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.
