Working On Me

I've been using Word forms for ages, and am always surprised when even quite large organisations send out old-fashioned forms that can't easily be completed on screen.

If you haven't yet discovered the joys of Word forms, then feel free to download and use my guide to them.

If you've spent much time reading blogs recently, you'll have encountered the retro word processing phenomenon. Word's complications distract from the pure business of writing. First the Mac user, then those of us with PCs found tools available on the web that would give us a significantly downgraded WP experience: green text on black, no toolbars and no fancy options at all.

There is now a cross-platform way to try this approach on line without downloading anything. Why not see if it helps you focus on just the words.

As I've mentioned before, at http://www.grbps.com I maintain a website for the business I run with my friend, Graham. Over time, I've posted quite a few little mini articles there on popular software, featuring the kinds of little tricks that have really made a difference to me. They're all based on questions people have actually asked on web forums or face-to-face. Here is another of the best ones.

Q: We have Word documents that need a notary stamp with the date formatted as below:

This 30th day of January, 2004.

Is there a way within word to accomplish this automatically using the computer date? Perhaps using the Microsoft Equation? Assistance would be greatly appreciated. Current work around has this being accomplished by linking to a excel sheet formatted the way we need it.

A: There's a Microsoft Knowledgebase article on how to do that here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=212689

But there's another way to do this, which might better suit your needs. This one uses the CREATEDATE form field and doesn't require any VBA to work. I'm assuming you know how to enter a form field (CTRL+F to create the curly brackets, then type inbetween them.) Here is the structure:

This { CREATEDATE \@ "d" \*ordinal} day of { CREATEDATE \@ "MMMM"}, { CREATEDATE \@ "yyyy" }

Most of us these days have a scroll mouse. To see it do something very clever, open up either Word or Excel and hold down the CTRL key. With that key held down move the central scroll wheel on your mouse and see what happens.

Since I learned how to do this, I must have saved hours of clicking on the view controls.

And as a bonus, it will perform a similar function in most browsers with most websites, too.

Bullet points are now endemic to our communication. The bullet-point is almost the atom of ideas in that it cannot be further reduced without losing meaning. Retaining that meaning in the process is, of course, vital, and it is here where grammar has a real contribution to make.

The good news about the bullet-point is that it removes the need for virtually all punctuation. The idea is that if your bullet-point is long enough to need a comma, it is probably too long. Even a list of items which would traditionally have been separated by commas (items such as lists, recitations, inventories and roll-calls) is rendered not with commas, but with sub-bullets, thus:

• Items such as:
• lists
• recitations
• inventories
• roll-calls

Note an important grammatical point here. Where sub-bullets complete a grammatical structure begun in the parent like this, they shouldn’t start with a capital letter, since in grammatical terms they simply continue an existing sentence rather than beginning a new one. This can be a challenge, since Word and PowerPoint will usually seek to make capitalisation automatic for you, assuming that a bullet-point will always constitute a sentence. Fortunately, this option can be turned off globally through Tools/AutoCorrect.