gHacks technology news » microsoft word

Microsoft Word: Jump To Last Cursor Position

Martin — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:45:01 +0000

If you open a Microsoft Word document you will notice that it will always open with the first page of the document being displayed. That’s fine under most circumstances but could be problematic for users who work with large documents if they cannot remember exactly where they left off at the last time. Microsoft Excel on the other hand remembers the cell that has been last edited by the user for every sheet of the Excel document.

Here is a tip on how to get the same result in Microsoft Word. The easiest way to make Word jump to the last cursor position in Microsoft Word documents is to use the keyboard shortcut [Shift F5].

Pressing [Shift F5] in a recently launched Word document will place the cursor at the position of the last change in the document. Word will only record changes to the document this way. Simply placing the Word cursor in the Word document is not enough to make [Shift F5] jump to that position.

The other requirement is that the document needs to be saved in doc format. Word cannot perform the jump to the last cursor position if a txt or rtf document is loaded into the text editor. This little keyboard shortcut can be very useful in large Word documents that are edited over time.

Redact Text In Microsoft Word 2007 Documents

Martin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:09:29 +0000

Word documents can sometimes contain hidden but also visible information that have to be removed before sharing these documents with other users. Tools have been developed to take care of the hidden data (Microsoft Word Metadata Scrubber is one) but until now there were not many tools to take care of visible data that needed to be removed before a document could be shared. Most Word users are therefor replacing confidential text with blanks or single characters like xxxxx which can often times confuse readers of the edited version of the document.

The Word 2007 Redaction Tool has been designed as an add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 to redact text and images in documents before they are shared with other users. The add-in will add a Redact group in the Review tab which can be used to control the process.

To redact text a user would select the text that should be redacted. The next step would be to click on the Mark option in the Redact group in the Word Review tab. This will mark the text by highlighting it. It is also possible to use the Find and Mark command to automatically highlight all instances of a phrase in the Word document. It is possible to review the document at any time before redacting the highlighted text by selecting the Redact Option under the Mark group in the Review tab.

The whitespace character length of each word is altered by 10% (in either direction) to make it harder to guess the correct words. The developer recommends to inspect the metadata of the document to ensure that these do not contain information that could leak the redacted information.

The Word 2007 Redaction Tool can be downloaded from the profile page at Codeplex. It requires the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and the VSTO 3.0 Runtime Service Pack 1 which will be automatically installed should they be missing on the computer system.

Tags: microsoft word, text redaction, word 2007, word add-on, word redaction

Word Document Hyperlink Checker

Martin — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:21:33 +0000

If you are working with Word documents regularly chance is that you sometimes work with documents that contain hyperlinks that point to additional information on the Internet. Some documents are created over the course of a few weeks or even months and hyperlinks that have been added in the beginning might not be valid in the end anymore. It is therefor a good practice to check the hyperlinks of a Microsoft Word document before publishing it.

That’s where the Word Document Hyperlink Checker comes into play. The Microsoft Word add-in can check all hyperlinks for validity in a Word document.

The hyperlink checker add-on supports Microsoft Word 2007, 2003, XP and 2000. It will automatically place a new menu entry in the Word interface that can be used to open the hyperlink checker interface.

It will display all hyperlinks that have been added to the Word document after clicking on the Show All button. A click on the Suspicious button will display suspicious and broken links which are the links that need to be tested by the user.

The add-in unfortunately lacks a few features that would make it more comfortable working with it including the ability to click on a link to check it in the default web browser, to edit links in the link checker interface or to place the cursor at the position of the selected link.

Another shortcoming is that the add-in will not recognize plain urls as hyperlinks. Only links that have been created using the hyperlink option will be recognized as links.

The Document Hyperlink Checker is still a helpful program for Microsoft Word especially for testing the hyperlinks in large documents. The Word add-in can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

Tags: document hyperlink checker, hyperlink checker, microsoft word, word, word add-in, word hyperlinks

Microsoft Office Live Workspace Add-in

Martin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:59:48 +0000

Microsoft Office add-ins add a wide variety of features to Microsoft’s Office. Most are designed to add functionality to specific programs like Microsoft Word, Excel or Outlook. The Office Live Workspace add-in is an official add-in that is being developed by Microsoft. It provides Microsoft Office users with the ability to upload their documents to the Microsoft Office Live Workspace on the Internet.

This does mean that an account at Microsoft Office Live Workspace is required before the add-in can be used. The service is free on the other hand and it takes only a few seconds to signup for it. Windows Live account users can use their account to signup for Microsoft Office Live Workspace. The service is currently in beta and provides access to 5 Gigabytes of storage space for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents that can also be edited on the website.

Office 2007 users find the option to upload their documents to the Microsoft Office Live Workspace and to open documents from the online storage space under the Microsoft Office button in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Office 2003 and XP users get a new Office Live toolbar that provides access to three buttons that offer the functionality to open documents that are stored at Microsoft Office Live Workspace, save documents so that they are stored online and to open the Office Live Workspace website.

The Office Live Add-in itself is compatible with Microsoft Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP.

Tags: excel, microsoft excel, microsoft powerpoint, microsoft word, microsoft-office, office 2003, office 2007, office live, office live workspace, office workspace, office xp, powerpoint, word

Microsoft Office Word 2007 AutoHistory

Martin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:44:57 +0000

One element that is missing in Microsoft’s Office Word 2007 program is the ability to manage document revisions. The software program comes with revision tracking features but those do not help that much once the document has been saved and closed in Word 2007. Enter AutoHistory; A Microsoft Office Word 2007 add-in that adds document revisions to Microsoft Word.

It does so by automatically creating a copy of the document whenever it is saved either by the user or by the software. The functionality becomes available immediately after installation of the Word add-in. Checking the Show / Hide History box will display a sidebar menu with all document revisions of the active document. A double-click on any of the documents will load it in a new Microsoft Word window.

A click on the Settings button opens the configuration menu where the maximum number of document revisions and the language can be configured. The default number of document revisions is unlimited but can be changed if size is of importance to the user.

AutoHistory (via Killertechtips) requires the installation of Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office system before it can be used and installed.

The Word add-in could come in handy for users who regularly work with Microsoft Word documents.

Tags: autohistory, document revisions, microsoft word, office 2007, office word 2007, word, word add-in

Google Docs Adds Office Excel 2007 XLSX Support

Martin — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:04:15 +0000

While Google Mail (Gmail) is already able to process Office 2007 file formats such as xlsx, docx or pptx by converting them to html format so that they can be viewed online Google Docs could not until now. This is kinda strange as one would think that Google Docs would be the primary application to display the Office XML formats. Google’s priority seemed to have been different. The developers have finally started to begin adding support for the new Office 2007 file formats beginning with the Excel 2007 format xlsx.

Not all pages have been updated in Google Docs with the information about the added Excel 2007 xlsx support. The upload page for example is not listing the new format as supported. The two other Microsoft Office 2007 file formats, that is Word 2007 with docx and PowerPoint 2007 with pptx, are not yet supported but it is very likely that the Google Docs team will add support for those file formats eventually.

The data transfer of the xlsx files produces good but not excellent results. The color highlighting of a test Excel 2007 file was for example not displayed on the Google Docs page of the document. The main information on the other hand were all displayed the way they looked in the real Office Excel document.

Tags: docx, excel, excel 2007, google docs, microsoft excel, microsoft powerpoint, microsoft word, microsoft-office, office 2007, office xml, pptx, xlsx

Microsoft Word Metadata Scrubber

Martin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:24:08 +0000

Metadata in Word documents can reveal information that the creator of the document had no intention to distribute. This ranges from information about the author to comments and a unique identifying ID. It can lead to all kind of privacy leaks. Microsoft even recommends to distribute documents in paper form only on their website.

Doc Scrubber is a Microsoft Word metadata scrubber which can be used to analyze and scrub Word documents. The software program is compatible with Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000 or Windows XP. It has been designed with simplicity in mind. It basically is managed by the two buttons Analyze and Scrub.

Analyze lets the user analyze one specific Word document to see if and which information it reveals in the metadata. The Scrub button is where the real action takes place. It can be used to scrub a single document, all Word documents in a folder or selected documents of folder.

By default a new document will be created after the scrubbing with the metadata removed which is another option that can be changed in the program’s settings. The user is given the choice to remove only the metadata that he selects.

A total of 13 different settings can be removed from the selected Word documents including subject, keywords, comments and several dates including creation and last saved data. Three of those 13 options can reset data back to their default values. This includes setting the template back to normal.dot, the revision count to 1 and the total editing time to 0.

The very same menu contains two options to replace the author and company to values specified by the user.

Tags: metadata, metadata scrubber, microsoft privacy, microsoft word, scrubber, windows software, word, word document, word metadata, word privacy

Microsoft Office Add In ClickSolve

Martin — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 08:22:54 +0000

Clicksolve is a Microsoft Office Add In that integrates an Internet mapping and searching feature into several Microsoft Office programs. The programs that benefit from the Office add in are Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Outlook.

The Office add in basically adds two new context menu entries to the right-click menu of those Microsoft Office programs which when selected will load the default Internet browser and perform the selected action. This can obviously only work if the user has selected text or data in the document at hand. The selected text can span across multiple lines or cells.

Clicksolve integrates itself automatically into the products meaning that the user does not have to load it from a menu. It runs out of the box after installation.

Another interesting feature of the Microsoft Office Add in is the ability to choose the default search engine for searching and mapping from a list of available ones.

The default setting makes use of the default search engine in the preferred web browser. The user can change that setting to one or multiple search engines and mapping services. Choosing multiple services will perform a search on all selected ones if a search is initiated by the user. ClickSolve will automatically open each search in a new tab in the default web browser.

Tags: microsoft office add in, microsoft outlook, microsoft word, microsoft-office, office add in, powerpoint plugin, word plugin

Recover Corrupt Word File

Martin — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:39:56 +0000

Word cannot open this document. This and similar error messages when opening Microsoft Word documents are usually (according to good ol’ Murphy) appearing when the user is in dire need to view, edit and print the document. A corrupt Word file can be recovered (with some luck) and the help of Repair My Word (via Online Tech Tips).

Repair My Word is a standalone application for Microsoft Windows operating systems that can recover corrupt word files by loading,repairing and saving them int he software program itself. According to the developers homepage the program is compatible with Microsoft Word 6.0, Word 95, 97, 2000, XP, and Word 2003.

The corrupt word file has to be loaded into the program with the Repair / Open button. This opens a file browser that can be used to pick the word document. Repair My Word will try to load the file and display a preview of it in its program interface. This can be used to check the contents of the Word document before it is being saved.

Repair my Word can try to repair documents with the following error messages (and others):

The document name or path is not valid. Try these suggestions. Check the file permissions for the document or drive. Use the File Open dialog box to locate the document.
Word cannot open the document.
Word cannot open the document: user does not have access privileges.
When you attempt to open a Microsoft Word 97 document into Microsoft Word version 6.x or 7.x, the document contains garbage characters.

A great addition would be the option to load folders into the application or let it scan the computer to find documents on its own.

Tags: corrupt word file, doc recovery, microsoft word, repair corrupted word files, repair word document, word tips

Sendshield Prevents Private Data Leaks When Sending Office Documents

Martin — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:42:17 +0000

Experienced users know that Microsoft Office documents can contain hidden information that can be revealed after enabling functions to see them in Microsoft Office products. This can include hidden rows and data in Excel spreadsheets, embedded information in Powerpoint presentations or revision histories in Microsoft Word documents.

Hidden data can have severe consequences for the sender or his company. Sendshield provides examples of companies who forgot to remove hidden data and the consequences that it had. You find examples for companies like Google, Merck, Microsoft (oh the irony) and the United Nations.

Sendshield acts as a proxy that analyzes every Office document, Word, Excel or Powerpoint, that is attached in Microsoft Outlook. It warns the user that the document contains hidden data and provides a convenient way to remove the data.

A red warning sign and a line appear beneath the attachments of that email which opens a new window that is displaying in depth information about the hidden data in the document(s). The user has the option to remove the data on a individual entry basis or all at once.

This process does not change the original document in any way which is a benefit of using Sendshield instead of manually editing the document.

Tags: microsoft excel, microsoft word, microsoft-office, outlook, powerpoint, sendshield, spreadsheet

Microsoft Word Article Authoring Add-in

Martin — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 09:32:42 +0000

Add-ins, Add-ons, Extensions and Plugins are a great way to extend the functionality of a product. The new features can be supplied by third party developers or by the initial developer. In the case of Microsoft Office 2007 it’s more often than not Microsoft that is providing add-ins to the community.

The so called Article Authoring Add-in is a Microsoft Word 2007 add-in that is currently supplied as a beta version on the official Microsoft homepage. The add-in enhanced the authoring of scientific and technical articles by providing the ability to read and write files from Word 2007 into the XML format used by the National Library of Medicine for archiving articles in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature and PubMed Central.

Information on the Microsoft website is sparse but from the information provided it looks like a niche add-in targeting “the staff of scientific and technical journals, Information Repositories, and early adopters within the scholarly authoring community, as well as developers of publishing solutions and workflows”.

Tags: Article Authoring, microsoft word, word, word 2007, word add-in

Word Document Property Tool

Martin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:56:35 +0000

Every Microsoft Word document contains meta information about the author, title or subject for instance. Word automatically adds those information to every created document and everyone can view the meta information by right-clicking a Word document and selecting Properties from the menu. The data can be changed with this method as well which is not a problem if only one document has to be changed but could take a long time if many documents have to be changed.

It takes so long because every document has to be right-clicked and edited on its own. Mass editing some of the settings would be nice and that is exactly what the Word Document Property Tool [download, via Lifehacker] offers.

It can scan directories and – optionally – subdirectories for Word documents with the file extension .doc. Wildcards – ? and * – can be used to find all or only specific documents. Once the folders are scanned all documents found are displayed in a list and each can be edited accordingly.

Editable are the following six variables: Title, Subject, Author, Manager, Company and Keywords. Please note that each document has to be edited on its own, it’s still much faster than the manual way of editing the information. You only need to enter the information once and can simply edit settings with two clicks.

This looks to be very helpful if for instance the manager or company changes. It’s also great for adding keywords to documents.

Tags: microsoft, microsoft word, software, Windows, word meta information

Set Transparent Color for Images in Microsoft Word

Martin — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:12:13 +0000

I once had to add a image into a Word document that had a black background which looked awful when printing the document. Microsoft Word comes with a few basic possibilities to alter graphics that are added which includes changing colors of the image and defining a transparent color for the image.

It was an easy task to set the black background color to transparent which had the result that the image was showing without the black background. Here is how I did that in Microsoft Word 2007. After adding the image to Microsoft Word you left-click the icon to bring up the graphics menu.

Click on Recolor in the left menu that is called Adjust and select Set Transparent Color there. Now click on the color that you want to make transparent. There are some limitations though. You can only make one color transparent which means that if your image has different similar looking colors as the background this won’t bring the desired results.

You could use an image editor like GIMP or Paint.net to change the color of the background image to one solid one or make it match the background color of the document.

Tags: document, microsoft word, word

Microsoft Word Startup Parameters

Martin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:59:11 +0000

Did you know that all editions of Microsoft Word support several startup parameters that can be helpful in more than one occasion? The easiest way to start Word with parameters would be to create a shortcut of the winword.exe, right-click the shortcut and select Properties from the menu and append the switches at the end of the Target line.

It is possible to use the command line instead and append the switches behind the Word executable. It would look like the following Path to Word/winword.exe \switch. I will not comment on all command line switches available, only on those that I find useful enough to be included in the list.

Here is a tip that I found useful. If you use a switch that calls a file with spaces put that file in “”, for example “Ghacks Technology News”.

/safe – start Word in safe mode
/q – disable the Word splash screen
/ttemplatename – start Word with a different template. For example /tc:\template.dotx
/t filename – load a filename in Word. For example /t c:\template.dotx
/a – start Word without loading add-ins and templates
/m – start Word without any autostarting macros.
/mmacroname – start Word and a specific macro.
/r – register Word in the Windows Registry again

Tags: microsoft word, windows tips

Use Microsoft Word to save PDF Documents

Martin — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 08:24:55 +0000

Microsoft has introduced so called add-ins in Microsoft Office and Word which are first-party or third-party applications that extend the functionality of the software. One add-in in particular is being a great asset for me personally, it is called the 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS and works with eight Office programs including Microsoft Word 2007 and Excel 2007.

I do have to create several PDF documents each month and have been using one of the numerous online converters for this task since now. I did not like the fact that I had to upload my files to another website but that was the only working solution so far.

This has changed with the Microsoft Office add-in which adds the option to save documents as PDF right in Word and Excel. The download is only available to genuine Office 2007 users and Microsoft is performing a check before the download.

Works with:

Microsoft Office Access 2007
Microsoft Office Excel 2007
Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
Microsoft Office Publisher 2007
Microsoft Office Visio 2007
Microsoft Office Word 2007

Tags: microsoft word, microsoft-office, pdf

How do I open docx files ?

Martin — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 09:04:36 +0000

Microsoft introduced the .docx file format in its new Office and Word applications and wants it to replace the commonly used doc format. The problem with the change from doc to docx is that many users are still working with prior versions of Word or no Microsoft product at all and face the problem that they can’t load the docx file because it is not supported in their application.

The main question for those users is of course how they would open a docx file to be able to read and work with it. The answer is that it depends on what program and computer the user is working with. Let me outline several possibilities to open and work with docx file without using the latest Microsoft Office or Word software.

Older versions of Microsoft Office or Microsoft Word:

Older versions such as Office XP do not support the docx format because it was not known when they were developed and sold. A simple way to read docx and xlsx files in those applications would be to install the Microsoft Compatibility Pack which adds support for the new file formats.

Open Office

You can use the Open XML Translator for Open Office to be able to read and edit docx files with Open Office.

Online Solution

The docx converter lets you convert docx documents online. This is a pretty good solution if you don’t want to install the previously mentioned add-ons.

Macintosh

You might want to use the Online Solution above or download a desktop widget from the same developers. If you happen to use Microsoft Office on your Mac you might want to take a look at the Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac.

Tags: docx, docx explained, microsoft word, office, what is a docx file

Ten Tips for Microsoft Words

Martin — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 17:04:10 +0000

The article “Ten things every Microsoft Word user should know” is for those of you who are still using Microsoft Word (and not Open Office or similar freeware products). I think most companies still rely on the Microsoft Office productline, also many computers come preinstalled with an OEM version. You get a great explanation and guide for every tip that shows you how to use the feature described.

The author takes a look at styles (general, header, charakter and table styles), Table of Contents, Line and Page Breaks, Captions and Cross Reference, Turn off auto formatting, Character Based formatting, Continue previous list and finally keyboard shortcuts. The tips are great and pretty useful if you write a lot.

Tags: microsoft word, Windows, word tips

gHacks technology news » microsoft word

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