J. David Stark

Tag: Microsoft

  • Change Word Styles to Direct Formatting in 10 Steps

    Change Word Styles to Direct Formatting in 10 Steps

    One of the best ways to ensure consistent formatting in a Word document is to use styles.1 But, you might also need to be able to turn these styles into “direct” formatting. If you apply a style to text, the text will be formatted as the style specifies (e.g., a first-level heading, a block quotation).…

  • Prefix keys for Microsoft Word

    In Dan Gookin’s Word 2016 for Dummies (affiliate disclosure; Wiley, 2016), he provides a good deal of helpful guidance for beginning Word users. One particularly helpful resource that may be of interest more broadly is his nicely condensed presentation of prefix keys for producing diacritical marks (pg. 256, reproduced below). As the name suggests, the prefix…

  • Word 2016 introduction for Mac users?

    The “for dummies” series has a couple good introductions to Microsoft Word (for all and specifically “for professionals”). But, these texts seem to concentrate on Word as it appears in Windows, which is sometimes surprisingly inconsistent with how ostensibly the same version of Word appears in Mac OS. The similarly themed “idiot’s guides” series also…

  • Better attention than a goldfish

    A recent study commissioned by Microsoft Canada found, disturbingly, that the human participants’ average attention spans had fallen to 8 seconds, a shorter time frame than measured for goldfish (Evernote, New York Times). One of the major suspected drivers of these results is the propensity of the participants to use a mobile device while “paying attention” to…

  • Overlining text in Microsoft Word

    Overlining is comparatively straightforward in Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. But, for Microsoft Word users, overlining still isn’t a default formatting feature, as is its companion underlining. Sometimes inserting a symbol or special character will work if you can find one that matches the overlined character you need. In other cases, Word’s cache of symbols and special…

  • Google Drive and Office 97–2003

    Google Drive’s Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps are scheduled to cease supporting exports to Microsoft’s older Office 97–2003 formats at the end of the month. According to the Google Apps blog, In September, we added the ability to export Google documents to the newer Microsoft Office formats that rely on open standards (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx).…