Posts tagged with » MS Word tips

Find Straight Quotes and Apostrophes

A normal search for a single or double quote mark will bring up curly (“smart”) quotes/apostrophes as well as straight (dumb) ones. To search only for the straight ones, open the search dialogue box, enable Wildcards searching, and search for ^034 (double quotes) ^039 (single quote) With thanks to Graham Mayor, originally cited at pcreview.

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MS Word: Deleting Blank Line in Footnotes

A blank line is appearing between footnotes in a document I have been sent. When I try to delete the line, from above or below, MS Word tells me that “this is not a valid action for footnotes.” Why can’t the line be deleted? When I reveal formatting, it turns out that it is a […]

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MS Word fix: Text direction in comment balloons for documents created in a right-to-left language

Reversing text direction in comment balloons for documents created in a right-to-left language country SOLUTION: Open up a marginal comment to the MS Word file; Click in the marginal comment (i.e. place cursor inside it); Click the left-to-right icon on the upper-most menu strip (normally to the right of ‘View Gridlines’) — text in comment […]

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‘Ibid.’: Finding those pesky periods

‘Ibid.’ is an abbreviation for ‘ibidem‘ (‘in the same place’). The full stop in ‘ibid.’ is therefore obligatory. But it can be dashed hard to spot. To automate the search (in MS Word), hit Cntrl-F to bring up the Find/Replace box, enable Wildcards, and enter: ibid[!.] in the find box. This little string finds instances […]

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Alt-X hexadecimal character entry

To enter Unicode characters by their hexadecimal value (without having to trawl through Word’s fair-weather-friend symbol-entry interface): Enter the hexadecimal value for the Unicode symbol, position cursor at the end of the string, and press alt-X. This toggles between the character and the unicode value.

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