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How To Diagnose Formatting Problems In Word Documents

June 30, 2011 By

Have you ever had a joint submission due in court (or some other document you were collaborating with another attorney on) and gotten a draft Microsoft Word document from your co-counsel that was an absolute train wreck? I’m not talking about legal arguments, but formatting that looks like someone’s two-year-old typed it.

If you’re working in Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010, here are three formatting diagnostic tools you need to know about:

Show/Hide Formatting Marks

This button (the one that looks like a paragraph symbol in the Paragraph section on the Home tab) is Microsoft Word’s version of WordPerfect’s Reveal Codes. Clicking on that button to enable this feature shows you codes like:

  • Hard returns at the end of lines (¶)
  • Spaces between letters or words (•)
  • Tabs (→)

Here’s what a typical paragraph looks like without Show/Hide turned on:


And here’s what that same paragraph looks like with Show/Hide:


This feature comes in handy when diagnosing spacing and justification issues.

Status Bar

See that long thin horizontal bar at the bottom of your Word screen? You probably just have the current page number showing on the left-hand side of it. But you could get so much more information about your document on that bar.

Just right-click on the Status Bar to get this contextual menu:


You can pick as many options as you like by placing a check mark to the left. At the very least, you’ll want the Section and Page Number (useful for diagnosing headers/footers that mysteriously change mid-document), since importing old WordPerfect documents has the unfortunate side effect of embedding random Section Breaks in the Word version of the document.

Reveal Formatting

The Reveal Formatting pane (which can be accessed with the SHIFT-F1 key combination or via a button on your Quick Access Toolbar for easy mouse access) shows you exactly how the selected text is formatted: fonts, paragraph settings, and sections.


The hyperlinked features (shown above in blue underlined text) allow you to go directly to the relevant dialog box for a quick fix, and you can even compare the formatting between two sections of text to see, for instance, why one paragraph isn’t indented quite like the one before it. Just select one set of text with your mouse, check the “Compare to another selection” box, then select the second text to compare the first text to.

While diagnosing text formatting problems in Word takes a bit of practice, the tools above can help pinpoint exactly how to fix a problem paragraph. Take a few minutes to set up your Status Bar and experiment with the Reveal Formatting pane, and the next time you get a mess of a document, you can say, “No problem!”

Deborah Savadra specializes in helping law firms use Microsoft Office applications.  Her blog http://legalofficeguru.com features video tutorials on solving common Microsoft Office dilemmas like diagnosing and fixing formatting problems. You can follow her on Twitter at @legalofficeguru.

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More Ninja Moves: Quick Parts in Word and Outlook

January 5, 2011 By

You’ve probably got boilerplate texts that you use over and over and over again. (Don’t think so? Consider certificates of service, various signature blocks (contract, pleading, etc.), notary acknowledgment – you could probably compile quite a list.)

Rather than rifle through your files, pick up a prior document and copy a sample (and risk forgetting to edit “him” to “her,” etc.), set up a Quick Part in Word 2007, then use it to insert a generic version of that text whenever you need it. (This feature is very similar in Word 2010.)

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Three More Outlook Ninja Tricks: Before You Hit the “Send” Button

November 22, 2010 By

Microsoft Outlook For Lawyers - 3 Quick Ninja Moves

As a follow-up to three right-click tricks in Microsoft Outlook, here are three more for message options you may want to use before hitting the Send button. (Note: all instructions are based on Microsoft Office 2007, but all features except “Flag for Recipient” are available in versions 2002 forward.)

Have Replies Sent To. Say, for instance, you’re sending out an email to a group asking for feedback, but you want your assistant to keep track of the responses instead of you. Use the “Have Replies Sent To” feature to re-direct any replies to your assistant’s email inbox instead of (or even in addition to) yours. [Read more...]

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Three Quick Ninja Moves For Using Microsoft Outlook

November 4, 2010 By

Microsoft Outlook For Lawyers - 3 Quick Ninja Moves

Here are three quick maneuvers you’ll want in your Outlook email bag of tricks to make managing email easier:

Right-click an email to make a Rule. If you’ve got an email in your Inbox that you always move to another folder, forward to your assistant, or do some other repetitive action with (and you don’t want to go to the trouble of creating a Rule from scratch as we discussed before), just right-click your mouse on the email as it appears in your Inbox and choose “Create Rule …” from the menu.  Outlook will bring up the Rules Wizard, with several suggested rule conditions (such as the sender’s name or the email’s subject line or body content).

That makes it easier to plug in Rules as you come across emails that are good candidates for automated handling from that point forward.

Right-click an address to add it to your Contacts. Once you’ve opened an email, use this shortcut to add the sender to your Contacts: right-click on the sender’s name and choose “Add to Contacts.”

You can fill in other information for the sender (snail mail address, phone, etc.) while you’re at it.  Or … not.  Either way, it’s an easy way to store new email addresses for future use.

Right-click a Contacts entry to start a new email. Don’t start an email the long way by going up to the New Item drop-down, choosing New Message, opening a new mail window, and clicking To to find the email address in your Contacts.  Instead, right-click on the Contact’s name and choose “New Message to Contact.”  You’ll automatically get a new message form with the Contact’s email address pre-filled in.

You can also use this technique to schedule a meeting (“New Appointment with Contact” or “New Meeting Request to Contact”) or assign a task to him or her (“New Task for Contact”).

What other “one-click tricks” do you use to make short work of tasks in Microsoft Outlook?  Share ‘em in the comments below.

Deborah Savadra specializes in helping law firms use Microsoft Office applications.  Her blog http://legalofficeguru.com features video tutorials on solving common Microsoft Office problems. You can follow her on Twitter at @legalofficeguru.

Image credit:  TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ (Flickr)

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Microsoft Word Hack: Taking Keyword Shading Out of Westlaw Printouts

October 19, 2010 By

My boss was really frustrated.  He’d spent all this time doing research in Westlaw, but when he’d saved his work in Word as a Rich Text File (with the extension .rtf), the keywords were still highlighted.


Except … they weren’t.  At least, not in the conventional Microsoft Word sense.

He couldn’t get that highlighting off, no matter how hard he tried.  He wanted to use those printouts in another context, but the highlighting had to go.

Legal Office Guru to the rescue!

I used the Reveal Formatting pane (instantly accessible via SHIFT-F1) to diagnose the problem: Westlaw had used Shading (rather than Highlighting) to put that bright yellow background behind his keywords.  (Since Westlaw is producing a generic RTF file, this is not surprising, since whatever they produce has to be compatible with various word processors.)

We’re working in Word 2007, so here’s what I did to remove the persistent yellow background:

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How Outlook’s Out of Office Could Keep You Out of Trouble

September 28, 2010 By

The Age of the Crackberry has created a global expectation that everyone is available by email all the time.  So I cringed when I read about a federal judge who banned an attorney from practicing in her district because he missed two hearings in her courtroom noticed via email.  (The attorney has moved for reinstatement, pleading a death in his immediate family, followed immediately by his own cardiac scare.)

I can’t tell you how to handle these things procedurally. But here are some tools that can help ensure emergencies don’t catch you (and your practice) unaware.
[Read more...]

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How And Why To Use InSync For Your Law Firm

September 17, 2010 By

I recently started using Insync, a free (at my level, at least) application in the Google Apps Marketplace. If you’re looking for file synchronization, online and offline access and more, you owe it to yourself to watch this video.

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Protect Your Documents From Prying Eyes With Privacy Settings

September 16, 2010 By

Nobody wants to go back to drafting documents on electric typewriters.  But we’ve made a potentially costly trade-off: now, we’re sending out lots more information than just the text of the document.

Yes, I’m talking about the infamous metadata.

Rather than bore you with technical explanations of what metadata is, I’m going to show you some ways to minimize the amount of potentially confidential information that goes out with your Microsoft Word documents.  (These tricks are also available, with slight variations, in the other Office applications except Outlook.)

[Read more...]

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