Replies

As an alternative to Gary’s suggestion, you could use alignment tabs, a feature introduced with Word 2007. In fact, alignment tabs were designed to accomplish exactly what you want to do.

While in a header or footer, you can insert an alignment tab at the cursor position. The Insert Alignment Tab command located is toward the right side of the Header & Footer Tools tab in the Position group. When you click to open the dialog, you’ll note three options: Left, Center, and Right. Click the type of tab you want to insert, make sure the “Align relative to” drop-down is set to Margin, and click OK. Type the text and/or add any field codes you like. When you’re finished, close out of the header or footer.

Now if you change the document margins — and/or the orientation — the text and/or field codes you added to the header or footer should adjust automatically.

For more information, see this Microsoft Support article (the section about alignment tabs is toward the bottom).

Jan

With a simple numbered list, you should be able to right-click the first number and then choose “Increase Indent” (rather than “Adjust List Indents”). In my tests, that changed the indents for all levels of the list.

Does that work for you?

Jan

A couple of quick points:

First, the existing tab stops in footer (and header) editing screens can be very useful. Note, however, that Microsoft set up the Center tab at 3″ based on the default page margin settings of 1.25″ left and 1.25″ right. If you use other common margin settings — for instance, 1″ left and right or 1.5″ left and .5″ right (the latter is standard in California pleadings) — the 3″ tab won’t be true center. (You can edit your templates, if necessary, to change that setting.)

Secondly, if you insert a page number code from the drop-down in the Header & Footer Tools tab or from Insert, Page Number, it’s best to use “Current Position” rather than “Bottom of Page.” The reason is that there’s a glitch in the “Bottom of Page” option, and it will wipe out any other text in your footer! The “Current Position” option leaves the rest of your footer intact.

Note that you can insert a page number code at the cursor position by pressing the key combination Alt Shift P.

Hope this info. is helpful to you.

Jan

Hi, Sherry,

Sorry to have dropped the ball — I had to prep for a trip to Sacramento (doing a Word 2010 training tomorrow at a small law firm that’s moving from WP to Word). In any case, I’m glad you got the merge working. (“Update labels” isn’t exactly intuitive, is it? But, once you know about it, it usually works quite well…).

Jan

Sherry,

As Paul suggests, the cell height (as well as the width) needs to be identical in each cell. I’m not sure if you answered my earlier question: Did you check the cell height and also check the Properties dialog, Row tab, to make sure that the row height is set for “Exactly,” rather than “At least”? If it’s set to “Exactly,” it can’t change spontaneously, but if it’s set to “At least,” it can.

Jan

This is like taking the batteries out of your smoke detector because it keeps going off! It’s fine to do this if the problem is the smoke detector, not such a good idea if the problem is an electrical fire. The changes to normal query only goes off if there have been changes to normal!

Point taken. Thanks for the warning!

Jan

Sherry,

Before you decide to do a mailmerge, let’s check a few things. When you set up the table, did you do all of the following:

(1) Make sure the top of the table started at the exact same point on the page as the labels? (You might have to tweak your page margins and/or header margins a bit.)

(2) Make sure the columns were the same width and the rows the same height? (Take a look at the Row tab in the Properties dialog and make sure the row height is set to “Exactly,” not “At least.”)

(3) Center the table on the page? (You can do that from the Table tab in the Properties dialog.)

If so, the table dimensions should approximate that of the labels.

One more thing: Before you print a test page, try selecting the entire page, then going into the Paragraph dialog and setting the left indent for .25 or .3 (so that the text isn’t right at the margin), and also add some “Before” spacing — maybe 6 points or 12 points.

Let us know.

Jan

That’s good news indeed! Hooray!

Keep us posted, and have a good weekend. (You too, Paul!)

Jan

I’m not sure about the portion of Paul’s instructions where he has you open a document based on a label form and then delete the resulting table — I’m wondering if perhaps, once you know the dimensions of the label, you could begin by having the records in any document — then convert the text to a table.

When Paul said to run a find and replace as follows — Find = ^p Replace = ^l — he was having you replace paragraphs (hard returns, inserted with the Enter key) with line breaks, also sometimes referred to as soft returns. Then when he had you do the second find and replace operation — Find = ^l$^l Replace = ^p — he was having you replace the character you were using to separate records (a dollar sign) with a paragraph mark (a hard return). In other words, the only hard returns remaining after the two find-and-replace operations should have been between records. Then, when you converted the text to a table, using paragraphs as separators, Word should have taken each entire record and plunked it into a cell in the table, rather than dividing up the records based on the line breaks. I’m not sure why that didn’t happen; I assumed that Word would differentiate between a true hard return and a line break.

Maybe Paul can clarify.

Incidentally, there are a couple of different ways you can select a table in Word. From the Table Layout tab, you can click Select (at the top left side of the Ribbon), or you can move the mouse pointer close to the upper left-hand side of the table and, when you see a four-headed arrow, click it.

Jan

[/FONT]

Hi, Sherry,

If I may jump in… I think some of the confusion here has to do with the two different options Paul has presented. In the first option, you would convert your mailing list into a table and then perform a mail merge whereby the data in the table is pulled into a separate document formatted as labels. (As in WordPerfect, merges in Word require two files: (1) a data file — in this case, the mailing list, which in Word must be in the form of a table, and (2) a form file such as labels.) In the second option, you would convert your mailing list into a table and format the table to match the dimensions of the type of labels your client wishes to use. No merge involved.

Is that a little clearer?

I think Paul is focusing on the first option for now. (Paul, please let us know if that’s not the case.) So his instructions are intended to help you reformat your mailing list as a table that uses the same margins as your client’s labels. Essentially, you’ll be putting the data into a label form without using an official label form.

If you haven’t done so already, I would suggest making a copy of the mailing list before you start playing with it.

Assuming I’m understanding Paul’s instructions correctly, the find and replace operations are designed to turn each record into a separate paragraph — sort of equivalent to a single “Address field,” if you will. Each label will contain one such record / “Address field.”

After you do the find and replace, you’ll convert the text to a table (with paragraphs as the field separator and with the number of columns matching the label type your client uses). I’m pretty sure you will be able to tweak the table margins after the conversion. Just be careful; when you change the table margins, you want to make sure that all cells are formatted identically. For people who are accustomed to working in WordPerfect, that can be a bit of a challenge. (Using the Table Properties dialog to accomplish this task works better, IMHO, than trying to adjust the margins by dragging the margin markers on the Ruler.)

I hope that helps.

Good luck!

Jan

Glad we were able to pin it down. Progress!

Jan

It looks as though add-ins could be changing the template even if you’re not doing anything directly that affects the template. See this MS Knowledge Base article for an explanation: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918064

Any luck?

Jan

Hi, Chuck,

In the Options, under Advanced, scroll about 3/4 or 4/5 of the way down and look to see if “Prompt before saving Normal template” is checked. If so, uncheck it and click “OK” to save your changes. If not… will have to think further.

Let us know.

Jan Berinstein

The Tracking Options are available from the Track Changes icon (drop-down), which is also in the Tracking group on the Review tab. Click the Track Changes icon, then click “Change Tracking Options.” About 3/4 of the way down the “Track Changes Options” dialog, you should see “Balloons.” There’s a drop-down list with three choices: “Always,” “Never,” and “Only for comments/formatting.” Choose “Never,” then click “OK.”

Now revisions will appear in-line, instead of in balloons in the margins. That setting should stick unless / until you deliberately change it.

Let us know.

Jan

Forgot to add that Building Blocks, also known as Quick Parts, are something else altogether — not really relevant to your original questions (as far as I can tell). Essentially they’re the newer incarnation of AutoText. That is, they’re boilerplate text (sometimes combined with codes and/or graphics) that you can insert with just a few keystrokes.

Jan