When you insert a graphics object of any sort into a Word document—pictures, clip art, charts, SmartArt—it is inserted inline with the text on the text layer.  Word treats it as just another character of text.  Big.  Funny looking.  But just another character.  When you drag it to a new location within your text it acts just like a character on that line, within that paragraph.  This is not the behavior that most people are looking for when inserting graphics.  What most folks want is a graphic that the text flows around, book or magazine style, and often then have special needs to display...

Custom headers and footers can increase the impact and clarity of your documents.  This article explains how to create fairly sophisticated headers and footers, containing art work, special Word formatting, and dynamic fields, and then to save them as Quick Parts, so that you can re-use them with ease. Step 1 is to build the header and footers in the first place.  Since we do not want to use one of the pre-existing, pre-formatted Word headers or footers, simply double-click in the header area of your document to place the insertion point there.  You will see a Header identifier label appear along...

Palomar College pays for the rights for its faculty to work at home with certain Microsoft products.  This is a benefit that is often under-appreciated.   When I give workshops on Office 2010 products, I mention that faculty members can get it though the FCCC (the Foundation for California Community Colleges) and walk them through the steps.  I often see people make notes, but then we move on to other things.  I’ve got a feeling that those notes get lost in the grand rush of things, because I am often asked by workshop attendees later—often much later—how to obtain Office 2010 for $45,...

The find and replace tool in Word 2010 is very powerful, and can do even more than you might imagine.  By using caret codes—the caret character (“^”: shift-6) followed by another character—you can search for Word formatting and special characters and replace them with other formatting or special characters.   That sounds complicated, but its not.  An example will help. Often when you paste in text from a web site or improperly formatted document you get a series of lines terminated by a paragraph break with a paragraph break on a blank line between the lines of text.  Your goal is...

I sometimes wonder how people learn Word?  I suppose it is like all tech skills–a slow accretion process.  A couple of weeks ago I conducted a Word workshop and was surprised that no one there (it was called Word 1, so not that surprising) knew how to Find and Replace with Word.  I didn’t intend to show simple find and replace, but wanted to show something a little cooler.  That is, find words and replace formatting; or just find formatting.  You can do both in Word 2010.  I have created this video to show how.  (Hint: using the 720pHD setting and going full screen gives the best...