NDUS
Training and Documentation
Word for WordPerfect Users – Easing the Transition
Welcome
– This session focuses on several tips that should make life easier for
WordPerfect users making the transition to using Microsoft Word with the
PeopleSoft system.
Let’s
face it – change is hard! Many dyed-in-the-wool WordPerfect users would rather
go back to using a manual typewriter than use any version of Word! However,
change is also necessary.
Fortunately,
the tips and concepts presented here can help make your tasks in Word much easier
and more successful. While I’m using Word 2002 (also known as Word XP) in this document,
most of the keystrokes and menu commands used will be the same, or very similar
in Word 2000.
Beginning
with Word 2000, and continuing into Word 2002, Microsoft introduced an annoying feature called Adaptive Menus and Toolbars. This
default adaptive behavior may make it difficult to find a particular menu item
or toolbar button you need, especially when you’re in a hurry! Do yourself a
huge favor and disable the adaptive features immediately! You should only have
to do this once – here’s how:
On
the Word Menu Bar click Tools, then click Customize.
In the Customize dialog box, click the Options tab. Next, check the “Show Standard
and Formatting toolbars on two rows” and “Show full menus” options, then click the Close button. If you’re using Word 2000,
you’ll need to remove the check
marks from the “Standard and Formatting toolbars share
one row” and “Menus show recently used commands first” options. From now on,
none of your menu choices or toolbar buttons should ever go into hiding again!
Now
we come to the biggest complaint most WordPerfect users have about Word – no
Reveal Codes! It’s true, you won’t find Reveal Codes in Word; however, there
are several sneaky ways around this problem.
Number one – get used to working with the Show/Hide
option turned on most of the time while editing your Word documents. The
Show/Hide button is a toggle button normally located on the Standard toolbar, which
displays or hides all of the hidden, non-printing characters that control your
document.
If
you don’t see the Standard Toolbar displayed on your screen, go to the Menu
Bar, click View and highlight Toolbars, then click Standard if it’s not already
checked.
To
display the non-printing characters, click the Show/Hide button once. You
should now see all of the previously hidden symbols displayed.
Wherever you pressed the Enter key to end a paragraph
you should see paragraph marks. Paragraph marks are similar to HRt (hard
return) codes in WordPerfect.
A
right-arrow character appears wherever you’ve pressed the Tab key to insert a
tab, and a small dot appears wherever you’ve pressed the spacebar to insert a
space.
If
you see a small black square to the left of the text, either the “Keep with next”,
or “Keep lines together” options were applied. Text with this format will be
forced to the top of the next page of the document when there isn’t enough
space to fit all of the protected text at the bottom of the current page.
To hide the non-printing characters, just click the
Show/Hide button once again. While there are other non-printing characters
you’ll see from time to time, these are the ones you’ll see most often.
You
can also reveal the formatting applied to a particular piece of text by using
Word’s Reveal Formats command in place of the missing Reveal Codes screen.
Select
Help, then click What’s This? From the Menu bar, or press
the Shift key plus the F1 key, and your mouse pointer turns into an arrow with
a question mark. Click the text you want to reveal to read the formatting
applied at that location. Word 2002 displays the formatting on the right side
of your screen in the Reveal Formats Task Pane. You can leave this Task Pane open
while you work to display all of the formatting applied at the current cursor
location.
If
you already have a different Task Pane displayed on the right side of your
screen, click the small black triangle to the left of the Close button in the
Task Pane and select Reveal Formatting. If you don’t see the Task Pane
displayed on the right, click View, then click Task Pane from the Menu Bar.
If
you’re using Word 2000, the Formatting dialog box opens on screen when you
click on a piece of text with the What’s This mouse
pointer. To leave Reveal Formats, you’ll need to press the Escape key in the
upper left corner of your keyboard.
There
is one more way around the missing Reveal Codes screen. Select Tools, then click Options from the Menu Bar. Select the View tab at
the top of the Options dialog box, then type a small number (for example .5”)
in the “Style area width” text box at the bottom of the dialog box and click
OK.
Next, on the Menu Bar select View, then
click
In
Word, there is a difference between character formats and paragraph formats.
Character formats apply to each individual character, so each character must be
selected in order to apply the format. Character formats include such things as
font styles, colors, sizes and so forth.
On
the other hand, paragraph formats such as tab settings, indents, and alignment,
apply to the entire paragraph rather than to each individual character. If you
issue a paragraph format command, it applies to the paragraph the cursor is
located in.
To
change the formatting of several existing paragraphs in a row, select the
paragraphs first, then format them. You must tell Word
which paragraphs you want to change, rather than inserting one code and having
it apply to all text that comes after that point.
In
Word, the paragraph marks are the secret to success! These paragraph marks
contain the “codes” as they’re known to WordPerfect users,
that determine exactly how that paragraph looks. As you type text and
move from paragraph to paragraph, the next paragraph inherits the “codes” or
the same format from the previous paragraph.
Here
are just some of the “codes” that get stored inside the paragraph mark:
- Alignment (left, center, right, justify)
- Indents
- Spacing (line spacing and spacing before and
after paragraphs)
- Tab settings
- Automatic numbering
- Borders and shading
All of the paragraph formats travel with the paragraph mark as you type. You can
copy the paragraph mark from the end of one paragraph and paste it at the end
of another and the second paragraph will take on the same formatting as the
first one! If you delete the paragraph mark at the end of one paragraph, the following
paragraph will conform to the format of the newly combined paragraph.
When
you’re copying and pasting text, or selecting text to format it, always turn on
Show/Hide so you can see all of the paragraph marks. If you don’t, you may
inadvertently select the paragraph mark along with the text and quickly make a
mess of things!
Here’s
where things really get different between Word and WordPerfect – If you give a
command in WordPerfect, a hidden code is inserted in the document which affects
everything from that point forward to the end of the document, or until you insert
another code that changes the format. If you do the same thing in Word, you
only change the paragraph where the insertion point is located, nothing else!
For
example, to change the tab settings for existing paragraphs in WordPerfect, you
need to move the cursor to beginning of the first paragraph you wish to change,
then apply the new tab settings. Once you’ve done this
the new settings apply to all paragraphs after that point. If you need later
paragraphs to have different formatting you must move the cursor to the
beginning of that paragraph and change the settings again.
In
Word, you simply select the paragraph, or paragraphs, that need different tab
settings, then change those tab settings; other paragraphs that come after that
point, but were not selected will still have the original tab settings.
With
that said, it’s usually easier to type the entire Word document first, then go
back and apply the formatting to the existing text later. Because Word stores
most formatting in the paragraph mark at the end of each paragraph, it’s
definitely easier in most situations to type the document first, and save the
formatting tasks until the very last.
Fortunately,
the Enter key works the same way in Word as it does in WordPerfect. However,
when you press the Enter key twice between each paragraph to add white space,
you may end up with extra paragraph marks at the bottom of a page or at the top
of the next page when later editing changes move the text around in the
document.
Instead,
you should use Word’s Spacing Before or After command
to add this white space between paragraphs. Here’s how:
Before
you start typing the body of the text, determine your line spacing (single,
double, 1.5, etc.) and the spacing you want between your 
paragraphs. On the Menu Bar, select Format, then click Paragraph.
Type
the number of points you want automatically inserted either before or after
each paragraph in the Before: or After: text boxes,
then click OK. As a general rule of thumb, 6 or 12 points of space before or
after each paragraph is commonly used with a 10 to 12 point text font.
Type
the text you want, but press the Enter key just once to end each paragraph. You
should see paragraphs spaced just the way you want them.
If
you’ve already typed your text, be sure to select the paragraphs to be changed before
you issue the Format, Paragraphs command.
One
of the most frustrating tasks in Word is indenting text from the left or right
margins. Unlike WordPerfect – where pressing the Enter key ends the Indent – in
Word all of these indents get carried over to the next paragraph as you type.
Indents are easiest to set from the Ruler Bar in
Word. To display the Ruler Bar, select View from the Menu Bar, then click Ruler. Select the text you want to indent, then
click and drag the appropriate triangles on the Ruler Bar to visually match how
you want the text aligned.
The
top left (downward pointing) triangle controls the First Line Indent for the
paragraph. The bottom left (upward pointing) triangle controls the Hanging
Indent, and the bottom left square box controls the Left Indent of all other
lines but the first line of the selected paragraph. The right, single triangle
controls the Right Indent of the paragraph.
When
you click and drag the Left Indent box, both the First Line Indent triangle and
the Hanging Indent triangle move with it so all lines in the paragraph are
aligned the same. If you then click and drag the Hanging Indent triangle to the
right, the First Line Indent triangle remains where it is, and the first line of
the paragraph “hangs” to the left of the rest of the lines. Click and drag the
top First Line Indent triangle to the right or left to control the indentation
of the first line only.
Hanging
Indents are very important in Word! Unlike WordPerfect, hanging indents are
used automatically every time you use Word’s Numbering or Bullets features, or
when you type a numbered list manually.
To
create a numbered list manually in Word type the first number, then press the
Tab key and type the item text to set up a hanging indent instead of typing the
number and pressing Indent as you do in WordPerfect.
When
you click the Numbering or Bullets buttons on Word’s Formatting Toolbar, Word
automatically creates a hanging indent, inserts the numbers or bullet
characters and adds the tabs for you as you type the text.
- First Item
- Second Item
To change the formatting of a numbered or bulleted
list, select the entire list, then click and drag the appropriate Indent
markers on the Ruler Bar to reposition the indents. These automatic features are really handy –
but they can get you into trouble if you don’t realize they’re in the Hanging
Indent format.
If
you want to add a new line to indented text at the same indent level as the
previous line, you need to use a line break rather than a paragraph break. When
you press the Enter key, you create a paragraph break, and therefore a new item
in the list. To create a line break, hold down the Shift key, then press the
Enter key. This new line will be indented the same as the line above it.
Unfortunately,
two of Word’s default AutoCorrect settings often cause the most frustration for
WordPerfect users (and Word users too!).
If you’re having trouble with Word’s bulleted lists and/or numbered
lists, you can easily disable these default AutoCorrect settings to make things
easier.
From the Menu Bar select Tools, then
click AutoCorrect Options. At the top of the next dialog box, click the
AutoFormat As You Type tab. Remove the check marks from the “Automatic bulleted
lists”, and “Automatic numbered lists” options at the top of the dialog box,
and from the “Format beginning of list item like the one before it” and “Define
styles based on your formatting” options at the bottom of the box.
And
now we come to the last thing most WordPerfect users find frustrating when
using Word – it appears that you can’t change some document formats in the
middle of the stream. For example, let’s say you have a four page document and
you want the first, second and fourth pages in portrait orientation, but you
want just the third page displayed in landscape orientation.
In
WordPerfect you can position the cursor at the beginning of that third page,
insert a new page format code, return to the last page and insert another new
page format code and be done with it!
If
you try to insert different page formatting in the middle of a Word document,
you’ll find that the entire document changes to the new page format – not just
the one page you intended.
Fortunately,
to format different parts of your document using different paragraph or page
formats (things like margins, headers/footers, page orientation, paper sizes,
etc.) you simply insert one of several different types of section breaks to
produce multiple sections.
By default, every Word document consists of one section,
no matter how many pages are in the document. If you open a new, blank document
in Word, then look at the Status Bar in the bottom left corner of the screen, you’ll see that every document consists
of one section by default. If you divide the document into separate sections,
each section can have different formatting options.
To create a new section, position the cursor where
you want the section to begin, then select Insert and click Break from the Menu
Bar. In the Break dialog box, choose from the Page options listed in the
Section break types area, then click OK.
If
you want to begin a new section on the current page, select Continuous. To have
the new section start on a new page, choose Next Page, Even page, or Odd page.
If
you keep these few handy tips and concepts in mind while working on your
documents, you’ll soon find that you can use Word to do everything as well as
you previously did it in WordPerfect, and your job will be much easier!