog box. Double-click Microsoft in the Toolbars list (or single-click its check box), and finally click Close. The Microsoft toolbar appears as a floating box, but you can, of course, click its title bar and drag the box to your normal toolbar area or dock it on any screen edge.

See Graphics' Boundaries
When working with graphical elements, text boxes, and inserted objects in Word documents like newsletters, reports, and brochures, you may need to see their exact boundaries to place them properly. Here's how to show these boundaries in both the Online/Web Layout and Page/Print Layout views in Word 97 and 2000:

Select Tools, Options, then click the View tab in the Options dialog box. In Word 97, select Text boundaries in the Show section of the dialog box. In Word 2000, select Text boundaries in the Print and Web Layout options section of the dialog box. Click OK to finish the job.

Stylish Keyboard Shortcuts
If you use Word's Heading styles (and you should), you need not use your mouse to assign a heading style to a paragraph. Word's keyboard shortcuts will quickly and simply apply the heading style you prefer. To apply Heading 1, press Ctrl- Alt- 1; Heading 2, Ctrl- Alt- 2; and so on. Here are two other useful styles you can apply with keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl- Shift- L converts the selected text to the program's Bulleted List style, and Ctrl- Shift- N sets the paragraph style back to Word's default Normal style.