Word's Unseen Treasures

It has been said that human beings only use 20 to 30 percent of their intellectual capacity. I grew up believing that. A few weeks ago, however, I read an interesting scientific article that says that the assertion is pure baloney. If we weren't using it, it wouldn't have evolved, and the parts we weren't using would have gone away.

Instead, science tells us, most of the brain serves specific purposes. And, one purpose is redundancy. Rather than all of a specific ability or memory being located in one part of the brain, you instead find that primary parts of the brain can be cut away (don't try this at home, kids), and specific memories and capabilities still remain. It's only when something catastrophic comes along, such as a stroke or an unfortunate encounter with a guillotine, that you completely lose certain memories or abilities.

Even in case of a stroke, however, some people show an amazing ability, through therapy, to recover lost abilities. Complete removal of the brain, however, does tend to substantially reduce the chances for recovery. Even then, however, American politics does seem to indicate that not having a brain doesn't appear to keep many people from exercising their right to vote.

You might be wondering what any of this has to do with Microsoft Word. Two key words are capability and redundancy. Word has tons of capabilities that many, if not most users, don't even know about, let alone use. Unlike the assertion about the human brain, it would indeed be correct to assert that most Word users use only a very small fraction of Word's capabilities.

Not unrelated to this, Word also often has a number of different ways to accomplish any given task. While they might seem redundant, the redundancy is not perfect. Some ways are better, and some ways are more efficient. And, some are both. I'm going to tell you about a couple of the latter, better and more efficient ways to do something you're probably doing some other way.

RedefineStyle
Suppose you want to redefine a given style, such as Heading 1, so that it's 14 point Times New Roman, instead of the default 16 point Arial. In Word 2002, there are several ways, including:

• The obvious way.
  Choose Format/Styles and Formatting, find Heading 1 in the list, right click it, and choose Modify.
  
  
• The deliberate after-the-fact way.
  Select a Heading 1 paragraph and apply the desired font changes. Display the Styles and Formatting task pane, click Heading 1's dropdown arrow, and choose Update to match selection.
  
  
• The best way.
  Select a Heading 1 paragraph and apply the desired font changes. Press your RedefineStyle key.
  

What? You don't have a RedefineStyle key? Well, for goodness sake, you'd darn well better get one—quick! Here's how:

1. Choose Tools/Customize/Keyboard button.
   
   
2. Set Categories to All commands.
   
   
3. Click in the Commands list and tap the r key twice. You should now have the RedefineStyle command selected.
   
   
4. Click in the Press new shortcut key: box, and press the key combination you want to use for this marvelously delicious and efficient command.
   
   
5. Click the Assign button.

The hard part is deciding what key combination to use. For me, it was an easy decision: Ctrl+Shift+D. Yes, I know it's already assigned to double-underline. But, in over 20 years of word processing, I can count on zero fingers the number of times I've actually needed double underlining. Well, perhaps you're different (gosh, I sure hope so), and that's why the keyboard has so many different potential key combinations. Choose one you can remember, and then use it the next time you want to redefine a style.

Incidentally, you're probably wondering "What's the difference between RedefineStyle and Format/Style by Example. The answer is "Plenty!" I'll explain the difference in a future article. For now, however, explore on your own to learn the amazing answer. Hint: choose Tools/Options/Edit/Prompt to update style to see the effects of Style by Example.

Caveat! If you actually want the changed style to become part of the underlying template, then you need something more. With the Styles and Formatting task pane displayed, right click on the redefined style, and choose Modify. Click to enable Add to template, and click OK. Now, press the Shift key and click File/Save All in the menu, and say Yes when it offers to save changes to the current template.

Just in Case
Suppose you're editing someone else's bilge… er, carefully crafted text, and, for some ungodly reason, they've elected to use ALL CAPS IN SOME OF THE MOST PECULIAR WAYS. You can, of course, simply retype it. That, of course, is the coward's way out.

Why is it the coward's way? It's the coward's way because a coward would hesitate to press Shift+F3, Word's built-in change-case keystroke, because they can't necessarily predict what Will Happen. That's because pressing Shift+F3 doesn't always do the same thing. Depending on what's selected, it toggles the case of selected text among several states:

• Words.
  If one or more words are selected, but they include no sentence terminators, then Shift+F3 toggles among initial caps, all uppercase and lowercase.
  
  
• Sentences.
  If one or more whole sentences are selected, Shift+F3 toggles among sentence case, all uppercase and all lowercase.
  

In either case, if your text contains any irregular capitalization, Shift+F3 is almost guaranteed to mess it up. You might typically want only a specific Shift+F3 outcome, and you would want to tell Word which outcome you want.

You can get this predictable outcome behavior if, instead of pressing Shift+F3, you choose Format/Change Case from the menu. The latter pops up a menu letting you choose which action to take, as shown in the figure.

Mind you, this is a misleading command. That's because it's not really formatting. It's really editing. If you choose Format/Font and choose All Caps, it's formatting. It changes the formatting attributes of selected text. That's different from using Format/Change Case, which actually changes the underlying ASCII/ANSI characters.

But, I digress. If you'd rather have this alternative behavior when you press Shift+F3, it's yours for the asking. But, you have to know how to ask. And, here's how.

When you press Shift+F3, Word runs its built-in ChangeCase command. When you choose Format/Change Case, Word runs its built-in FormatChangeCase command. So, all you have to do is change Shift+F3's assignment (or assign a different key combination entirely):

1. Choose Tools/Customize/Keyboard button.
   
   
2. Set Categories to Format.
   
   
3. Click in the Commands list and tap the f key ten times (or scroll and search if you prefer). You should now have the FormatChangeCase command in your sights.
   
   
4. Click in the Press new shortcut key: box, and press the key combination you want to use, possibly Shift+F3, or possibly something different, such as Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C.
   
   
5. Click the Assign button.

Now, when you press your key combination, you'll get the Change Case dialog box, and you can choose from among five different actions, rather than playing ChangeCase roulette.