Even More Word Q & A

This question came across my desk last week.

Can you add a section TOC in a Word document?

You have your main table of contents, or TOC, at the beginning of your document—but what if you want to create a separate TOC in one of the sections or chapters of your document?

For example, can you list your level 1 and level 2 headings in the main table of contents at the beginning of the document and list your level 3 headings inside the section of the document where they appear?

At this point, you may be thinking, "Of course you can. You just use field codes."

That's true. However, building a TOC from scratch in the Field dialog box can be daunting. And you don't have to do it that way—at least, not all the way that way.

Instead, to build a table of contents, you can start with the Table of Contents dialog box.

Adding a separate section TOC in Word?

First, create the table of contents that's going to go at the beginning of the document.

(Remember to assign styles to the all headings that you want to appear in your TOC.)

On the References tab, click Table of Contents, and then click Insert Table of Contents. In the dialog box, specify to show only two levels.

Click OK.

Now click where you want to insert the section TOC.

Click Table of Contents and Insert Table of Contents again, and then click Options. In the Available styles list, delete the values for Heading 1 and Heading 2, and then type 3 in the box for Heading 3.

Click OK twice—and when you're asked whether you want to replace the existing TOC, click No.

What if I want separate TOCs in more than one section?

Good question! This takes a little more time, but it can be done. To add a separate section TOC for each section or chapter, you need to use bookmarks. Select all of the text, including the headings, that you want in the first section TOC, and then on the Insert tab, click Bookmark.

In the Bookmark dialog box, type a name, such as Chapter1, click Add, and then click OK.

Create bookmarks for each section or chapter that will need a section TOC.

After your bookmarks are in place, you can insert the section TOC the same way that you did before. Just don't be alarmed when it shows every level 3 heading in your document. We're going to fix that.

Click next to that section TOC, and then press ALT+F9. Your TOC is replaced by a field code that probably looks something like this.

{ TOC \o "3-3" \h \z \u}

All you need to do is type \b and the name of your bookmark, like this:

{ TOC \o "3-3" \h \z \u \b Chapter1}

Press ALT+F9 again so that you can see the TOC. Press F9 to update it—and when asked, click to update the whole table.

Getting the rest of your section TOCs into your document is easy. Press ALT+F9 again to see the field code. Select it, press CTRL+C to copy it, and then paste it in each place that you want to add a TOC, changing the name to the correct bookmark name for that location.

After you paste and update the last section TOC, press ALT+F9 a final time, so that you can see all of the section TOCs in your document.

Done!

- Joannie

New & Really Nice Templates Released

Some new and really nice business templates just got released on Office Online. An example of one of the "Professional services flyers" is below. Check the rest out here.

-Jonathan

The Fantastic Five

There are five little-known features in Word that just make me smile. And while you have to dig for them once—as they don't really fit-in on the Ribbon—once you've got 'em, you've gotta have 'em. At least I do.

With no further ado, the fantastic—or at least handy—five (with Human Torch-esque formatting):

Note: We'll go over how to get at all of these features at the end of the post.

Back

This one is the Mr. Fantastic of the group…partly because it's my favorite, and partly because Mr. At Least Handy doesn't have the same ring. Have you ever clicked on a link in a Word document, had it take you to a different place in the document, and want to go back to where you started? Scroll no more! Just click Back and you're good to go. KABOOM! <Forgive the mixture of Batman and Fantastic Four allusions…I can't help myself>

Note: The Back command is not the same as the Shift + F5 shortcut which takes you to the last place you edited. That being said, Shift + F5 is quite handy when you are typing, scroll a few pages to find something related, and then want to easily get back to where you were editing.

Email

A close second. It's 9pm, you're tired, you just finished the first draft of your proposal, and your teammates Sally and Sam are expecting it in their inbox for review in the morning. What do you do?

You click Email, type in a short note and their email addresses, and click Send. That's it. While the Email command really only saves you going into Outlook, creating a new email message, finding your document, and attaching it, I can't tell you how happy it makes me every time I click Email and all that stuff is done for me. POW!

Create Microsoft Office Outlook Task

Now let's say you are Sally or Sam (the people reviewing the draft proposal). You'll likely have a few things that you need to follow-up on when reviewing the draft proposal that was so easily emailed to you.

Enter Create Microsoft Office Outlook Task.

Select the part of the proposal that you need to follow-up on, click Create Microsoft Office Outlook Task, and a new Outlook task pops-up with the selected text in the body and the title of the document in the subject line. KABLAM!

Calculate

Now let's say the draft proposal has to do with a software project and contains some data from the last software project you're team worked on. Specifically, let's say it contains the following data:

Our Bug Stats This Month

• 527 fixed
• 70 by design
• 235 external
• 129 no repro

And let's say that in your mind the total number of bugs this month is much more important than the breakdown of how the bugs are being dealt with. With the handy Calculate feature you select the list, click Calculate, and see the total in Word's status bar. SMACK!

Microsoft Office Online

Finally, you're wrapping up your review of the proposal and forgot how to preview how the proposal will look if all the Tracked Changes you made are "Accepted." You click on the Microsoft Office Online button and your internet browser starts-up and takes you straight to the Office Online homepage when you search for "Track Changes" and get your answer. BAM!

Where to Find the Features

With the goodness of these features in mind, you may be thinking: "Holy Word Processing Jonathan! Where do I find these fantastic features?" Or something like that…

You can get at Back, Create Microsoft Office Outlook Task, Calculate, and Microsoft Office Online with these three steps:

Step 1: Click on "The Office Button" [see picture below] and click "Word Options"

Step 2: Click "Customize" and in the drop down menu under "Choose commands from:" and select "Commands Not in the Ribbon"

Step 3: Find one of the previously mentioned fantastic four in the list, select it, click "Add," repeat for the remaining three, and click "OK"

Now you'll find the fantastic four on your Quick Access Toolbar [see picture below], and you can get the fantastic fifth (Email) on your Quick Access Toolbar by clicking the "Office Button," clicking "Send," right-clicking on "Email," and clicking on "Add to Quick Access Toolbar." KAPOWEE!

Thanks for indulging the silliness of this post and I'd love to know which little-known features are your favorites in Word. Feel free to perpetuate the silliness if you'd like :)

-Jonathan

PS Some related goodness from David

That’s a Table?!

Before I joined the Word team, when I thought about tables in Word, I thought of something like this:

After about a year of working on Word 2007, when I thought about tables in Word, I thought of something like this—thanks to the contextual presentation of Table Styles in Word 2007:

Then, after some lunches with and lessons from our resident table experts, I started to think about the following when I thought about tables in Word (please forgive the typo in the second heading):

This mental shift occurred after our table experts introduced me to using tables as a layout tool to help spice-up my document and to position graphics relative to text or other graphics. I'm a big fan of adding a bit of spice to documents and using all sorts of graphics to help get my points across, so I've become a big fan of using tables to:

• Add catchy "chunks" of content to documents

• Precisely position graphics relative to other graphics or text
• Simulate columns and reduce the vertical space taken up by a lists in Outlook 2007 (which uses Word 2007 as the "editing surface" for emails)

Add catchy "chunks" of content to documents

In the document above, the chunks of content in the upper left and lower right hand corners are tables. They don't look like tables because I fiddled with their borders a bit. Specifically, here's the same document with the chunks sans border fiddling:

Both chunks are really simple tables with the weight, color, and visibility of their borders customized. I did this by selecting the table, clicking on the Design tab of the Table Tools contextual tab, clicking on the Borders button, and the Borders and Shading option on the drop-down menu.

This gave me the following dialog that allowed me to customize the weight, color, and visibility of the borders. As you can see below I chose to show a 2 ¼ pt width dark red border on only the left and top of the first table.

I did something very similar with the other table. The only difference is that I specified to show only the border on the right and bottom sides of the table.

After the customization, I dropped in the content and that was it.

Precisely position stuff

As you may remember from a previous post, Live Preview and Galleries make positioning pictures much easier in Word 2007. This being said, when I need to get real precise with more than one picture, a chart, headings, and text…its table time.

For example, here's the document from above "showing" the table I used to position the two pictures, chart, headings, and text in the middle of the document:

All I did here was to create a three-column two-row table. Then I merged the first two cells in the top row using the Merge Cells button on the Layout tab of the Table Tools contextual tab.

Then I put my content into the cells, sized the columns appropreately by clicking and dragging them, and then hid all the borders by clicking on the Design tab of the Tables Tools contextual tab, clicking the Borders button, and then clicking the No Border option.

Reduce the vertical space taken up by a lists in Outlook 2007

When you write an email in Outlook 2007, you are actually writing in Word 2007.

This being said, the "Page" related Word commands are not available in Outlook 2007 email messages since emails aren't really made up of pages in the sense that Word documents are made up of pages (think 8.5" x 11" sheets of paper). So, if you have a long list of stuff in an email, you can't lay it out in columns like you do in Word (select the list, click on the Page Layout tab, click the Columns button, and click Three).

But, you can put the list in a three column one row table and hide the table borders (as we discussed above).

Finally

If you start using tables to spice-up the layout of your documents or as a tool to position graphics relative to text or other graphics, you'll start hiding your table borders frequently, and may become a fan of Table Gridlines. What are Table Gridlines? Table Gridlines show everywhere your borders would show if you didn't hide them, but Table Gridlines don't print. This makes them a great way to give yourself the context of table borders when editing your document, without affecting what you will print.

For example, below is the document I've talked about in this post with Table Gridlines showing. The Table Gridlines are the dotted blue lines where the table borders would be if they were showing.

Keep in mind that the document will print the same whether your Table Gridlines showing or not showing, so turn them on or off as you see fit by going to the Design tab on the Table Tools contextual tab, clicking the Borders drop down menu, and clicking the View Gridlines button [see screen shot below].

Hope this is useful.

-Jonathan

New Version of the Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification

I have the pleasure, perhaps honor :), of being the principal editor of a revised version of the RTF file format specification. The focus of this revision is interoperability with Microsoft Word, RichEdit and all those other programs that support the venerable standard. More specifically, this new version contains definitions for all of the control words that show up in RTF files, fixes some errors, improves the English, and makes the formatting consistent.

It's really worth it, since RTF is so great at allowing documents to travel fluidly forward and backward through time. HTML is reasonably good at time travel, but it's not nearly as rich. Meanwhile XML formats require new namespaces whenever we add new features.  With RTF one just defines appropriate new control words, which older readers happily ignore and new ones can understand if they choose to.

Sometimes it's tricky work because the people who wrote the underlying code have left the Word team, if not Microsoft, and one has to reverse engineer a lot. But that's something my colleagues and I have been doing for years in maintaining and generalizing RichEdit's RTF converters. You just enter a construct in Word, save it as RTF and look at it with a plain-text editor. Also Word can be too ‟helpful" in editing the document: autoFormatting, smart quotes, and background spelling need to be disabled or else i's get capitalized when they shouldn't be, curly quotes get used when ASCII quotes should be used, and the second of two capitals gets lower cased.

Word has a very cool Compare feature that's invaluable for projects like this one. It lets you see all the changes you've made to a document without confronting you with revision marks as you edit. Go to the Review tab, choose Compare and enter the file names of the original and revised documents. Then after a little while (at least with the 300 page RTF specification), up comes the compared version with revision markings for all changes. You can also see a revision pane with a summary of the corrections as well as windows with the original and revised documents. To display all four windows, it's handy to have a large screen. In particular, the Compare facility readily reveals if Word has made background changes you don't want.

Many people have helped with this revision, both in spotting problems by examining a myriad RTF documents as well as in filling in gaps in understanding from personal experience and/or examination of the Word code. Now it's your turn. If you want to see changes in the RTF specification, please send them to me.

- Murray Sargent

I Have Questions You’re Not Posting About

Following up on Stuart's comment about the purpose of the Word Team Blog, here are some great resources if you have questions we're not posting about.

Office Online's Word Page

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/FX100487981033.aspx

All sorts of free goodness from training courses to templates to how-to's for Word 2007, 2003, 2002, and 2000.

Word 2007 Solution Center

http://support.microsoft.com/ph/11377

Handy resource for the top Word 2007 issues and help with error messages, downloads and updates, installation and setup, security and privacy, menus and toolbars, working with files, and formatting documents.

Word MVPs

http://word.mvps.org/index.html

The MVPs are independent experts in Word who are super helpful.

Word Forums

http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.word.docmanagement&lang=en&cr=US

All sorts of Q&A, ranging from "Opening up a Word Document from 1992?" to "Make a picture as watermark in the Word 2003?"

Microsoft Knowledge Base

http://support.microsoft.com/search/

Allows you to search through Microsoft technical support articles.

Contact a Support Professional by Email, Online, or Phone

http://support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx?rdpath=1&gprid=11377

When you want that personal touch.

Click the Question Mark or Press F1

Last but not least, when you are not connected to the internet, clicking "the question mark" or pressing F1 will pop "the little window" that lets you access help content that gets installed on your computer along with Word.

The Question Mark

The Little Window

Hope this helps.

-Jonathan

Necessity is the Mother of Discovery

In The Republic, Plato said "…the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention." Over the years, this phrase morphed into the idiom "necessity is the mother of invention." I've found that when working with a product as rich as Word, this wisdom turns into "necessity is the mother of discovery."

For example, one of the projects we worked on during 2007 was writing the Word 2007 version of Rich Text Format (RTF) specification. I mention this because it was during this project that we needed and therefore discovered three little-known but very handy table features in Word:

• Repeating Headers
• Sorting
• Table Properties

<aside>I'm not being cute when I say we "discovered" these. Not every member of the Word team is an expert in each of the 1,700 or so commands in Word 2007. Put it this way: We have table experts on the Word team, but not everyone on the Word team is a table expert.</aside>

If you have ever had the pleasure of reading the Word 2007 RTF spec cover-to-cover, you know that Appendix B contains a forty-plus page table. It's a massive three column table describing everything you can do with RTF (column 1), listing where each of those things are covered in the spec (column 2), and slotting each of those things into a "type" category (column 3).

As you might guess, our work on the spec culminated in adding all the new Word 2007 stuff to this table and reporting how much stuff you could now do with RTF.

Adding pages of new rows to a very specifically formatted alphabetized forty-plus page table necessitated either discovery or insanity. Fortunately we discovered repeating headers, sorting, and table properties.

Repeating Headers

This one is easy and made pages two through forty-four of the table easier to work with. Specifically, when we repeated headers, we could see the header row of the table at the top of every page the table spanned.

For example, here are pages two and three of the table with headers repeating and then the same pages without headers repeating:

Header Rows Repeating

Header Rows Not Repeating

As you can see, the header row is at the top of every page the table spans when you repeat header rows. Conversely, the header row is not shown when you don't repeat header rows. We liked the clarity added by repeating header rows and selected it like this:

Sorting

While repeating header rows was pretty nice, we discovered a diamond by sorting the contents of this very strictly formatted table right in Word.

Here was the issue we faced. The Word 2007 RTF spec builds off of the Word 2003 spec. That means that creating the 2007 spec means adding all the stuff new to 2007 to the 2003 spec, and then changing the title of the spec. The formatting and layout of the spec must stay the same.

Part of this is updating the giant table in Appendix B with pages and pages of new rows. And of course, the table is in alphabetical order. So, we could:

• Meticulously insert each new row one-by-one in alphabetical order. Very lame.
• Add a bunch of new rows at the end of the table. Copy the entire table into Excel. Use Excel's sorting functionality. Paste the table back into the spec. Reformat it to look exactly like the table in the 2003 spec. Lame.
• Add all the 2007 stuff to the end of the table. Click sort. Not lame.

We chose the latter and had time to enjoy one of the three sunny days we had here in Redmond, WA last year.

Table Properties

Actually, before we headed out, we wanted to know how much new stuff we documented and the total amount of stuff in the 2007 version of the spec. We could leverage the monster table to do in one of three ways:

• Make sure header rows aren't repeating and count the number of rows in the table from the Word 2003 RTF spec (amount of existing stuff). Make sure header rows aren't repeating and count the number of rows in the table from the Word 2007 RTF spec (total amount of stuff). Subtract the amount of existing stuff from the total amount of stuff to get the amount of new stuff. Cry while typing up the email reporting the amount of new and total stuff.
• Make sure header rows aren't repeating. Paste the table from the Word 2003 RTF spec into Excel. Note the number of rows and subtract one to account for the header row (amount of existing stuff). Paste the table from the Word 2007 RTF spec into Excel. Note the number of row and subtract one to account for the header row (total amount of stuff). Subtract the amount of existing stuff from the total amount of stuff to get the amount of new stuff. Sigh while typing up the email reporting the amount of new and total stuff.
• Right click in the last row of the tables in the 2003 and 2007 specs. Click Table Properties and select Row. Note the row number and subtract one to account for the header row. Subtract the amount of existing stuff from the total amount of stuff to get the amount of new stuff. Smile while typing up the email reporting the amount of new and total stuff.

So we faced a nearly fifty-page table and necessary discovery or necessary insanity. We discovered repeating headers, sorting, and table properties, and thus I'm able to chat with you today.

-Jonathan

Making your Output Greener

Though most documents created today are viewed online, a great many are still printed. We frequently hear requests asking how to make printed Word documents use less paper. Reducing unused space on the page is the most obvious way to reduce your document's printed size. However, keep in mind that the balance between whitespace and text is a key factor in any document's readability—when there is too little whitespace, text is harder to read.

You should also consider the ways in which you are presenting your content. The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words may not literally be true but using an image such as a chart or diagram can often reduce the amount of text that you need and overall take up less space. You should also consider arranging content to take full advantage of the page; one good approach is to use tables for layout within your pages to give you smaller regions in which to place your content.

Controlling the Whitespace

The whitespace on the page comes from two sources—the boundary "box" around the text (set as part of the margins) and the spacing between the rows of text (set as spacing within and between paragraphs). The whitespace on your page can be adjusted using settings on the Page Layout tab.

Margins

In Word 2007, we reduced the default left and right margins from 1.25" to 1" to reduce the amount of whitespace used in margins (and therefore conserve paper). We were able to make this change for the default setting because typical monitor sizes and resolutions had improved to where a 6.5" width was quite readable on-screen.

Many people find even narrow margins comfortable for reading on paper. When setting margins, you can consider both the left/right distance and the top/bottom spacing. For the most dramatic reduction in whitespace, select the Narrow setting (0.5" on all four sides) from the Margin gallery:

An important consideration is that some printers can't print that close to the edge of the page. If that's the case, Word will warn you when you change the margins. You may want to use the Page Setup dialog to make more precise adjustments to the margins. The Custom Margins… option at the bottom of the gallery will open the Page Setup dialog with the Margins tab displayed.

Another thing to be cautious of when using the Narrow settings is that if you have a header or footer in your document, Narrow margins may not allow enough space for that text. Word won't allow the text to overlap, but will place your document text immediately next to your header or footer with no whitespace, which isn't very readable. You can use the settings on the Layout tab of the Page Setup dialog to adjust the placement of your header and footer.

If your document consists of a lot of lists or tables—which are often quite narrow—you may find that you get little savings from reducing the whitespace on the left and right edges of the page. One "trick" with tables is to fit your tables to their content and center them whenever possible; distributing the whitespace to either side makes the page seem less dense with text. You can often reduce the point size of the text in tables or lists because their formatting already helps improve their readability.

Paragraph spacing

Word determines the spacing between paragraphs by comparing two different settings—the space after the paragraph and the space before the next paragraph—and using the largest value of the two. In addition to adjusting the spacing settings used for the Normal paragraphs in your document, you can often save a great deal of whitespace by adjusting the spacing used around your document's headings.

Changing the spacing between lines within the paragraphs is another way to adjust whitespace. In conversations with many people, I've come to believe that this is one of the most subjective aspects of readability. In Word 2007, the default spacing between lines is 15% greater than single space but many people see this as almost double-spaced (which would be 100% greater). And the default space after a Normal paragraph is 10 points, which gives less than one blank line between paragraphs.

You can use the line spacing control on the Home tab to change the line spacing and the settings in the Paragraph group of the Page Layout tab to adjust spacing between the paragraphs. Or you can adjust both using the Format Paragraph dialog.

If you'd like to use a layout created by one of the Microsoft designers to minimize whitespace within your text, use the Traditional style set (selecting it from the Change Styles->Style Sets menu on the Home tab).

Fonts: Too Wide, Too Narrow, and Just Right

One the factors that many people overlook when trying to manage the overall length of their documents in the impact made by their font selection. Consider the following examples of the English alphabet (all at the same point size):

As you can see, the change from Times New Roman to Calibri as the default font for text in Word resulted in a reduction of the overall length of text. Calibri was chosen because most documents are read online and are usually fairly short; for printing of longer documents, many typographers state that a font like Cambria, Georgia, or Times New Roman would be more appropriate.

Although you can always change the font used for your text by selecting the text and changing the font using the Font dropdown, a better long-term approach is to change the fonts used for the document theme and referenced by the styles in your document.

If you are working with the style sets that are part of Word 2007, the styles are already designed to work with themes. On the Home tab, select the Change Styles control and then point to the Fonts entry to see the list of pairings created for the Office 2007 Themes. You can use one of these pairings, or use the Create New Theme Fonts command to create your own pair to be used in your documents.

If you are working with styles that are not theme-based, you need to edit each style directly to change the font used. You can either specify a font directly for the style or update the style to be theme-based by referencing the Body or Heading entries from the Font control. A style that is theme-based will list +Headings or +Body as its font rather than a specific font name.

You are using styles, aren't you? If not, then you can still take advantage of theme-based formatting by using the Body and Heading entries from the start of the Font dropdown. To help reinforce the idea that they relate the font back to the theme, the Body and Heading entry show the currently assigned Theme font when displayed in the Font dropdown but not in the Font dialog box.

Using your Preferences for All New Documents

All of the changes discussed here can dramatically change the overall length of your document and therefore the amount of paper you use when printing. Which changes work best for a given document has a lot to do with the specific content on the page. However, you can change your starting point for new documents to encourage yourself to minimize the paper you use.

You'll find it easiest to decide on a new look if you use a document that is typical for the way you work as a starting point. The document should have several typical paragraphs as well as samples of any headings or other styles that you use.

To start, decide on the amount of space on the page you are going to use for text, and how much you're reserving for the margins. Make margin adjustments using the Page Setup dialog, and when you are satisfied with them, select the Default button. This Default button stores the Page Setup settings as the part of the current template—for blank documents created by Word, this is shown as the NORMAL template.

Once you've defined the area that will contain your text, it's time to make adjustments to the whitespace within your text. As a first step, decide on the fonts you want to use for your headings and body text. Use the Change Styles control on the Home tab to access the list of pre-defined font pairs and the Create New Theme Fonts command for creating your own font pairs.

Next, adjust the spacing for each of the styles used in your document. Use the commands on the Ribbon or those in the Format Paragraph dialog box to set the whitespace used for each style. Consider both the spacing between lines (most important for your body text) as well as the spacing between paragraphs (most important for headings). Once a paragraph has the spacing you want for that style, right-click on the paragraph, point to the Styles entry, and select Update <style> to Match Selection. This will change the definition for that style. (The text "<style>" in the command above will be replaced with the name of the style you are updating.)

After making those changes, select the Set as Default command from the Change Styles control on the Home tab to store those settings for your new document. This stores the settings for the style definitions and the theme controls. Note that if the Set as Default command lists a specific template, the settings are only stored for new documents based on that template—if it just says "Set as Default," then you're storing the settings for your new blank documents.

Other Green Word Features

Word has several other features worth considering when thinking about conserving paper.

Word provides finer control over the spacing of the characters in your document on the Character Spacing tab of the Format Font dialog. Activating kerning for your text makes the text more readable and often reduces the length of your document slightly. If the performance of your machine allows it, we recommend enabling kerning for the styles you commonly use. You can also make manual adjustments in character spacing, which can often be used to squeeze a heading that almost fits onto a single line.

Documents created in other countries may define a different paper size than what is available in your printer. Be default, Word will scale the content of these documents to use the available paper (which is the best way to conserve paper). If you want to confirm that this setting is active, display the Word Options dialog from the Office Button menu and then in the Advanced group to make sure that the Scale Content for A4 or 8.5 x 11" paper sizes option in Printing section is selected.

If you want Word to reduce the number of pages used for your document by automatically making adjustments to various settings, first go to the Print Preview view (accessed by selecting Print and then Print Preview). In the Print Preview tab, you'll find a Shrink One Page command in the Preview group. Select Shrink One Page to have Word reduce the number of pages in your document by adjusting margins, reducing the font size, and other such changes. But be sure to check your document to be certain you're happy with the adjusted results—the command won't remove inserted page breaks, so some pages may end up with blank space when the text is shortened. How many pages the command actually reduces varies depending on the starting format of your document and your content.

You can also print your document with more than one page per printed sheet. Word offers a control to enable this on the Print dialog (Page per Sheet in the Zoom group) and many printers also offer the same sort of option (in their Properties dialog). If both are available, you may get faster output by letting the printer do the work rather than using the Word setting. But never use both—otherwise, Word will produce two pages per sheet and then the printer will place two sheets on each printed page resulting in 4 sheets per page, which is too small for almost anyone to read.

I hope others will share their suggestions for minimizing the amount of paper used when printing by adding comments to this article. And we're all helping by reading this and other documents online.

--Stuart

Comment on Collaborative Authoring

Way down at the bottom of the early February post Word Q & A: Tables and Charts Francis made an interesting comment to which I replied asking for more info, but I fear nobody saw either of them as they were way down on the comment list of a month old post. That being said, I've pasted Francis's comment below as well as my reply below and would love to hear everyone's thoughts.

Francis's comment:

Jason's comment about services is interesting. However, an application can lend itself to online activities without having to plug into any particular online service. E.G., consider how Word stores documents: as indivisible, single-author files. It's very hard to use them collaboratively. Wikis let numerous, geographically dispersed individuals work simultaneously on a single body of work; the same thing is nearly impossible to do with a Word document.

Case-in-point: I often work on projects where numerous persons are charged with authoring discrete sections of a final report. Word makes such groupwork very hard. The only options we have are:

a) tasking one person with hunting down and compiling the final report from scores of separate documents (enormous manpower costs, impossible to see intermediate stages of final product, revision after compilation difficult)

b) e-mailing around a master document that everybody edits (bad, unreliable, leads to people messing up layout and forking document; necessitates lots of work tracking/merging document versions and approving changes)

c) hosting the master document remotely, e.g. on a shared drive or CMS (less need to track document but otherwise same problem as above, only with file locking and access problems)

d) patching inconsistent subdocs or stitching files with fields together (very unreliable, hard to work with, and not portable)

Jonathan's reply

In response to Francis's excellent comment, I'm curious what everyone would like to see enhanced in Word in terms of collaborative document authoring. Francis suggests the ability to "…break down (and recombine/build back up) our documents simply and reliably into (from) chunks/blocks/sections/subdocuments that individual authors could work on…" I'd love to hear more details and what others think.

What type of collaborative authoring are you involved in today? What are the pain points? How would you like to see Word address them?  How wouldn't you like to see Word address them?

-Jonathan

More Word Q & A

Thank you to everyone who has posted questions. We're looking at them and looking into many of them. In the meantime, here are a couple that have cropped up in the hallways.

And what are those links at the end? That's where you can find information in Word 2007 Help.

Start with 1, but not at the start

My nagging question is how can I configure page numbers to start on page 4 or 5 or 6? Scenario: I have a 20 page white paper. The first page is a title page, followed by a blank page, 2 pages of legal and a TOC. The 6th page has the introduction and I want my page numbers in the footer to be centered and to begin at 1 on that 6th page and proceed automatically from there.

The answer to this question involves sections. In your Word document, add a section break. For example, if you want page numbering to start at 1 on the 6^th page, replace the page break that's between the 5^th and 6^th pages with a Next Page section break. (You can add a section break by clicking Breaks and then Next Page in the Page Setup group on the Page Layout tab.)

Now that you have a new section, you can tell Word to start the page numbering of that section with 1. On the Insert tab, in the Header & Footer group, click Page Number, and then click Format Page Numbers. Under Page numbering, click Start at, and then enter 1 in the box.

Big hint: If the headers and footers in your document are linked to each other, you'll still have page numbers in the first section. To keep page numbers off the pages in the first section (or to use a different numbering format), turn off Link to Previous.

If you see this in your document:

click this:

Get rid of my revisions!

How do you turn "Track Changes" on and off? Is this the same thing as showing or not showing the changes?

It is not the same thing, and thank you for asking.

Showing or hiding changes affects what you see on the screen. It does not affect what is in the document. To turn off the Track Changes, click Track Changes in the Track Changes group on the Review tab.

After you turn off Track Changes, the markup you already had is still there

This is important:

To remove all of the changes that have already been tracked in your document, use the Review tab to accept or reject the changes.

You can also use the Document Inspector to remove them all at once. But that Document Inspector is very thorough. It will remove document properties and headers and footers.

If you don't want that level of inspection (and removal), change the settings before you run Document Inspector. Click the Microsoft Office Button, point to Prepare, click Inspect Document, and then clear the check boxes for items that you don't want to change.

Resources

Insert page numbers
Get rid of tracked changes, once and for all
Inspect documents for hidden data and personal information

P.S.

If you're already on Facebook, join the Office 2007: Help! I'm lost! group. We're there.

The Results Are In

Earlier this year I asked if you'd fill-in the following sentences:

• If the next version of Word improved my ability to x, it would make my life better because…
• If the Word Team Blog improved my ability to x, it would make my life better because…

Well, the results are in and available in their raw form below (note: the responses below are unedited and in the language that of the original poster). Thanks for the excellent feedback.

Some good or bad news, depending on how you look at it, is that a few of your requests are possible in Word today (we hope). For example, consider the following responses to "If the next version of Word improved my ability to x...":

• intelligently compare two or more documents
• mail merge where I am using the same letter but modified client information each time
• interface with the Digital Rights Management
• build operationally specific words to the local dictionary (via a wizard or template)

The first is possible via the Compare button on the Review tab:

The second is enabled by the Mailings tab:

The third by the Protect Document button on the Review tab:

The fourth by the Custom Dictionary functionality found in Proofing tab of the Word Options dialog:

As for the rest of them:

• it's clear that many of you use our new bibliography features
• we'll have to revisit this list when we're able to chat about the next version of Word, so we can see if we've been able to meet any more of these needs in the next version

Finally, I'm curious what you think about all the feedback below. Does it make sense? Is it missing the point? Let me know what you think.

-Jonathan

(PS Special thanks to Stuart for the insight he added to this post)