The Tribe of Adminsa home for wayward admins

You’ve done everything right – you’ve chosen “Insert” from the menu bar or the picture icon from a tool bar or pane, you’ve chosen “picture from file,” and you’ve said OK. A nice box appears but no picture! You try different formats, you try this, you try that. You print the picture out of another program and it’s fine! What gives?? What gives is that Word thinks your picture is behind some text, even if you have none. What can I tell you? Word is occasionally delusional.

Get to “Format Picture” by your preferred method – I right click on the picture.

Now choose “Layout” from the list of choices. In the Mac 2008 version it looks like this – yours may differ, but the same choices will be there:

Now click on “In front of text,” which shows the dog in front of the lines:

Your picture appears like a rabbit in freshly planted lettuce patch.

The site has updated with lots of new information. An Adobe Acrobat Faux Wiki has been added with a couple of supporting pages to address some of those nagging PDF issues and open the floor to questions and tips.

There’s a new page on how to get rid of that annoying markup that remains when you print Word documents after tracking changes here.

Ever paste a table into Excel, only to have it all show up in one cell? Here’s a solution that’s just been moved into the Word Faux Wiki.

There’s a page on The Wonder of Snag-it, a big problem solver for admins.

Finally, there’s a new post right below this one on how to count multiple variables in Excel that will eventually become part of an Excel section.

You might notice a few more little ads at the bottom of the pages. I remain committed to keeping it to a minimum, but I could use a little help supporting site, so if you want any of the software or books you see here, click through!

If you want to be notified of the updates on this site, click on RSS or on “RSS” down at the very bottom of the page. Once you’re there, choose “subscribe in mail” near the bottom of the right hand sidebar.

Cheers!

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Whatever software you want to use, that picture is in the wrong format. Word to the rescue!

If, for example, you just removed the pink highlights from the boss’ receipts in Photoshop so they wouldn’t appear blacked-out when you fax them with his expense reports (are you a star, or what?), but now you need to insert them into something that only accepts JPG (okay, I can’t come up with a reason why you would need to do that…just go with it), you can solve it with Word.

Insert your PDF into Word (Insert…Picture from file)

Right click and choose “Save as Picture…”

In the “Format” drop down box, choose “JPG”

Voilà!

There’s the beginnings of an MS Word pseudo-wiki here now. There are a couple of pages – one on how to reorder a last name first list (or vice versa if you’re so inclined), and a trick for using Word to count items in a list. What’s lacking are YOUR tips, so hit the contact or comment button and send in your pointers and questions. Let’s make this grow into a real tool! 

The point of these software specific directories is to collect the experience of the people in our role  who really use the it, as opposed to that of tech writers who try to imagine how we’ll use it. Documentation is all well and good, but nothing helps as much as a peer.

Got a quick question? Post it on the forum.

Convert A Scanned File to an editable Word doc

Steps

• 1. Scan the page you want to convert into a Microsoft Word document.
• 2. Save the scanned image in *.gif, *.jpeg or whatever format.
• 3. Open that image, go to “File->Save As” and name it “xyz.tiff” in the “TIFF” format as shown.
• 4. Go to “Start->Programs->Microsoft Office Tools->Microsoft Office Document Imaging”
• 5. Go to “File->Open” and open your scanned document that has been saved in *.TIFF format.
• 6. Go to “Tools->Send Text to Word.” You will get a prompt stating this process will take time, Click OK. This will take some time depending on your computer’s speed (a minute or two at the most).
• 7. When it’s done it will open up Microsoft word on its own and the scanned document will now be in editable mode.

Things You’ll Need

• Microsoft Word 2003 or newer
• Scanned image of the document you want to turn into a Microsoft Word document