____________________________________ Maurer Publications Computing Tips ____________________________________ Publisher: Steve Maurer, owner Maurer Publications http://www.steve.maurer.net Date: January 23, 2002 Subject: Text Manipulations in Word ____________________________________ In Today's Issue: Note from the editor: 1. Article: Manipulating Text in Word 2. Today's Quick Tip: Highlighting Right Down the Middle... 3. Cool Idea of the Day: 4. Website News 5. Subscription information: ____________________________________ A Note from the Editor: Hello, name! I'm sorry it's been a while since the last newsletter. We launched a new service here locally during the holiday season last year and the response was more than we expected! I started a photo scanning and printing service, dealing mostly with old photographs and converting home photos, like Polaroid shots, into quality prints. We even had quite a call for photo greeting cards. This year has started out pretty good, too. I have been amazed at how well the new service has been received...just goes to show you, if you want to make some money in business, you have to find a need and fill it! Hopefully, now that we've developed a routine for handling the extra business traffic, I'll be able to get back to a regular mailing schedule. I've already been working on the next few issues, which will be based on an upcoming book I am writing on using Microsoft PowerPoint. Today's issue will be dealing with special text manipulation in Microsoft Word. I know you'll find it very useful. You will notice that the "Quote for the Day" has be replace by a "Cool Idea". It is actually be a little free promo for a program I am involved in. If you've heard of peer to peer networking, and you probably have, you will find this short article very interesting. Thanks for your patience and for all the kind letters and electronic greeting cards you all sent me this season. You don't know how much that is appreciated! Now...on with the show! ____________________________________ 1. Article: Manipulating Text in Word Text to table - table to text Microsoft Word is a very versatile word processing tool. There are many features in the program of which many folks are not aware. With just a few clicks and some specially formatted text, items like tables of contents, indexes and bibliographies can be created and updated automatically. This is very useful, especially if you are writing long documents. Another feature, which is very useful, is the conversion of text to tables and tables to text. If you are like me, it is sometimes hard to get everything to line up correctly using tab stops. There is a very easy shortcut to doing just that. Let's take a look at turning text into a table. CONVERTING TEXT INTO A TABLE Using a table can be a very effective way to display information, especially related data items. For an example, let us take a look at some fictional high school football statistics. There will be several categories of information, which will make up the headings for our table of statistics. We will want to show the name of the teams, their win records, their loss records, and their tied game records. If you would like to try this out as you read along, start by opening up Word to a new document. Now, copy and paste the following lines into the new document: Team Name, Wins, Losses, Ties, Bulldogs, 10, 1, 0, Indians, 5, 5, 2, Tigers, 6,, 4, Cowboys, 3,7,1, Mustangs, 4, 4, 2 Notice a few things here. A comma separates each data item. This will be used in formatting the table. Another thing to note (which you might have thought was an error) is the double comma after the 6 following the team name "Tigers". This is not an error, it is a place holder. If you don't have a value for a data item, place the comma there anyway, it will hold the place for that item. Now the fun begins. After you have pasted the line above into a new Word document, highlight all the text. Then select "Table" from the menu bar, scroll down to "convert text to table" and click it. A dialog box will pop up, asking for some formatting information. It will also have some default values shown. The first box will ask you for the number of columns you want. It will default to the number of entries in the list, in this case 24. Change text box value to 4, as this is the number of headings we want (Team Name, Wins, Losses, and Ties). Leave the other settings at their default for now. The column width can be changed, but leave it at "Auto" for now. Since we are using commas for entry separators, check that radio button if it is not already. Click on the "OK" button and your comma separated text values will be transformed into a neat and tidy table! Notice that the extra comma we talked about has been converted into an empty cell in the table. If we didn't have that extra comma, all the entries after that would be in the wrong column. If you want to get really fancy, click on the autoformat button in the table format dialog box before you click "OK". You will be able to select from a variety of formats there, from simple grids to tables with color and fancy borders. CONVERTING A TABLE INTO TEXT! Now that we have a nice, neat table with our imaginary statistics all lined up, it's time to change them back to text…but it may not look like you are thinking it will. When we convert our table to text, it will not be our original comma-separated values. Instead, it will be text in a tabular form. Here we go! Select the entire table. You can do this by dragging your cursor over the table, or by going again to the menu bar, clicking on "Table" and then scroll down to "select table". I prefer this method as I am sure to get the entire table. Once you have selected the entire table, go again the "Table" menu and scroll down to "convert table to text". You will get another formatting dialog box, this time asking how you wish to separate the values. "Tab" is selected by default, so just click "OK". Your table will be converted into a tabbed format, nicely and evenly spaced. You might want to try out the other formatting options to see what they look like. Each one might fit a different need that you have. That's all for now on converting text to tables and vice versa, but don't close your Word document yet! It will come in handy for the following tip, "Right Down the Middle". _________ Article By: Steve Maurer, Maurer Publications ____________________________________ - - Advertisement - - Looking for informative books on starting a home business? Or maybe some information on arts and crafts. Check out the selection at Bizymoms.com . Be sure to download the free chapter from Barbara Brabec's book "Tax Strategies for the Home-based Entrepreneur". It's in my collection! Check out Bizymoms.come today! - - End Advertisement - - ____________________________________ 2. Today's Quick Tip: Right Down the Middle I hope you kept your document open that we were working on in the article above, as it will be helpful to illustrate this tip. Make sure you have the document formatted in tabbed form for this one. I used to think, "Why can't I select just the middle section of a document, instead of only adjacent sections?" (But Steve, you might ask, why would you want to do that? Are you crazy!?) No, I'm not! Well, maybe just a little, but look again at the tabbed information you just created. Suppose you just wanted to copy the Wins statistics. How are you supposed to extract just that information only? The answer is simpl...just select "Right Down the Middle". Here's how you do it. Place your cursor in front of the word "Wins". Now hold the [Alt] key down and click and hold the left mouse button. Now move your mouse so you begin to select text to the right and down. You can highlight the entire "Wins" column that way. Once you are done highlighting the text you want, let go of the mouse button and [Alt] key. Now, right-click somewhere in the highlighted text and select copy (or go to "Edit" , then down to "copy" on the menu bar). You can now paste this information into another area in the document, or even into another document. Why might you need this, you ask? Well, if you have, for instance, a tabbed list of sales information, you might just want to paste one column of the information in to a memo or summary document, perhaps a monthly total column. Try it out, and see what you can come up with! Steve Maurer, Maurer Publications ____________________________________ 3. Cool Idea of the Day: As I said earlier, instead of a quote today, I am going to tell you about a neat idea I came across recently. You may be familiar with the term peer to peer networking. If you have used Napster or other file sharing programs, you have used peer to peer networking. I am currently involved in a project that is funded by Intel and Microsoft, and administered by Stanford University. Instead of sharing music files, computers across the United States and abroad are donating "computing time and power" to solving complex problems. By combining the power of many computers, we have a computing resource that is equal to about 100 times the largest super computer in existence today. I am currently using my computer to help find a cure for Alzheimer's disease, with possibilities in finding a cure for Diabetes II (which many of you know that I have). In a nutshell, here is what is involved. You download a small program to your computer, which will perform the computations. Then you download a small "packet" from the program home site. This is actually a small piece of the overall computational problem. When you are not using your computer the program works on the computations in the background. If you start using your computer again, the program will stop and wait for you to finish. Then it will start in on the computation again (a little like a screen saver). When the program has finished working with your "packet", it will send the information to the home site the next time you connect to the Internet. No personal information about you or your computer is ever sent to the site. After delivering your computation results, the program downloads another packet to work on. Along with the Alzheimer cure program, there are also programs involved in finding a cure for Anthrax and for cancer. If you would like more information about this program go to the following address: You might just want to put your computer to good use...and help us all! Steve ____________________________________ 4. Website News Watch for updated pages coming next month! And a new look!!!!! ___________________________________ Stop sending "Dear Customer" Emails. Get WorldMerge, and send personalized email to your targeted contact list in minutes! Download your free copy today: ____________________________________ 5. Subscription information: This newsletter is sent ONLY to the subscriber who requested it. If you received this newsletter as a forward, we invite you to subscribe! You can subscribe at our website http://www.steve.maurer.net To subscribe by email... You are subscribed as: Using the address: To unsubscribe, email... mailto:steve@maurer.net?subject=unsubscribe To submit an article for consideration, use our tip submission form on our website Please pass this to a friend who may be interested!