Word 2016 For Dummies (2016)

Part VI

The Part of Tens

Chapter 32

Ten Bizarre Things

In This Chapter

Inserting pretty equations

Inserting video

Hiding text

Beholding the Developer tab

Hyphenating text

Setting document properties (or not)

Making a cross-reference

Using Collect and Paste

Disabling click-and-type

Keeping Word separate from the Internet

If Word were only about word processing, this book would end at Chapter 17. Fully half the book talks about things I consider to be along the lines of desktop publishing or even graphics, tasks that can be done far better by using other software. Beyond those capabilities exist things I consider even more strange and unusual. Welcome to the Twilight Zone, Word edition.

Equations

Here's a feature that everyone demands, as long as everyone graduated from college with a degree in astrophysics or quantum mechanics. It's Word's Equation tools, which you need whenever you're desperate to stick a polynomial equation in your document and don't want to endure the tedium of building the thing yourself.

You can pluck a premade equation from the Insert tab's Equation button menu, as long as the equation you need appears there. Otherwise, just click the button by itself (not the menu triangle) and two things happen: An equation content control is inserted in your document at the insertion pointer’s location, and the Equation Tools Design tab appears on the Ribbon. Creating equations was never easier! Well, creating them is easy, but knowing what they mean is a different story altogether.

No, Word won't solve the equation.

Video in Your Document

For some reason, the video-in-a-document feature was showcased in an older release of Word. I can see why! So many people were demanding it.

Not really.

Obviously, the Online Video feature isn’t intended for anything you plan to print. No it’s an electronic publishing thing, which is why the topic dwells in this chapter listing Bizarre Things.

To insert a video, click the Insert tab’s Online Video button. Search for a video by using Microsoft Bing (of course) or YouTube or by pasting a video link. Eventually, after little toil, the video appears as a large graphical object in your document. You can play it right there on the screen. Apparently, people have been demanding such a word-processing feature since the Electric Pencil program debuted back in 1976.

Videos are best viewed when a Word document is presented in Read mode — which in itself is yet another bizarre thing. To enter Read mode, click the Read Mode button on the status bar (shown in the margin) or click the Read Mode button on the View tab.

Hidden Text

What’s the point of writing when you can’t see it? I don’t have a clue as to why, but Word does let you apply the hidden format to random bits of text in your document. The text doesn’t show up as blank lines either, it just doesn’t show up.

To apply the hidden text format, select the text and press Ctrl+Shift+H. The same keyboard shortcut deactivates this format. The following text is hidden:

To show hidden text, click the Show/Hide command button (in the Paragraph group on the Home tab) as described in Chapter 2, in the section about dealing with spots and clutter in the text. The hidden text shows up in the document with a dotted underline.

The Developer Tab

Word's advanced, cryptic features lie on a tab that's normally hidden from view: the Developer tab. To display the Developer tab, obey these steps:

1. Click the File tab.

2. Choose the Options command to display the Word Options dialog box.

3. Choose the Customize Ribbon item on the left side of the dialog box.

4. Under the Customize Ribbon list on the right side of the dialog box, place a check mark by the Developer item.

5. Click OK.

The Developer tab is aptly named; it's best suited for people who either use Word to develop applications, special documents, and online forms or are hellbent on customizing Word by using macros. Scary stuff.

Hyphenation

Hyphenation is an automatic feature that splits a long word at the end of a line to make the text fit better on the page. Most people leave this feature turned off because hyphenated words tend to slow down the pace at which people read. However, if you want to hyphenate a document, click the Page Layout tab and then the Page Setup group, and choose Hyphenation  ⇒  Automatic.

Hyphenation works best with paragraph formatting set to full justification.

Document Properties

When your company (or government agency) grows too big, there’s a need for too much information. Word happily obliges by providing you with a sheet full of fill-in-the-blanks goodness to tell you all about your document and divulge whatever information you care to know about who worked on what and for how long. These tidbits are the document properties.

To eagerly fill in any document’s properties, click the File tab and choose the Info item. Document properties are listed on the far-right side of the window. Some information cannot be changed, but when you click the lighter-colored text, you can type your own stuff.

Cross-References

The References tab sports a bunch of features that I don’t touch on in this book, not the least of which is the Cross-Reference button in the Captions group. The Cross-Reference command allows you to insert instructions such as Refer to Chapter 99, Section Z in your document. This feature works because you absorbed excess energy from the universe during a freak lightning storm and now have an IQ that would make Mr. Spock envious. Anyway, the Cross-Reference dialog box, summoned by the Cross-Reference command, is the place where cross-referencing happens. Page 653 has more information about this feature.

Collect and Paste

I hope the word-processing concept of copy and paste is simple for you. What’s not simple is taking it to the next level by using Word’s Collect and Paste feature.

Collect and Paste allows you to copy multiple chunks of text and paste them in any order or all at once. The secret is to click the dialog box launcher in the lower-right corner of the Clipboard group on the Home tab, right next to the word Clipboard. The Clipboard pane appears on the screen.

With the Clipboard pane visible, you can use the Copy command multiple times in a row to collect text. To paste the text, simply click the mouse on that chunk of text in the Clipboard pane. Or you can use the Paste All button to paste into your document every item you collected.

Even more bizarre: You can actually select multiple separate chunks of text in your document. To do so, select the first chunk, and then, holding down the Ctrl key, drag over additional text. As long as the Ctrl key is held down, you can drag to select multiple chunks of text in different locations. The various selected chunks work as a block, which you can cut, copy, delete, or to which you can apply formatting.

Click-and-Type

A feature introduced in Word 2002, and one that I don't believe anyone ever uses, is click-and-type. In a blank document, you can use it to click the mouse pointer anywhere on the page and type information at that spot. Bam!

I fail to see any value in click-and-type, especially when it's easier just to learn basic formatting. But click-and-type may bother you when you see any of its specialized mouse pointers displayed; thus:

That's click-and-type in action, with the mouse pointer trying to indicate the paragraph format to be applied when you click the mouse.

See Chapter 33 for information on disabling this feature.

Word and the Internet

Microsoft went kind of kooky in the 1990s when Bill Gates suddenly realized that his company was behind the curve on the Internet. In response, many Microsoft programs, including Word, suddenly started to bud various Internet features, whether the features were relevant to the software's original intent or not. For example, Word has — even to this day — the capability to create web pages or post to a blog.

Word is an excellent word processor. Word is a lousy web-page editor. Though you can write a blog post, the steps involved to configure that process are complex and rarely meet with success. (And, yes, I tried and tried to get it to work.) Therefore, I cover none of that stuff in this book.

This book is about word processing. If you want software for email, making web pages, using an Internet fax, creating a blog, or using the Internet to find pictures of famous celebrities in compromising poses, you must look elsewhere.