Make the Most of Word's Menus Toolbar and Menu Tricks You Didn't Know Existed Helen Bradley
Fri 2/15/02 -- It's often the little improvements you make to your workplace which add up to big efficiencies in the long run. When you spend half of each day in Microsoft Word, adding a toolbar button for an often-used file, command, or character can mean better productivity. In this column, I'll present some great additions for your menus and toolbars that can make your word processing work that little bit smoother.
Making sense of the Work menu. Word's built-in Work menu is one of its best-kept secrets -- it's easy to unearth, but also easy to overlook if you don't understand its potential. Basically, the Work menu stores a list of documents which, unlike the recently opened ones near the bottom of the File menu, don't disappear after a while but are always a click away.
To display the menu, right-click a toolbar and choose Customize (or click Tools/Customize), then select the Commands tab. From the Categories list, choose Built-in Menus; find the Work menu in the Commands list; and drag and drop it onto Word's menu bar. Click Close to finish.
Working with the Work menu. You can add any open file to the Work menu by choosing Work/Add to Work Menu. To remove a file from the Work menu, press Ctrl-Alt-hyphen (use the key near the Backspace, not the minus symbol on the numeric keypad). Your mouse pointer will change to a dark horizontal bar. Click Work, then click the file to remove from the menu -- and only from the menu; the actual document will still be on your hard disk.
Adding symbols to toolbars. As an alternative to the Insert/Symbol command, you may already know how to type accented characters using the keyboard -- for example, pressing Ctrl-`-e to get è or creating the ¢ symbol by holding Alt as you type 155 on the numeric keypad. However, an even easier way to enter these characters is to add them as toolbar buttons -- sort of Insert/Symbol shortcuts.
Right-click a toolbar and choose Customize, then the Commands tab. From the Categories list, choose All Commands; from the Commands list, find Symbol: and drag it onto a toolbar. When the Symbol dialog appears, choose (normal text) in the Font list, then choose the desired character from the grid and click OK. Right-click the new toolbar button, and in the Name: area, type the character you just selected. You can now add the character to any document by clicking the toolbar button. (If you're interested in learning more about shortcuts for accented characters, look up "Keyboard shortcuts for international characters" in Help).
Putting the Frames options back. Early versions of Word had options for adding a frame on the Insert menu and formatting it on the Format menu. These menu items are now turned off by default, but the commands are still available, and you can easily put them back where they belong.
Open the Customize dialog and Commands tab again. From the Categories list, choose All Commands; from the Commands list, locate InsertFrame and drag it to Word's Insert menu. When the latter opens or pulls down, place the cursor where you want to add the Frame option. Repeat the process to add the FormatFrame command to the Format menu.
Creating a font sampler. Word 6 and 95 both shipped with a font sampler macro that created a document with a small sample of every font available -- it was a great reference tool. The macro wasn't shipped with Word 97, although you could use the old macro if you still had your Word 95 disks and knew where to look.
We've uncovered the 21st-century equivalent in Microsoft's Knowledge Base article number Q209205. It's a small piece of macro code you can copy and paste (use Tools/Macro/Visual Basic Editor) to create a font list macro. Edit these lines to add more characters to your sampler (for example, uppercase letters):
' Enter example text(Alphabetic characters.) .TypeText "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
' Insert example text(Numeric characters.) .TypeText "0123456789?$%&()[]*_-=+/<>"
If, when you run the macro, you encounter a message like "The macros in the project are disabled. Please refer to the online help or documentation of the host application determine how to enable macros," change your macro security level. Choose Tools/Macro/Security; on the Security Level tab, choose Medium, then click OK. Exit and restart Word.
