Customising your Computer - Part 2

If you read our last Computer Talk email and followed the handy computer tips, you would have discovered your Quick Launch Bar and how to use Windows Explorer. In this edition, we will talk about how to customise MS Word (2003) to make it work better for you. As I said in the previous email, before you begin working with MS Word, you really have to “customise” it to death. These are some of the standard things I change on everyone’s computer.
Go to Tools>Options and click on -

The View Tab

• Untick Smart Tags. Does anyone really ever use this feature?
• Under Field Shading make sure that Always is selected from the down arrow. This means that if you ever get a document template with “fields” in it (we prepare all our document templates with fields), you will be able to see the fields which will be shaded, and press F11 to go from field to field and type.

The General Tab

• Untick Allow starting in Reading Layout. Reading Layout is when you get two big pages on your screen when you open up a Word document….very annoying!

• Tick Mail as attachment. This means that you can email a document from MS Word. Open up a Word document, go to File>Send to>Mail Recipient (as Attachment). It will then send the document from your email program as an attachment. It’s just a quicker alternative for sending documents as opposed to going to your Email program, opening up a new message, finding the relevant document (or picture) on your computer and then attaching it.

Untick Automatically create drawing canvas when inserting Autoshapes…another really annoying feature in my opinion .

The Edit Tab

• Untick Prompt to Update style

AND VERY IMPORTANTLY

• Untick Keep track of formatting. When we discuss Styles later on this year, you will see the benefit of disabling this function, but if you are already using Styles end up with a thousand different miscellaneous styles that you will never use, it is because this option is ticked. By keeping this option ticked makes your Style Gallery look messy.