Monday, September 23, 2013

Tip #114 - Replacing Text in Word

100 (or more) Computer Tips in 100 (or more) Days

Tip #114 - Replacing Text in Word & Publisher - Including Special Characters

A variation on Finding text in Word is Replacing text. Most people will think about using this tool in their last proposal to change all of the occurrences of “ABC Moving” with “Acme Moving & Storage”. While that is a helpful use of Replace, I use it to clean up documents that I copy from the internet or that clients send me. They are often filled with manual line breaks, extra spaces and unneeded paragraph marks.

To use the Replace feature click the Replace option on the Home tab, Editing group. In the dialog box click the More button on the left side and then click the Special menu to view the options. If I wanted to replace all of the manual line breaks with a space I would find “Manual Line Break” in the list and click on it. Word inserts the code for that (^l) in the Find What box. Now click in the Replace with box and tap the spacebar once. You won’t see anything in the Replace with box but the character has been inserted. Now click the Replace All button and all of the manual line breaks have been replaced with a space. Once you use this a few times you don’t have to click on the More button and Special, you can just type the code ^l (l for line break) and click on Replace All.

Another code that I use frequently is ^p for Paragraph Return. I am often sent documents  that I need to import into newsletters or brochures. The client has typed the document using two returns after each paragraph. This has to be stripped out for my purposes.  In the Find what box I will type ^p^p and in the Replace with box I type one ^p. This is telling the program to find every occurrence of the Return/Enter key being struck twice and change it to one return, thereby removing the extra returns between the paragraphs.


Another example of this is when people get carried away using the Tab key in an effort to make nicely spaced columns. They will create lists by typing something like the first name at the left margin and then press the Tab key two or three times and type the last name. They will again tab two or three more times before typing the phone number or other piece of information. These extra tabs need to be removed before this information can be put in a table or used in another format. In the Find what box I will type the Tab code of ^t^t and in the Replace with box I again use ^t. In this case I don’t want to remove all of the tabs, just those areas of the document where there are multiple characters together. After I click on the Replace all option I will often click on Replace all again. I am reading the search report looking for zero replacements made. Then I know that the document is free of these offending double (triple?) tabs. 

Happy Computing!

Diane

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Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Tip #112 - Printing Specific Pages

100 (or more) Computer Tips in 100 (or more) Days

Tip #112 - Printing - just the pages you want!

So printing may sound like an easy activity. You're looking at the document, you go to the File menu or use your keyboard command (Ctrl p on the PC or Command p on the Apple) and up comes the print dialog box. You click the print button and walk to the printer. Why would I feel the need to write anymore about the topic. Well I was just helping my husband print a variety of pages from a PDF he downloaded and I was able to print five of the eight pages all at the same time. 

Before I printed the document I scrolled through it and realized that he only needed to print some of the pages, the rest were advertisements or instructions that he didn't need. I made note of the pages to print and then brought up the print command. Rather than going with the default "All" pages, you need to click in the "Pages" box. If you want a range, type the first page number followed by a dash and then the last page number. For non consecutive pages, type a page number followed by a comma and then the next page number. As you can see in the screen shot, I wanted to print pages 1, 3 and then 5 through 7. This sure beats printing each page or group of pages separately!

So how easy is that? If you look carefully you will find in all documents the ability to enter specific pages rather than printing the whole document.

Happy Computing!

Diane

Don't forget to click the Subscribe to 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days via email link on the right side of the screen so you get email alerts when Diane adds a new post.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Diane McKeever, the writer of 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days, by subscribing to her Facebook posts or visiting her web page, www.dianemckeever.com . 

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