Hands On: Set a default date in Word

Another, easier way is to set up an Autotext entry.

Insert the date field in the desired format, then select it.

Go to Edit, Autotext, type a name for the Autotext entry ­ you could use ‘Today’ again.

Writer will suggest a one-letter shortcut ­ T ­ which you can accept or change.

Click on the Autotext button and choose New (to keep the font formatting of the selection) or New (Text only) to keep just the contents.

Close the Autotext dialogue, and you’ll be able to insert your date in the chosen form by typing the shortcut letter(s) followed by F3. Shortcut letters are not case-sensitive.

The real word count
Like most columnists, I can’t just waffle on as it suits me. Although it may seem like that at times, in fact this column is constrained by a word count target, and if you’re really at a loose end, you’ll find there are 1,500 words in the column, give or take a few. But what counts as a word?

If you run Tools, Word Count you will get one answer. If you run the Spelling and Grammar checker with the Readability Statistics you’ll get a different one. If you select all, copy and paste into Notepad, then copy back from Notepad into a new, blank document you may get a third figure. And other word processors have other foibles ­ according to Openoffice, last month’s column is 41 words longer than Word reckoned.

Abiword made it eight words fewer, and Lotus Symphony generously tacked on more than 200 extra words. I pasted the text into the online word counter at www.wordcounttool.com, which added a mere 38 words. These experiments took place with a document unsullied by headers, footers, endnotes or footnotes.

Some of this is explicable. If you create a Word document containing a bulleted or numbered list, each bullet counts as a word, which makes some sense. Until you run the Readability Statistics and then you’ll find they are not counted. There are obviously other discrepancies, so if any sharp-eyed readers have spotted any, I’d be grateful for the chance to share that information with the rest of the readership.

Save settings ­ the easy way
Word 2003 and earlier has a wealth of customisable material under Tools, Options. Everyone will have their own preferences, such as increasing the number of recent files, turning off fast saves and using smart paragraph selection.

Unfortunately, this information, which is stored in the Windows Registry, has been known to go astray, and restoring your finely crafted preferences means wading through 10 or 11 tabs, each of which contain up to 20 options. So here is a quick and easy way to save and restore those options that doesn’t involve any direct dealings with the Registry.

Start Word and create a new, blank document ­ that is, one based on Normal.dot. Go to Tools, Macro, Record New Macro. Give it a name ­ such as SaveMySettings ­ and make sure it’s stored in ‘All Documents (Normal.dot)’. Click OK to start recording.

Now go to Tools, Options. Click through each tab in turn, and when you’ve done this, click OK to close the Options dialogue. You can now stop the macro recorder ­ there should be a tiny toolbar somewhere on the screen, or you can go back to Tools, Macro, Stop Recording.

Although you may not be aware of a great sense of achievement, if you go back to Tools, Macros and edit the macro you have just recorded, you’ll find that you’ve created up to 250 lines of code. Although you didn’t change anything, the macro recorded the state of each tab. Should your settings go missing, running the macro will set them back to the state when the macro was recorded.

Tool Tips or TOOLTIPS?
Here’s a bizarre little Word foible that regular correspondent Jean Elliot brought to our attention. If you record a macro in Word 2003 or earlier, you are first prompted to give it a name and optionally assign it to a Toolbar or Keyboard shortcut.

If you give your macro name in the format ‘WordCount’, for example, and assign it to a Toolbar, hovering over its button will produce the tooltip WORDCOUNT. However, if you assign the macro to a toolbar after recording it, or assign an existing macro created from code to the toolbar, it appears as the more elegant ‘Word Count’ ­ with a space before the uppercase C.

As it is rather more effort to assign a macro to a toolbar after recording, Jean wondered if it were possible to get recorded macros to show the more elegant version. It is possible to write a macro to change a tooltip, but this involves even more effort than going via Tools, Customise. If any reader has a better idea, we’d be glad to hear it.

Cognitively dysfunctional
It’s a great thing having all those function keys in Word whose behaviour can be modified by holding down one or more of the Shift, Alt and Control keys. What isn’t so great is trying to remember them all, especially when there’s no menu equivalent, such as the various F9-related field operations.

With Word 2000, XP and 2003, there’s a discreetly hidden toolbar to help. Go to View, Toolbars, Customise and on the Toolbars tab tick ‘Function Key Display’. Close the Customise dialogue and you’ll have a neat little toolbar that not only duplicates the function keys, but shows exactly what they do ­ press a modifier and the button labels change to suit.