Tuesday, 8 March 2016
12:23 AM
I have used Microsoft Word for years—decades—but hardly a week goes by when I don't learn something new. (Including things that are probably pretty well known to others, oh well.) Anyway, TIL about how to use the batch version of auto-formatting in Word. Since I think a lot of people already know this, I'm adding the information here primarily for later reference for myself.
Word has settings to perform "auto-formatting as you type." These include things like converting quotation marks into so-called smart quotes (i.e., typographical quotation marks), converting double hyphens (--) into em-dashes (—), converting typed fractions (1/2) into typographic fractions (½), etc. You set these options in the AutoCorrect dialog box: File > Options > Proofing, AutoCorrect Options button, AutoFormat As You Type tab.
It turns out that Word can also apply these auto-formatting instructions after the fact. In the same AutoCorrect dialog box, there's a tab named just AutoFormat:
This has most of the same options as with auto-format-as-you-type. Here's the neat part: you can get Word to apply these formatting options by pressing alt+ctrl+k. There's no UI gesture, but you can use the feature for customizing the ribbon to add the relevant command to the ribbon or Quick Access Toolbar.
A use case where I can see this working pretty well is if you paste text in from a text editor. (I do this all the time.)
Credit where it's due: I learned about this from the article How to Automatically Format an Existing Document in Word 2013 by Lori Kaufman on the How-To Geek site. As I say, I'm adding this info here primarily for my own benefit. :-)
[categories]
writing, technology, MS Word
|
link
|