Oct 24, 20070
Making Documents Look Much Better in MS Word
Do you spend a lot of time formatting documents in Microsoft Word? If so, there are a number of under-the-hood features that can make you more efficient at it, and make your documents look better. In a previous post I compiled time-saving shortcuts for Word, and readers chimed in with a slew of tips of their own. In this post, I’ll round up some of the best tips for making your documents look better.
This post will assume that you already make use of Word’s Styles, which are, from a formatting perspective, among the program’s most powerful tools. Styles controls are found on the Format menu at the Styles and Formatting option.
Remove Those Pesky Blue Web Addresses. You know how a Word document that has several web addresses in it starts to look ugly because they’re highlighted in blue? You can quickly make the URLs look like the rest of the document. Just right-click on the URL, and select Remove Hyperlink from the menu. (You can also select Edit Hyperlink if you want to change the URL.)
Eject Those Ransom Note Fonts. Do you often grab text from web sites and drop it into Word documents? The result can end up looking like a ransom note. A quick way to drop the text in without all the formatting from the site is to go to the Edit menu and select Paste Special. Then select Unformatted Text.
Use the Format Painter. It’s amazing how few Word users use the built-in Format Painter. The icon looks like a paintbrush on Word’s standard toolbar. To use it, select, say, a paragraph in a document that has the formatting you want to reproduce. Then click the paintbrush. Then select, say, a paragraph that you want to have that formatting. It will be automatically applied.
Take Formatting Back to Square One. Are you having problems with the formatting in a Word document? Maybe you formatted a paragraph with fonts you don’t like or aligned it incorrectly. To get a quick view of how the paragraph is formatted, put your cursor [Read more]
This post will assume that you already make use of Word’s Styles, which are, from a formatting perspective, among the program’s most powerful tools. Styles controls are found on the Format menu at the Styles and Formatting option.
Remove Those Pesky Blue Web Addresses. You know how a Word document that has several web addresses in it starts to look ugly because they’re highlighted in blue? You can quickly make the URLs look like the rest of the document. Just right-click on the URL, and select Remove Hyperlink from the menu. (You can also select Edit Hyperlink if you want to change the URL.)
Eject Those Ransom Note Fonts. Do you often grab text from web sites and drop it into Word documents? The result can end up looking like a ransom note. A quick way to drop the text in without all the formatting from the site is to go to the Edit menu and select Paste Special. Then select Unformatted Text.
Use the Format Painter. It’s amazing how few Word users use the built-in Format Painter. The icon looks like a paintbrush on Word’s standard toolbar. To use it, select, say, a paragraph in a document that has the formatting you want to reproduce. Then click the paintbrush. Then select, say, a paragraph that you want to have that formatting. It will be automatically applied.
Take Formatting Back to Square One. Are you having problems with the formatting in a Word document? Maybe you formatted a paragraph with fonts you don’t like or aligned it incorrectly. To get a quick view of how the paragraph is formatted, put your cursor [Read more] 
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