Pick up where you left off in Microsoft Word (SHIFT-F5)

Pick up where you left off in Microsoft Word with “Go Back”

by The Guru

Here’s a quick tip for Word 2002, 2003 and 2010: Ever open up your Microsoft Word document first thing in the morning, after having worked on it all day yesterday, and have trouble finding where you left off last time?

Don’t worry — you won’t have to wait for your morning caffeine to kick in.  As soon as you open up your document, press SHIFT-F5.  Word’s “Go Back” feature will take you back to your last edit.  (In fact, if you press Shift-F5 repeatedly, it’ll take you through your last four edits.)

That’s it!  (Don’t you love it when something’s that simple?)

(Photo credit: Aprilzosia at Flickr)

Pick up where you left off in Microsoft Word with

Inserting the Date Your Document was Last Saved (Microsoft Word)

Inserting the Date Your Document was Last Saved

Summary: Word keeps track of the date each time you save your document. If you want to insert that "save date" in your document, you can use a field to do it. (This tip works with Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, and Word 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Inserting the Date Your Document was Last Saved.)

Every time you save a document in Word, some of the document properties information is automatically updated. Part of the information is the date on which the document was last saved. You can insert this date into your documents and have it updated automatically, if you so desire. To insert the last date your document was saved in your document, follow these steps:

1. Position the insertion point where you want the date to appear.
2. Choose Field from the Insert menu. You will see the Field dialog box.
3. Choose Date and Time from the field categories at the left of the dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)
4. Select SaveDate from the field list at the right side of the dialog box.
5. Click on Options to select a date format, if desired.
6. Click on OK to insert the field.

Inserting the Date Your Document was Last Saved (Microsoft Word)

Understanding Styles (Microsoft Word)

Wordtips:  Understanding Styles

Summary: Styles are a key concept in Microsoft Word. If you understand styles, you will find it much easier to use Word effectively. (This tip works with Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, and Word 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Understanding Styles.)

Unlike most other word processing programs, Word does an excellent job of separating content from appearance. This may sound strange, but the words you type are your content and the way they look on screen or on paper is the appearance. Styles are nothing more than a named definition of how text should appear. You can best understand this by comparing your text to water (this is your content). The appearance of the water depends on the attributes of the container in which it is placed. If you place it in a glass it will look one way; if you place it in a pitcher, it looks a different way. The relationship between text and styles is no different; if you change the style that has been applied to text, then the appearance of the text automatically changes.

While Word allows you to explicitly format your text by selecting it and then picking the attributes you want applied, styles give you much more power. This is because you only need to define the style once, and then you can apply it to text as you see fit. Plus, if you later change the style, then all text formatted with that style is automatically updated to reflect the change. (You have changed the container, so the water changes appearance.)

There are several types of styles maintained by Word, but the two most prevalent types are character styles and paragraph styles. Character styles are used to define how individual characters appear, including attributes such as font, font size, and bold, italics, superscript, etc. Paragraph styles are much more comprehensive and define not only how the characters in the paragraph appear, but how the paragraph should appear in relation to the margins of your document, whether it should include bullets or numbering, how it should be treated by the spelling and grammar checkers, and how it should appear in relation to other paragraphs in the document.

In addition to character and paragraph styles, beginning in Word 2002 you could also define table and list styles. Table styles are used to specify how a particular table appears, including borders, spacing, and other table-specific formatting attributes. List styles are used to define how bulleted lists and numbered lists should appear.

Styles are saved with a document or they can be stored in a document template. Word allows you to add, change, rename, and delete styles. There are a number of ways in which you can define styles, but the most common is to use the menus. To define a style if you are using Word 97 or Word 2000, follow these steps:

1. Choose Style from the Format menu. Word displays the Style dialog box.
2. Click on New. Word displays the New Style dialog box. Using this dialog box you can change the attributes of the style.
3. Make sure you specify the name and type of style you are creating. You can also indicate if this new style is based on (derived from) an existing style.
4. Click on the Format button to make changes to the actual formatting attributes assigned to the style. The types of formatting available depend on whether you are working with a paragraph or character style.
5. When you are done setting the formatting attributes, click on OK to close the dialog box. The Style dialog box is again displayed, and your style is listed in the available styles list.
6. Click on Cancel to close the Style dialog box.

If you are using Word 2002 or Word 2003, the way you define styles is different. Follow these steps if you are using one of these later versions of Word:

1. Choose Styles and Formatting from the Format menu. Word displays the Styles and Formatting task pane at the right side of the program window.
2. Click on the New Style button. Word displays the New Style dialog box. Using this dialog box you can change the attributes of the style.
3. Make sure you specify the name and type of style you are creating. You can also indicate if this new style is based on (derived from) an existing style.
4. You can make changes to common attributes right in the New Style dialog box. If you need to make more detailed attribute changes, click on the Format button. The types of formatting available through the Format button depend on the type of style you are defining.
5. When you are done setting the formatting attributes, click on OK to close the dialog box.
6. Close the Styles and Formatting task pane.

At this point you can use your style anywhere you like within your document.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (955) applies to Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Understanding Styles.

Understanding Styles (Microsoft Word)

Use Breaks in Microsoft Word to Better Format Your Documents

How to Use Breaks in Microsoft Word to Better Format Your Documents

Have you ever struggled to get the formatting of a long document looking like you want in each section?  Let’s explore the Breaks tool in Word and see how you can use breaks to get your documents formatted better.

Word includes so many features, it’s easy to overlook some that can be the exact thing we’re looking for.  Most of us have used Page Breaks in Word, but Word also includes several other breaks to help your format your documents.  Let’s look at each break and see how you can use them in your documents.

Where are all the breaks hiding?

If you’re using Office 2007 or 2010, you can insert a Page Break from the Insert tab.  All the other breaks are listed in the Page Layout tab.  Click the Breaks button, and you’ll see all 7 of the page and section breaks you can use in Word.

Ok, now you’re ready to add breaks to your document.  Here’s what each one can do:

Page Break

Page Break is the one most of us have used, and you can add one from the Insert tab or the Page Layout tab.  As you likely already know from experience, page breaks only start you on the next page; all formatting will be kept the same from your original page to your new one.  Use this when you want to just start typing on a new page but want the formatting to all stay the same.

Column Break

Have you ever been writing a multi-column document and wanted the last line on the column to go to the next line?  You could just press Enter a couple more times, but then your formatting will be messed up if you edit your text.  A better way is to insert a Column Break.  This will move you to the next column, leaving your previous text in the first column.  If you go back and add more text to the first column, it’ll just go on down in the same column unless you add enough to overflow it.

Text Wrapping

Want to have caption text around a picture?  Select the text beside the picture, and select Text Wrapping.  This will let you keep this text together with consistent formatting, and will flow the rest of the document around this section.

Next Page, Section Break, and Even/Odd Page Breaks

The most important break, in our opinion, is the Next Page break.  Unlike the standard Page Break, this option moves you to the next page and gives you entirely separate formatting in the new section.  The Even and Odd Page breaks let you insert a section break and go to the next even or odd page, respectively, so you can easily format your documents for left and right pages in a book.  Alternately, the Continuous break does the same thing without putting you on a new page.

Want to switch from 2 column text to single column, or want to apply a new font scheme to only the cover page?  This is the break you’ll want.  Now you can format a full document with cover, contents, and references, all with their own unique formatting but saved in the same document.

Using Section Breaks with Footers

Formatting footers correctly takes a bit more work.  By default, your document footers will have the same content even on pages with section breaks.  To change this, double-click a header or footer in the new section of your document, and click the Link to Previous button to turn linking off.  Now your footers and headers will be fully unique between your document sections.

You can also choose to just keep your first page or your odd and even pages with different footers and headers.  To do this, check the appropriate box on Options in the Footer and Header Design tab.

Now you can take advantage of all the different types of document breaks to get your documents formatted just like you need.  Microsoft often mentions that 90% of it’s users only use 10% of the features in Office.  Hopefully this will help you take advantage of a little more of Office’s features to make it easier to format documents.

How to Use Breaks in Microsoft Word to Better Format Your Documents - How-To Geek

FreeOCR.net - free optical character recognition program

Get it Download' target=_blank>here.

Have you ever faced a situation where you needed to obtain editable text out of an image or a PDF file created from a scanned document? What you need in this case is "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) software that will literally "read" the document and try to identify characters and words visually, and FreeOCR.net is just such a program.

FreeOCR.net performs optical character recognition on images or PDF files that have a scanned origin. It can process PDF, TIF, BMP, JPG, and PNG files and provides an acquire function for running documents through a scanner. The simple user interface allows you to exclude non text elements (such as images or tables), although this has to be done manually.

For documents with multiple pages, each individual page has to be processed by the user separately, although FreeOCR will "pool" the output into a single text. FreeOCR.net is based on the open source Tesseract OCR engine and comes pre-installed with English support, although many other languages can be downloaded and added (including non latin character based languages such as Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, etc.)

This is an excellent basic OCR app that can get the job done. It works really well for use on the occasional document, or at least short documents. It is possible to process long documents (ebooks, etc), but in this case you would be better off with some of the more professional (and paid) apps that are out there.

PROS:

• Powerful engine: produces excellent results in general, at least for English which I tested. Note that images are recommended to be scanned at 200 dpi or more.
• Supported formats: processes PDF and most image filetypes (and will not restrict you to TIF as some others do).
• Supports a wide range of languages: English comes pre-installed, but other languages can be installed separately (see here). Languages include French, Italian, German/Fraktur, Spanish, Dutch, Vietnamese, Bangla, Czech, Catalan, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, Korean, Slovakian, Ukranian, Japanese, Indonesian, Norwegian, Hungarian, Serbian, Turkish, Tagalog, Romanian, Chinese (traditional & simplified), and Swedish.
• Simple interface: allows for selecting chunks of text to process, such as to circumvent pictures and other elements.

CONS:

• Does not process pages in batch: as it is designed to do one page at a time, which limits its usefulness for large documents.
• No post-OCR processing: such as spellchecking for example.
• No user-assisted "learning": such as employed by some other commercial OCR packages.

The verdict: an excellent free OCR solution. If you need to convert the occasional scanned document to editable text this will do the job. However, if you need to process hundreds of pages it can do the job in theory but is likely to be too labor intensive (much less labor intensive that re-typing though!).

Although I only tested English, the multi language support is quite noteworthy. If you do use for other language (esp. non latin) please post on your experience in the comments section. Thanks.

Version Tested: 3.0

FreeOCR.net: free optical character recognition program converts images to text in multiple languages | freewaregenius.com