For reasons known only to themselves and perhaps Loki, Microsoft doesn’t easily give up the secret for tabbing within a cell in a Word table. If you hit tab, you move to the next cell. The solution is easy though, and surprisingly, consistent between Mac and Windows: hold the Control key and tab.
Someone asked how to hide certain data in a Word table. Unfortunately, a Word table isn’t like Excel; you can’t choose “hide column” and be done with it. There are some workarounds, however.
1) Create your data in Excel and import it into your Word doc one of two ways:
A) Choose “Insert,” then choose “Object.” When the window comes up, scroll down to “Microsoft Excel Worksheet.” Click “OK.” This will open Excel. Anything that you do in Excel will show up in the Word doc, hidden columns and rows and all.
B) Create the worksheet in Excel, save it, the follow the steps above, but choose “From file” and choose your file. This will embed your worksheet in your Word document. When you want to hide columns or rows, double clicking will take you into Excel to make the changes, which will be reflected in the Word doc.
Don’t want to use Excel? There are other options:
2) You can format text as hidden. If you choose to hide the text in a column, the column will remain, but will be blank. If you do it on a row, the row will actually be hidden. How to do this:
Select the column or row. Select “Format” then “Text” (or the appropriate panes in 2007 or later). In the window that comes up you’ll see several checkboxes. The last one is “hidden.” Check it and click “OK.”
Keep in mind that unless you protect your document, there’s nothing to stop the person at the other end from unhiding that text, but the same is true of the Excel document.
3) You can make your font white (or whatever the background color is) and protect the document.
4) You can buy a redaction plug-in or use the highlighter tool set to black and pretend you’re a censor.
When you create a large document, you are likely to have a table of contents. Traditionally, this is numbered in Roman numerals and the rest of your document is numbered in Arabic numerals. You probably see where to change the style, but it doesn’t work properly. You need to make separate sections, and the trick with Word and sections is to do everything in the right order.
Click here to view a little movie of how to do it. This is a flash movie (meaning you have to have Flash installed), so in case you can’t see it, here are the instructions via the “slow boat”:
You probably already formatted your page numbers, like this:
This window came up, and you clicked on “Format”:
You chose the lower case Roman numerals…
then “Start at ‘i’” and clicked “OK”:
Good so far? Good. Now your whole document has lower case Roman numeral page numbers in the bottom right corner, including the first page. But wait!!! You only want the Roman numerals for the index…starting on the third page you’re out of the index and into the document proper and you want Arabic numerals. No prob!
Put your cursor at the bottom of Page ii. On the page below, for example, I would insert it after the colon after “steps.”
Choose the “Insert” menu item again, then choose “Break” and “Section Break (Next Page):
This will not only make the section break, it will move your cursor to the next page (surprise!). Now that you’re there, just insert page numbers again:
and format again:
Only this time, you’ll format this new section to show up in Arabic numerals, starting at “1″:
Shazaam! Your index page numbers are now formatted in lower case Roman numerals and the rest of your document has Arabic numerals for the page numbers. You’re brilliant!
You’ve set up a table in MS Word, right-clicked to choose “Borders and Shading,” choosen “None” and there’s still a pesky gray border! Here’s the easiest answer:
On the “Table” menu, pull down. You’ll see this:
Yes…there are border AND gridlines. Only Microsoft knows why. My theory is that it put there especially to annoy ME.
It’s still there? OK…go for the simple solution next: don’t fight it. Right click and choose “Borders and Shading” and make all your borders white. You can choose “All” and that should do it, but just make sure that all choices in orange below are highlighted (they won’t be orange in Word). You can also just click on them one by one:
If you’re still having trouble, well…you pasted that table in from somewhere else, didn’t you? In spite of what the Word documentation will tell you, this is almost always more trouble than it’s worth. It’s easier to just rebuild the darned table than to make it work. But say your table is huge or an Ole object and you just can’t. Try this:
I’ve borrowed a National Geographic picture to show you, since I don’t happen to have a table that’s having this problem. And the problem is that your table is acting like a picture, not a table. There’s an “invisible” frame around it that sometimes becomes visible.
Right click and see if you can get the “Format Picture…” menu option to come up. If so, that’s the problem. If you don’t want to build the table from scratch and you see this menu choice, click on it.
Next, fool around with the text wrapping choices and see if you can make it go away. This is trial and error…monkey business. (Yes, I’m easily amused):
Click on the “layout” choice and fool around with the wrapping style. The advanced button will give you more choices. If this sounds vaguely familiar, you may have read here about another problem caused by picture layout. Good luck!
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.
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