isambard » MS Word

Quote of the week (9 August)

steven — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 01:27:18 +0000

From Stephen King:

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Discovered in 1001 Rules for My Unborn Son. It comes in as #432.

Fixing MS Office menus (so you can see all the options all the time)

steven — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:06:48 +0000

One regular annoyance with MS Office (the old, pre-ribbon, versions) is its desire to demonstrate it knows more about your work than you do. It does this by hiding most of the options when you try and select from a menu.

Thankfully it’s simple to remind it who’s boss.

From the menu, select Tools > Customize (sic).
If you need to expand the menu to find this option, say a quick thanks that this will be last time you’ll need to do that.
In the dialog, select the Options tab.
Check the Always show full menus checkbox.
Close the dialog. And relax.

All is well again.

Managing MS Word file bloat

steven — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:28:49 +0000

Sorry. There are more reasons for file bloat in MS Word than we can possible manage. So this article will focus on just one that we tend to run into regularly. Problem we had was when writing training materials and including images of overheads. We”re firm fans of the “Send to MS Word” option in Powerpoint. This gives great looking pictures of each slide that you can just drag and drop into your document. However what tends to happen is after you’ve dragged a few into the document the file size suddenly jumps from something reasonable (for MS Word!) to a behomoth; we were regularly having to manage files of 50+ megs.

But after suffering one more time, found a solution at University of Queensland. And it worked like a charm.

Issue is that the “Send to Word” option does not create images of each slide but instead creates individual Powerpoint objects. Solution is to convert each slide object to an image:

select the object – just click on it
press CTRL+SHIFT+F9

To fix the whole document in one swoop, simply select everything (CTRL+A) before entering the special shortcut code above.

Including MS Powerpoint images in MS Word documents

steven — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 04:34:15 +0000

The easiest method to include an image of a MS Powerpoint slide in a MS Word document is to use the Send To option in Powerpoint. This creates an MS Word version of your Powerpoint file with pictures of each slide automatically generated. The slides appear a standard size, complete with edge frame, as they would appear to someone viewing them. It is then straighforward to cut & paste those pictures into your MS Word document.

Sadly this option is not valid for the Mac version of MS Powerpoint from office:2004. When selected in that version the output is a text version of the slide contents, not the pretty pictures.

To create an MS Word version of your slides:

Open your Powerpoint file.
Select File > Send To > Microsoft Word from the menu
Click OK in the Write-Up dialog that displays.
This dialog allows you to choose where your slide notes are included in the output document. Since you only need the slide images it does not matter where the notes are put; however having them alongside makes your slide list easier to navigate.

Once you click OK an MS Word version of your overheads will be created. This will be a brand new document that contains a single table, one row per slide, with neat images of your overheads available for cut & paste.

One final tip. Do not click in another document while the Powerpoint export is being generated. If you do the slide pictures will be generated in the document you clicked in!