Category Archives: New skills

As you will have read in my original post, I’m writing up quick guides to short cuts for formatting your Word documents, to replace workarounds you might use.

I want to show you how to do things in a more formal way which will  make things easier for you in the long run, particularly when you’re dealing with long and complex documents.

Today we’re going to follow up on my previous post on Tabs. Now we know how to use the tab button, we’re going to go a step further and set tabs using the ruler at the top of the screen. Exciting, eh? It’s called “setting tab stops” – the “stops” idea coming from when you added physical barriers to your typewriter. I actually learned to type on an elecronic typewriter, back in the olden days, by the way …

First of all, we need to check we can actually see the rulers at the top and side of the page.  Can you see a ruler at the top? If not, click on the view tab at the top of the page. See where it says ruler? Click on the box next to that so a tick appears:

Once you’ve ticked the box, the two rulers should appear, like this:

And we’re all ready to go. So, say we’ve got a little table of bird prices we want to lay out:

We can use the tab key to space across, but another way is to use the tab stops in the margin. Note that we need to highlight the text we want to apply tab stops to, or set up the tab stops before we type anything. Now, move the mouse pointer up to the top margin and click, just once, with the left mouse button, on the 1.5, 6 and 13 on the ruler. Just where the arrows are on the picture below. You’ll see a little L appear where you click. That’s L for left tab. Well, actually it shows which way the tab is facing, but we’ll come on to that later.

Now, when we type our text, using the tab key (remember, the one with 2 arrows on) will take us across to each of these tab positions that we have set up ourselves, rather than just going across by a set amount. The grey lines show how the text lines up with the tab stops we marked in the top ruler area.

All well and good, but the prices don’t line up very neatly, do they. We can get around this, and mess around with the tab positions by highlighting the text we want to affect (remember to do this! And for this stage we want to highlight all the text so we move the column heading and the prices) and double clicking on any of the Ls we placed in the ruler. This brings up the tab dialogue box. Note: although you can click on any tab marker to bring this up, it automatically moves to working on the leftmost tab setting first, not the one you clicked on. So you can see one tab stop highlighted, and the other ones listed underneath. You can see that there are options to Clear or Set tabs. Set will set a new one at whatever position you want: if you add a third one between 6 and 13, all your text in the third column will jump across to match that. Clear will delete the tab position you have highlighted in the top box.

In order to line up those prices, we need to make the third tab a Right-handed one. This means the tab marker is at the right margin or, effectively, the end of the text you want to affect. So, click on the 13 in the box to bring that up as the active tab, click on the Right alignment radio button (circle).

This will make the right hand side of the column line up: lovely tidy figures and heading! Look at the tab stop at 13. It’s now a backwards L, showing that it’s keeping everything tidy to the right, not the left.

But I think the bird names want to move over a bit. Simply highlight the text, bring up the dialogue box, highlight 6 and Clear, and click Set and add a tab stop at 3.5.

Now I fancy having a line of dots going from the name to the price. A bit odd in a list of bird prices, guaranteed, but if you want to do a quick table or a contents page (although I’ll be teaching you the proper way to do that automatically in a few weeks’ time) it works nicely and looks great. Highlight just the part that you want the dots to appear in and then double click on any of the tab stops. This time, select the 13 and choose the leader you require:

And there you go: lovely leaders between each bird name and its price. That looks tidier than scrappy columns made up of spaces and dots, now, doesn’t it!

Find my first introduction to tabs and using them to make your text nice and tidy and easy to navigate here.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

As promised in my original post, I’m going to write some quick guides to things you do when you’re writing documents which you think are a short cut but actually cause more trouble than they’re worth.

The idea of this series isn’t to criticise people, just to show you how to do things in a more formal way which will actually make things easier for you in the long run, particularly when you’re dealing with longer or more complicated documents.

Today we’re going to talk about using Tabs. Tabs seem to be something of a mystery, but there are easy ways to use both the tab button and tabs set in the top margin which will tidy up your document, make it easier to enter neat text in lovely columns, and reduce tension when you’re trying to line everything up.

Please note: these examples can look rather wide. I want them to be as near full-size as possible, so you can see exactly what I’m doing. If you’re looking at this post on a monitor, you should be able to scroll across to see the full image. If you’re viewing on a tablet, some of the screenshot may be cut off: hopefully you can see enough to get an idea of it, or you should be able to select the image to view it separately.

Let’s start off with using the Tab button. This is a button on your keyboard which should have two arrows on it, one facing one way and one the other. Got that? Good.

Here’s your common short cut, to start off with. You’ve got a menu you want to put on a document, with items in one column and prices in another. So you type it out, using the space bar to move along to the next column. And it looks like this:

But now you want to add another item and oh dear – it’s longer than all your other ones and puts it all out of alignment (because you’ve used the space bar to make the space between one column and the next):

How do I know you’ve used the space bar? Because I’ve used that little paragraph button on Word again which shows us all the formatting, tabs, line returns, etc.

So the way you’ve achieved this spacing is by doing this (where dots are spaces and the things like a backward P are returns):

What you should have done (my short cut) instead of using space (your short cut) was to use the tab key (remember, the one with the two arrows) to space across to a set point along the horizontal ruler at the top of the screen. These tabs are represented by arrows when you’re viewing the markup:

Now, when you want to move the prices over for all the shorter items, you just need to insert one press of the tab key at the end of each item, to get them to line up perfectly.

And here’s a last example. It’s very common to find people wanting to indent the first line of a paragraph, but using spaces to do so. This has its own issues – for example, you have to remember how many spaces you’ve put in and it’s likely that you’ll insert a different number each time, which will lead to indentations that don’t match. Instead, a simple press of the tab key at the beginning of your paragraph will leave everything nice and tidy

That’s enough for this session, I think. Of course, there are other ways you can format paragraphs and other indents, and you can set tab stops to wherever you want them to be across the page (and do all sorts of fancy kinds, too). But I’ll leave them for another post … (and I’ll link to them in this one when I publish them).

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

As promised in my original post, I’m going to write some quick guides to things you do when you’re writing documents which you think are a short cut but actually cause more trouble than they’re worth.

The idea of this series isn’t to criticise people, just to show you how to do things in a more formal way which will actually make things easier for you in the long run, especially if you’re dealing with a larger document like a dissertation, a thesis, a funding proposal, a workbook, a technical guide …

Please note: these examples can look rather wide. I want them to be as near full-size as possible, so you can see exactly what I’m doing. If you’re looking at this post on a monitor, you should be able to scroll across to see the full image. If you’re viewing on a tablet, some of the screenshot may be cut off: hopefully you can see enough to get an idea of it, or you should be able to select the image to view it separately.

Today we’re going to talk about page breaks. If you’re writing a document that has sections, chapters, etc., you might well want to start a new chapter on a new page, and have it look something like this:

So far, so good – you’ve got your new chapter starting on a new page. But I bet you finished one section and hit the “Enter” key until you got to a new page, didn’t you? The way to tell is to hit a rather magical little button that shows all the formatting you’ve done.  In Word, you’ll find it in the Home menu; if it’s not there, play around with the display until you’ve found it and add it to the menu bar. Here it is:

That’s actually the “paragraph” symbol or pilcrow used for centuries in manuscripts and printed books. Anyway, it’s ever so useful if you want to show what you’ve done to a document. Press it a second time if you want all the formatting marks to disappear again. So, pressing this with our document open shows the horrible truth – enter, enter, enter you’ve gone, six times, down the page …

And that’s all well and good – until you change the text above the page break. You’ve done this and it all looks nice, then you notice that repeated line on page 1. Oh, well, you can just delete that. So you delete the repeated line, and the text on page 1 is now one line shorter – one line further up the page. Below the text, you hit Enter 6 times to make Chapter 2 start on the next page. Those six lines are below your chunk of text still, but your text is one line shorter than it used to be. So what happens … ?

Disaster! Chapter 2 doesn’t begin on the next page any more! It’s crept up a line! And, similarly, if you’d added some lines of text to Chapter 1, this chapter heading would start part way down this page. Messy! And when you’ve submitted your work to an editor like me, you can bet we’ll be suggesting adding lines in or taking them away; when you get the document back the spacing will be all over the place (or I’ll have done it my way and made it tidy already … )

So how do you do it properly so this messiness doesn’t happen? Simple – you “force a page break”. Again, in all versions of Word, when you get to the place where you want to force a new section to start on a new page, press Control-Enter (or choose Insert – Page Break). Turning on your formatting display, and using our original text again, you’ll see this:

And because it’s a forced page break, it doesn’t matter what you do to the text above the break, the new text will always appear on the next page. Make the Chapter 1 text shorter again by deleting that extra line and you get this:

No hopping around – and even if you add so much to Chapter 1 that it goes onto the next page, Chapter 2 will just hop on down to the page after, automatically.

Of course, your document still looks like this:

But you’ve done it all correctly, in fewer keystrokes, and you know that whatever you do with Chapter 1, Chapter 2 will always start at the top of its new page, nice and tidy, going where you need it to go.

I hope that’s helped – it’s a very common issue, which is why I’ve tackled it first. There will be more of these posts coming over the next few months – do pop a comment on this post if I’ve helped you, and let me know if there are any other issues you’d like me to look at.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …