Hands on: Creating columns and boxes

Document shortcuts
Here’s a handy way of saving your place in a Word document. Highlight some text and copy it to the clipboard.

Then, with the focus on the Desktop, or any folder of your choice, right-click and ‘Paste Shortcut’. Save and close the Word document. You’ll then find double-clicking on the shortcut will start Word (if it isn’t already running), load the document and highlight the chosen text: what happens is that pasting the shortcut creates a bookmark in the document, which is why you have to save the file before closing.

Opening the shortcut loads the document and goes to that bookmark, and you can have multiple shortcuts to different parts of the same document. If you just ‘Paste’ instead of ‘Paste Shortcut’, you’ll end up with a Document Scrap - when this is double-clicked, Word loads with just the selected text in a new document. We haven’t done exhaustive testing on this, but it doesn’t seem to work in Vista and Office 2007 - the Paste Shortcut and Paste commands are greyed out in the right-click menu.

It works fine with Word 2003 and 97, plus Windows XP, ME and 98. With Word 2007 and XP, the Paste Shortcut command is active, but double-clicking on it produced an error message, though this may be because we had both Office 2007 and 2003 on the same XP PC.

A new Openoffice
Fans of Openoffice will probably have heard there’s a new beta version (3.0) that can be downloaded (145MB) here. Among its improvements is support for Mac OSX, version 1.2 of the ISO standard Open Document Format, and perhaps most important for those who come into contact with Microsoft Office 2007, import and export for the Office XML file format (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx).

If you’ve ever struggled to crop an image in Writer, you’ll find this is now much easier, with a toolbar button that allows you to crop by dragging handles in a similar manner to Word.

There’s a zoom slider - like that in Word 2007 - and the facility to display multiple pages. Notes in Writer have also been improved. Previously, when you inserted a note, you got a small yellow rectangle that would produce a (slow) pop-up when moused over or a dialogue when double-clicked. Now you get the full text of the note alongside the document - colour-coded by author - with an arrow connecting it to its target in the main text. There’s also better language support and, apart from a few new button images, the interface is much the same.

Prettier tooltips
In a previous column we mentioned Jean Eliot’s problem with tooltips on macro buttons in Word 2003 and earlier. At the time we said these could be changed with a macro, but it was more trouble than it was worth. Further research indicates this was an exaggeration, so here’s a very simple macro to change the tooltip assigned any button on any toolbar. As per our usual rough-and -eady code style, this doesn’t contain any error-checking or other frills:

Sub ChangeTip()

mytoolbar = InputBox(“Type Toolbar name”, “Toolbar”)
mybtnposn = InputBox(“Type button position counting from left”, “Position”)
mycount = Val(mybtnposn)
mynewtip = InputBox(“Type the new tooltip”, “Tooltip”)
CommandBars (mytoolbar). Controls(mycount). TooltipText= (mynewtip)

End Sub

As you’ve probably guessed, the macro produces three input boxes in succession. The first asks for the name of the toolbar on which the button resides - this should be the name you see in the View, Toolbars submenu, but it is not case-sensitive. The second asks for the button number - from the left, starting at 1 - and the third asks for the desired tooltip text.

This works on any button, not just macros or other custom items, so use it with care.