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Office 97 Tips
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Drawing perfect shapes
If you're more of an analyst than an artist, adding shapes to
your Office documents can be very frustrating. Your circles look
like eggs, you agonize over creating squares with equal dimensions,
and you can't draw a straight line to save your life. Fortunately,
Office includes help for the artistically challenged. Simply
select the drawing tool you want to use, press the [Shift] key,
and click and drag to create your shape. (If the Drawing toolbar
isn't visible, select View/Toolbars/Drawing from the menu bar.)
Using the [Shift] key with the Oval tool creates a circle, using
it with the Rectangle tool creates a square, and using it with the
Line and Arrow tools creates perfect horizontal and vertical lines,
as well as lines in 15-degree increments from their starting points.
Pressing the [Shift] key even helps create proportional AutoShapes. |
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Quickly determine font and paragraph formatting (95/97)
Because Word is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word
processor, it hides all formatting codes and displays your document
as it will appear when you print it. This is a very convenient
feature--until you try to determine the formatting that's been
applied to a section of your document. To determine font and
paragraph formatting, you could refer to the Style, Font, and
Paragraph settings on the Formatting toolbar or in the Format menu,
but this method involves a lot of tedious hunting and pecking among
numerous menus and dialog boxes. Luckily, there's a much easier
way. You can determine the font and paragraph formatting for a
paragraph or character using the What's This feature. Simply select
Help/What's This from the menu bar (in version 95, click the Help
button on the Standard toolbar) or press [Shift][F1].
When you do,
the pointer turns into a question mark. Click on the character or
paragraph whose formatting you'd like to identify. Word then displays
a pop-up message box summarizing the font and paragraph formatting
of the text you selected. To close this message box, press [Esc]. |
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Moving objects between applications
Office provides many ways to move data from one application to
another. However, many users don't realize that you can move
inserted objects between applications using the drag-and-drop
technique. For example, to move a chart from an Excel spreadsheet
to a PowerPoint slide, just select the chart and drag it to the
PowerPoint document window. Or, if you want to copy an object
from one application to another, simply press [Ctrl] as you drag
it. You can also use this technique with any application that
supports OLE. |
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