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Word Reformatting Tips

June 4, 2007

I have a client who sends me classified ads to put on their site as a Word document. I’m not sure how she makes it, but when I get it, all the hyperlinks and email addresses are dead links. She also uses manual line breaks rather indiscriminately, making the document problematic indeed. I used to remove the columns, justification, and line breaks, and then go through the document and make the links live by selecting each one, pressing the ENTER key and removing the extra line, over and over. Or, I’d do it in Dreamweaver. Tedious, to say the least.

I found the solution the other day. I’ve been using Word since version 1, and I didn’t know about this trick. The answer was there, all along. It’s AutoFormat.

It’s easier to show than tell, so I made you a little movie. Make sure you have sound, because I talk!

My other tip o’ the day is about odd-shaped selections in Word.

dos Often, I need to make a list of files that are in a directory.

The easiest way I’ve found to make this is to use (gasp!) DOS! Does anyone remember DOS commands? They still exist! Even in Vista!

To get to DOS, you’ll need the command prompt.

In Windows XP, click Start, choose Run. Type cmd in the box.
In Windows Vista, type it into the Start Search box.

At the prompt, use the CD (change directory) command to navigate to the directory you want.

hold down alt cd \ goes backwards. cd followed by a space goes forward.

To list the contents of a directory, use the DIR command.

You can print the contents to a file, by typing the DIR command, followed by the “>“ and then the filename you want.

Then, in Word, if you hold down the ALT key while you’re making a selection, you can just get the filenames.

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Comments

1Debra's brother | February 17, 2008

Hello Sister,

So I was reading your NobodyReadsThis blog cuz I thought I’d give you some hits, when I actually learned something new!

I didn’t know that in a cmd window, you can hold down the ALT key and copy a portion of the text. Who knew!?! Well, I guess you did!

Thanks for the tip!

Love you.

2debra | February 17, 2008

Well, thanks for stopping by, but you’re not reading the article correctly.

I say that you can use DOS to print the contents of the directory to a FILE. Then, in WORD, you can use the ALT key to select odd portions of text. It’s the ALT trick in Word that’s not very well known!

Hugs!

3Debra 2 | February 3, 2009

Hi Debra

Just proving that someone does indeed read this.

Thought you might be interested to know about a brilliant free utility called Karen’s Directory Printer. This allows you to print out lists of files, folders etc. and, if you wish, save them to a file. The results are more sophisticated than using the DIR command and the lovely Karen gives it away free. If you are interested, take a look at www.karenware.com/powertools/ptdirprn.asp.

Now, what was it I was looking for when I got sidetracked…

Debs

4Jeremy | January 27, 2011

Okay , here goes , the article is about fixing line breaks and hyperlinks in a word doc , so to be put on clients site , which is exactly my problem too , but the video aint working at my end , and I don’t see the relevance to dos command here ?

any help ?