Ten New and Cool Word Features
by Nan Barber04/24/2001
Word 2001 for Mac, part of the Office 2001 suite, has so many new features that most of us will never use--or need--them all. The problem is, there are so many that you may not be sure where to start. The last thing you want is to install Word 2001 and start right in on your latest overdue project, missing out on cool new features because you didn't even know they were there. To avoid that unhappy fate, here are 10 new (or improved) Word features to check out. This should set you well on your way to discovering the seemingly boundless expanse of toolbars, dialog boxes, and commands that is Word 2001.
Click and Type
The Click and Type feature, new to Office 2001, lets you go directly to where you want to type and place the text there, just by double-clicking. No more tapping the Space bar or Return key to get to where you want to be.
In Online Layout view or Page Layout view (the only views where Click and Type holds true), move the cursor around on the blank page, then let it hover for a second at the point where you'd like to place some text.
If your cursor is near the left margin, Word assumes that you want your text to be left aligned, and you'll see tiny left-justified lines appear next to the hovering insertion point (see Figure 1). Just double-click; the insertion point turns into a standard blinking bar, and you're ready to begin typing. When you hover the cursor in the middle of the page, the insertion-point icon changes to centered text, and if you go over to the right margin, it assumes you want the text right aligned. To turn Click and Type on and off, use the "Enable click and type" checkbox on the Edit tab of the Preferences dialog box (Edit menu).
Figure 1. Word's new Click and Type cursor appears in Page Layout or Online Layout view whenever you move the cursor over an unused area of the page. The tiny lines alongside the I-bar cursor here indicate that your text will be left aligned, after you double-click and begin typing. Office Clipboard (Collect and Paste)
Like other aspects of Office 2001, the Office Clipboard is innovative, useful, and versatile. It's also a tad idiosyncratic. For instance, you can drag from the Office Clipboard, but you can't drag into it. You can copy and cut from Entourage into the Office Clipboard, but you cannot drag or paste into Entourage from it.
But for routine cutting and pasting, the Office Clipboard does one thing really well: it remembers what you cut or copied several moves ago and keeps it in safekeeping.
To see it, choose Office Clipboard from the View menu. Every item you've cut or copied since you first launched an Office program for the day, depending on how much the Office Clipboard can hold at the moment, appears in an individual square. (The total capacity of the Office Clipboard, as well as the maximum size of each item, depends on system memory. In general, you can probably copy or cut the equivalent of 20 or 30 pages of text to the Office Clipboard; 60 pages probably won't work.)
Every time you use the Cut or Copy commands or their keyboard equivalents, Word places the items at the top (the upper-left corner) of the Office Clipboard. When you cut or copy another item, the rest move over and down to make room, and the oldest one (in the lower right corner) drops off, gone for good.
When you choose the Paste command or press Command-V, Word pastes the most recently cut or copied item into your document at the insertion point. You knew that. To paste an earlier item, open the Office Clipboard and drag to expand it until you see the item you're looking for.
Click the item you want to paste (a colored highlight appears around it) and then click the tiny Paste Selected button in the lower left corner of the Office Clipboard (or press Command-V). You can also drag an item into any Office window (except Entourage); just click, hold, and then drag any square in the Office Clipboard.
Flag for Follow Up
Clicking the Flag button on Word's Standard toolbar (or choosing Flag for Follow Up on the Tools menu) opens the Flag for Follow Up dialog box (see Figure 2), where you set a date and time when you want Word to remind you to return to the document you're currently working in. At the appointed time, Word opens a reminder dialog box on your screen.
Figure 2. The Flag for Follow Up dialog box acts like a built-in alarm clock, reminding you when to refer back to thecurrent document. It's up to you to remember why you wanted to revisit it. Picture Tools
Word's new Picture toolbar offers an array of Photoshop-like effects that you can use on ClipArt (either from the Clip Gallery or the Microsoft Clip Gallery Live Web site, as described in # 8, below), or on JPEG or GIF images that you've pasted or dragged into a Word document. (Office 2001 refers to these kinds of images collectively as pictures.)
To format pictures, click any picture; the Picture toolbar opens. (See Figure 3.) The icons here add shadows, open a color adjustment tool, fix red eye, and remove scratches from photographs. There are also standard marquee and lasso tools for cutting and cropping images.
Figure 3. When you select a photograph or other picture object in Word, the toolbar, which contains everything you'd ever want to do to that image, automatically opens. One of the most interesting features here is the Set Transparent Color button. Click it and the cursor turns into an arrow pointer. When you click that pointer on a solid color in your picture, everything of that color turns transparent. (It has no effect on clip-art pictures.) When your picture is a photograph, this is the way to eliminate the photograph's background and wrap text tight against the foreground image; it works best if the photograph's background is a solid color or at least mostly so.
But the real fun of the Picture toolbar is the Picture Effects button. Clicking it opens a dialog box (see Figure 4) showing a selection of effects that totally alter the look of a photograph. You can make it look as if it were drawn in charcoal, for example, or done in stained glass. There are even sliders to let you tweak the effects. Drag a digital photograph into your Word document, apply a picture effect--such as Craquelure or Diffuse Glow--and voila! Instant trendy, professional-looking illustration.
Figure 4. Clicking one of these effects buttons instantly creates poster or brushstroke looks. Data Merge Manager
Like one of those remote controls that work the TV, cable box, VCR, and stereo, the Data Merge Manager puts in one place all the tools you need to create form letters, labels, catalogs, and other merged documents. From selecting and creating the form document and data source to the actual merge and printing process, you never have to leave the Data Merge Manager.
Another great thing about Word's Data Merge feature is the variety of data source types it can use: Word tables, tab-delimited text files (such as ASCII), Excel worksheets, FileMaker Pro databases, and the contacts in your Entourage Address Book.
This step-by-step example--printing mailing labels from your Entourage Address Book--shows the power of the Data Merge Manager:
Open a new, blank document. (This becomes your main document, the form that you merge data into.) Then choose Data Merge Manager from the Tools menu. The Data Merge Manager opens. (See Figure 5.)
In the top, Main Document, panel of the Data Merge Manager, choose Labels from the Create menu.
In the Label Options dialog box that opens, choose the brand and model number of your labels in the list box.
Back on the Data Merge Manager, choose Office Address Book from the Get Data menu.
In the Edit Fields dialog box that opens, choose the fields (First Name, Last Name, Address, and so on) from the Insert Merge Field pop-up menu. Using the keyboard, add spaces and line breaks to format your mailing label and click OK when done.
On the Data Merge Manager, click the flippy triangle to open the Preview pane, and click the View Merged Data (ABC) button. The finished labels appear in your main document. Use the arrow buttons on this panel to browse them.
Now click the Merge to Printer button on the Merge panel of the Data Merge Manager. This opens the Print dialog box, where you can set up your printer and start printing.
There are, of course, many more things you can do with Data Merge Manager, including querying your data source to print only selected records, editing fields and formatting in great detail, and creating new data sources from scratch. (All of which are covered in Office 2001 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual.)
Figure 5. The Data Merge Manager is where you format, organize, and even print merged documents. The fields you create are automatically available for drag-and-drop placement in your envelope, label, or form-letter documents. Project Gallery
The first thing you see when you launch Word isn't actually a Word document but the Project Gallery (see Figure 6), where you tell Word what kind of document you wish to create. When the Project Gallery opens, the Word Document icon is highlighted by default; if you click OK or press Return now, a new, blank Word document will open, just as if you'd chosen New Blank Document from the File menu (or pressed Command-N).
Here's what you can do in the Project Gallery:
View. This menu lets you choose to view the Project Gallery as a catalog of forms, (see Figure 7). In List view, the panel of large document icons is replaced by a list of smaller icons, and a preview panel opens at the right where you can see a more detailed view of what you're about to open.
Show. Simplify your life. If you know you want to open a Word document, choose All Word Documents from this pull-down menu. This way, you will only be able to see, and open, Word forms and templates. All Office Documents, however, simplifies your life even more. From this one panel, you can instantly open up any kind of Office document or template, without so much as opening a folder or launching a program.
Create. Choose Document or Template; Word opens your selected blank document as either a document or a template.
To dismiss the Project Gallery, click Cancel or press Esc. Word automatically opens a new, blank document. If you'd rather open an existing document, use one of the methods below; Word replaces the blank document with your newly opened one.
Opening Existing Documents in the Project Gallery
If you're going straight to opening a document you've created in Word previously, choose one of the following options, whichever is fastest:
- Click the Open button in the Project Gallery
- Choose File->Open
- Press Command
Live Word Count
Checking your document's word count used to involve choosing a menu command. No more. Every document's current and continuously updated word count can be shown in the status bar at the bottom of the window. To use it, you've got to turn it on. Choose the View tab in the Preference dialog box (Edit menu), and check Live Word Count.
Now, when you start typing, the word count number is revised after every few words that you type; hence the name "Live Word Count." The word count looks like a fraction: The first number is the word count from the beginning of document up to the insertion point where you're typing; the second number is the total number of words in the document. (see Figure 8).
Double-click the word count number to summon the Word Count dialog box, which gives the number of pages, paragraphs, lines, and so on, as well as the word count. (If you leave Live Word Count off, you can open this dialog box at any time by choosing Word Count from the Tools menu.)
Figure 8. Another cool feature of Live Word Count: When you select a block of text, the first number changes to reflect the word count for just that passage. Clip Gallery
Choosing Clip Art from the Picture submenu (Insert menu) opens the Clip Gallery, Office 2001's clip art headquarters (see Figure 9). Clicking the Insert Clip Art button near the middle of the Drawing toolbar opens it, too. What's especially useful about the Clip Gallery is not the fact that it contains dozens of pictures, but the way it allows you to organize, add to, and search the collection.
Categories
The Categories button below the list of categories opens a dialog box where you can add and delete entire categories from the Clip Gallery. Word asks if you're sure if you want to delete the category and notifies you that the clips themselves will not be deleted. (Where do they go? They stay where they always were, in the Microsoft Office 2001:Clipart:Core folder. The clip-art files are named by confusing codes, so if you delete a category, the best way to find these clips again would be to use the Search function.)
Online
Clicking the Online button launches, after asking your permission, Internet Explorer (or your default Web browser) and opens the Microsoft Clip Gallery Live Web site. New clips are added each month, which you can download individually or in groups by checking their boxes. Best of all, when you click the download clips link in Clip Gallery Live, Word automatically imports the new clips into the Clip Gallery and opens it to display them. New clips are placed into the category called Favorites as well as into other existing categories based upon their keywords. To move them around, see "Properties," in the next paragraph.
Adding Your Own Clips
Even though there is a lot of it, you are not limited to the clip art that Microsoft provides. Not only can you bring your own images into any Word document with the From File command (Picture submenu, Insert menu), but you can also make them part of the Clip Gallery. This gives you the opportunity to use the Clip Gallery's Search function and organizing features and see thumbnails of your own clip art, too.
To do so, click the Insert Clip Art button on the Drawing toolbar (or click Import in the Clip Gallery). Use the Open window in the Import dialog box to navigate to the images on your Mac that you want to bring into the Clip Gallery. (Make sure the Show menu shows "Clip Gallery Images." The kinds of images you can import are JPEG, TIFF, PICT, GIF, or bitmaps, as well as clip files and clip-art packages from Microsoft.) Click to select the image (press Shift as you click to select multiple images); click Import.
The Properties dialog box opens, giving you a chance to rename the image and assign categories to it. If you've added more than one clip, Word will take you through the properties for each one at a time; there's also a checkbox to assign the same properties to the entire group.
Search
When you enter a word in the Search box at the top of the Clip Gallery and click Search, Word will find all the clips that match (or are related to) that keyword. For instance, if you type in "automobiles," Word will pull up all the clips that have "automobile" or "vehicle" on the keyword list. Because each clip has so many keywords, if at first you don't succeed: search, search again.
Work Menu
Like most people, you probably work with the same documents and templates over and over again, and you probably get tired of rooting around on your Mac to find them each day. Word's Work menu is an easy place to stash your daily work: the documents you use most often. Adding a document to the list couldn't be easier. Open the document. (Save it, if you haven't done so.) Choose Add to Work Menu on the Work menu. Now click the Work menu again; there's your document, ready for opening just by choosing its name.
You can remove a document from the Work menu just as you'd remove any Word command: press Command-Option-hyphen. The cursor turns into a thick, black minus sign. Use it to choose the name of document you wish to banish from the Work menu, and it goes away for good (the menu listing, not your actual document).
Web Page Preview and Other New Web Features
Choosing Web Page Preview from the File menu displays the current Word document in your default Web browser. While choosing Online Layout from the View menu shows what your document would look like in a Web page, Web Page Preview actually shows it in a Web browser. When you're creating a Web page in Word, this is the way to see how text flow and text color, image alignment, and animations will look when your visitors view them on your Web site.
Web Toolbar
Word's Web toolbar (see Figure 10) appears when you choose Web from the Toolbar submenu (View menu). Because most of its commands work in a Web browser, your default browser launches when you use the toolbar, if it isn't open already.
The Back and Forward commands (both on the Web toolbar and on its Go menu) move you backwards and forwards again through the links you've been following.
The Stop and Refresh Current Page buttons work just as in a Web browser. When you click Refresh Current Page in a Word document, Word reverts to the last saved version but asks for your permission first.
Clicking the Start Page button opens your default Web browser to your chosen home page.
Clicking Search the Web opens your browser to the Excite Apple start page, ready for you to type into the Search box.
The Favorites menu on the Web toolbar is the same as the Favorites menu in Internet Explorer.
Save as Web Page
This is the quickest, dirtiest way to create a Web page. It's the way to go if you have never used, or don't have time to use, HTML or a Web design program such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver, or Go Live. Just create a Word document with all the text and images you want to put into your Web page and proceed as follows:
Choose Save as Web page from the File menu. The Save dialog box opens.
Click one of the radio buttons depending on how you'd like to save the file:
Save entire file into HTML saves all the Word features in the document as well as the features that will appear on the Web (or in Online Layout view in Word). Headers and footers, comments, page numbers and page breaks, and so on will be retained and will appear when the document is again opened in Word.
Save only display information into HTML saves only the document attributes that work in a Web browser. Other information, such as page and section breaks, headers and footers, and columns will be lost.
This option makes for a smaller, more compact HTML file, which is a good thing if your Web service provider charges based upon how much server space you use. If you choose this option, use Save As first to save a copy with all the normal Word attributes in case you ever decide to use the document in Word again.
Click Save.
Figure 10. The Back and Forward commands and buttons in the Web toolbar correspond to the last locations you've visited in Word, not your default browser.
Bonus Tip: Shift for Save/Close All
While this isn't a new feature (it goes back to Word 98), it's not well documented, so it's worth mentioning. Press Shift as you open the File menu, and the Save command changes to Save All, and Close changes to Close All. Haven't you been dying to save and dismiss all the documents on your screen at once? You can, and the secret has been there hiding in your Shift key this whole time.
Nan Barber has copy edited most of the titles in The Missing Manual series. Office 2001 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual, coauthored with David Reynolds, is her first book. Nan is managing editor of the literary magazine Salamander, and she also writes online content and marketing materials for various industries.
O'Reilly & Associates will soon release (May 2001) Office 2001 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual.
Sample Chapter 2, Editing in Word, is available free online in PDF format.
You can also look at the Table of Contents, the Index, and the Full Description of the book.
For more information, or to order the book, click here.
