Office for Mere Mortals

I’ve recently started writing for Office for Mere Mortals. I wrote for this email newsletter some time back but took a break for a while. It’s a collection of tips and tutorials on Microsoft Office aimed at regular users, not tech-heads.

You can subscribe for free using the link above, but I’ll also be publishing some of the tips here on Before Hours. I’ll kick it off with a couple of Word tips.

Selecting a column of text

Most text selection in Word involves selecting horizontally – selecting a line or a paragraph of text. Sometimes, though, you need to select a vertical slab of text. To do that, hold down the Alt key while you click and drag your mouse over the text.

Hold down the Alt key to select columns of text This comes in handy when someone sends you an email or other document with the lines indented. When you copy the email into Word, you end up with empty space at the beginning of each line. To instantly eliminate the spaces and shift the whole block of text over, hold down the Alt key, click immediately to the left of the first character in the top line, then drag down and to the left to highlight the spaces. Press Delete to erase them. You can use the same technique to eliminate unwanted characters when you copy an email into Word in which each line has been preceded with a quote character, such as >.

You can also use this technique to select a vertical column within a slab of text, although this works best when you’re dealing with monospaced fonts where each character is the same width.

Rand() gets a facelift

One of Word’s quirky, tucked-away features is the rand() function. It lets you quickly insert a block of text in a document. To use the function in pre-2007 versions of Word, at the beginning of a line type =rand() and press Enter. Word inserts three paragraphs, each containing five sentences like this:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

To vary the number of sentences and paragraphs produced, add parameters to the function. For example, =rand(5,7) produces five paragraphs each containing seven sentences, while =rand(15,2) produces 15 paragraphs containing two sentences each.

Why would you want to do this? Well, it’s useful if you want to try out formatting or quickly whip up a document to demonstrate some of Word’s features. The sentence contains all the letters of the alphabet, so it’s particularly handy when you want to compare fonts.

In Word 2007, rand() gets a makeover. It no longer displays a sentence containing all the letters in the alphabet; instead, it produces three paragraphs of text explaining how to perform basic formatting actions.

It’s a shame Microsoft didn’t take this a bit further and include a sizeable number of Word 2007 tips rather than the meagre three paragraphs offered; that would have made rand() a really useful training aid. As it is, although you can no longer use rand() to display all the characters in a particular font, the more varied text – nine different sentences instead of the dizzingly repeated “quick brown fox” – makes rand() much more useful as a formatting aid. Use the text to test how page flow works in a document template or for positioning pictures or tables in a page and then flowing the text around them.

For the curious, the maximum value for rand is rand(200,99) or rand(99,200). If you try that in Word 2007 you’ll end up with almost half a million words inserted into your document and, if your PC isn’t speedy, a long wait. Use with caution!

Comments

[Kaila Colbin]

What a great tip! I'm a tech-head, I've been using Word and its advanced features forever, and I've even written a book on Windows, Word and Excel, but this one was new to me. Can't wait to try it :-)