SOFTWARE - OFFICE - 24.01.2011

Making the most of MS Word

Wildcards for text replacement

Via Edit; Replace in MS Word you can replace a word (for instance, a word you’ve consistently misspelled) by another word throughout a document. However, if you’ve spelled this word in different ways, this becomes more difficult. An example: suppose you’ve typed both “Stephen” and “Stephan” and you wish to replace them by “Steven”. Well, Word lets you use so-called wildcards in your searches. In the Find and Replace dialog box, click on the More button first. In the search options, check the Use wildcards option box. Then in the Find What field type “Steph?n” (where the question mark represents any other character than the question mark). In the Replace with field, type “Steven”. Now click on Replace All, and all the names will be replaced in the entire document in one move.

Tip. Instead of the question mark you can use another wildcard: the asterisk (*). This represents an undefined number of characters. This can be useful when you wish to have both “Stephan” and “Steven” replaced by “Stephen”.

Replace formatting

Via Edit; Replace you have - again behind the More button - the possibility to change the formatting of strings of text in the entire document. For instance, you could replace all words in boldface by the same words in italics. Here’s how: place your cursor in the Find what field and click on Format. In Font choose “Bold” as style. Now move the cursor to the Replace with field and repeat the procedure, but now select “italics” as character style. In this way you could, for instance, also replace a specific font or font size.

Tip. In order to remove the formatting information for your next search and replace command, click on No Formatting.

Using templates

You probably know that you can import images (for instance, your company logo) via Insert; Picture, From File. However, instead of doing this for every document separately, it’s better to start from a template which already incorporates this logo. You can create a new template starting from a new, blank document: insert all the elements you need, for instance, your logo and your address. Next, save this document as a template (File; Save as; Document Template). From now on, you can open it via File; New; Templates.

Your logo as bullet

Here’s something which isn’t really more efficient, but it’s fun: you can replace the traditional bullets used for lists by other symbols or even by your own logo. Here’s how: click on Format; Bullets and Numbering, select any size and click on the Customise option. Now click on Customise and Import and look for the logo on your hard drive. Simply confirm, and that’s it.

Other tips

A good repository of Word tips is WordTips.net (http://word.tips.net). However, another sure fire way of finding tips on MS Word is to google “Word tips”.

Note. The instructions may differ slightly depending on the Word version you’re using - actually, this also applies to the tips we’ve just given.