Word: Add a watermark to all sections at once

My colleague, C, was trying to add a DRAFT watermark to her Word 2007 document. She could add it successfully to the cover page, but as soon as she tried to add it to the even page section or the odd page section, whatever she’d added previously disappeared. This document had several sections, and each section is set for odd/even pages and a different first page for the cover page. Without investigating too closely, I suspected that a combination of odd/even pages, different first page, and Same as previous settings for the headers were at play here. I suggested she start at the end of the document and work her way back to the beginning, but that didn’t work either.

However, I found what did work and that was to set a custom watermark. First, I got C to delete all watermarks she’d just added (otherwise she would get two different watermarks on some pages), then I got her to do this:

1. Go to the Page Layout tab.
2. Click the Watermark button in the Page Background group.
3. Select Custom Watermark (at the bottom of the shortcut menu).
4. Select the Text watermark option.
5. Change the Text field to DRAFT.
6. Click OK.

All sections (odd/even, and first page) had this watermark applied to them at once.

C was very happy and so was I, as it ended up being such a simple solution.

These same instructions apply to Word 2010 and possibly Word 2013.

See also:

• How to delete a stubborn watermark: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/word-remove-a-stubborn-watermark/
• Word 2003 instructions: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/add-a-watermark/

[Links last checked April 2013]

Word: Removing reviewer names

J asked:

Do you know how to turn off the name of the reviewer to make a review anonymous?

While you can’t turn off/remove an individual reviewer’s name as far as I can find out (Yes you can — see further information at the end of this post on how to do this, based on Tyler’s comment from 10 April 2013), you can remove ALL reviewers names from your document, just leaving the markup/comments, but without names.

A little bit of Googling found that you can remove ALL reviewer names from a document, but not just one. See these:

• http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/word-help/change-the-author-name-for-review-comments-HA010036415.aspx (see the instructions in the ‘Make reviewer names anonymous’ section).
• http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2003-word/change-reviewer-information-in-word/72b87bc8-f56d-40ff-bdee-aba4bbf3b5fb?msgId=79a7422a-aff7-4890-b3e2-0d989089c4c2

You can also change YOUR user name (Review > Track Changes > Change User Name), but no-one else’s. Be aware that making this change applies to ALL Office documents you create.

If you want to change the information about the author etc., then in Word 2010 you can go to File > Info and click Properties on the far right panel, then Advanced Properties to display the old Document Properties box you used to see in Word 2003.

Doing a File > Save As will NOT change the original author/company details; you can only change this manually in the Document Properties dialog box.

To remove a single reviewer’s name from Comments

With thanks to Tyler Moore (comment dated 10 April 2013) for enough information for me to write up this solution fully.

1. Make sure the document you are working on is in Word 2007 or later format (i.e. DOCX extension).
2. Save a COPY of this document and WORK ON THE COPY ONLY until you’re satisfied you’ve achieved what you want. If you make an unrecoverable error, you can always go back to your original.
3. Close the Word document.
4. Go to the file location of the copy of the document and change its extension from docx to zip. Say Yes to make this change.
5. Double-click the new zip file and open it in WinZip or similar. Do NOT extract the files. (I only have WinZip, so the rest of these steps relate to WinZip; your zip software should work similarly).
6. Within WinZip, double-click the word folder — there will be several XML files listed.
7. Right-click on the comments.xml file and select a text editor to open it with (e.g. EditPlus, Expression Web, even Notepad if you have nothing else though other text editor show color-coded syntax and are easier to read).
8. Once open, press Ctrl+H to open the Replace dialog box (if Ctrl+H doesn’t work in your text editor, find the Find/Replace tool and open it).
9. In the Find What field, type w:author=”<reviewer name>” where you substitute <reviewer name> for the name of the reviewer you want to remove; e.g. if the reviewer’s name is Joe Bloggs, then type w:author=”Joe Bloggs”.
10. In the Replace With field, type w:author=”" (i.e. no name).
11. Click Replace All.
12. In the Find What field, type w:initials=”<reviewer initials>” where you substitute <reviewer initials> for the initials of the reviewer you want to remove; e.g. if the reviewer’s initials are JB then type w:initials=”JB”.
13. In the Replace With field, type w:initials=”" (i.e. no initials).
14. Click Replace All.
15. Repeat steps 9 to 14 for any other reviewer names/initials you want to remove.
16. Save the comments.xml file. If you’re asked to update the zip file, do so (in WinZip, choose the Update zip file with changes option).
17. Right-click on the document.xml file and select a text editor to open it with.
18. Once open, press Ctrl+H to open the Replace dialog box.
19. In the Find What field, type w:author=”<reviewer name>” where you substitute <reviewer name> for the name of the reviewer you want to remove; e.g. if the reviewer’s name is Joe Bloggs, then type w:author=”Joe Bloggs”.
20. In the Replace With field, type w:author=”" (i.e. no name).
21. Click Replace All.
22. Typically, the document.xml file doesn’t store the initials, but to be certain press Ctrl+F and search for w:initials. If there’s nothing found, move on to the next step. If you get a match, follow steps 12 to 14, then move on to the next step.
23. Repeat steps 19 to 22 for any other reviewer names you want to remove.
24. Save the document.xml file. If you’re asked to update the zip file, do so (in WinZip, choose the Update zip file with changes option).
25. Close the zip program.
26. Change the file extension back to docx.
27. Open the Word document. If all went well, you should now have comments with dates, but no initials or reviewer names for the reviewers you removed.
28. If all is good, archive off the original document and start using the revised one.

Troubleshooting: If you get an error when opening the Word document, or you find all the comments are missing (!) it’s likely that you inadvertently removed a required space between elements in the XML file(s). How do I know? Because I did it! The solution is to rename the file as a zip file again, open the zip file, open the comments.xml and document.xml files in a text editor and look for things like w:id=”25″w:author=”" — there should be a space between the ending ” of the first part and the following w (i.e. it should be w:id=”25″ w:author=”"). Do a find for “w: (no spaces) and replace with ” w: (a space between the ” and the w). Save the changes, update and close the zip file, and rename the file back to a docx file.

[Links last checked April 2013]

Word: Stop Word from auto capitalizing the first word of bullet items

Well, I didn’t think it was possible, but it is! You CAN stop Word from auto capitalizing the first word in a bullet list item, but there’s a trick to doing it.

By default, Word has the settings for Capitalize the first letter of sentences and Format the beginning of list item like the one before it turned on (in Word 2010, both settings are under File > Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect Options, on the AutoCorrect and AutoFormat As You Type tabs, respectively). Make sure these settings are both turned on. Yes, it seems strange to keep the Capitalize the first letter of sentences turned on, but you need this on for all you normal sentences. Unfortunately, Word considers any bullet list item to be a ‘sentence’ even if it’s not, and so it automatically capitalizes the initial letter of the first word. This is a real pain if your style guide says NOT to capitalize list items that are sentence fragments, single words etc.

So, how do you stop Word from auto capitalizing the first letter in each bullet item? You have to tell Word to undo what it’s just done, and then it will ‘remember’ that choice for subsequent items in the same bullet list. Bottom line: Ctrl+Z.

Here’s how:

1. Type a lead-in sentence to a bullet list as normal (the first letter of the first word will automatically capitalize). Press Enter to go to the next line.
2. Type the first word of the first bullet item in lower case and press the spacebar.
3. Immediately after pressing the spacebar, press Ctrl+Z. This will undo the previous action (i.e. convert the automatically capitalized first letter back to a lower case letter).
4. Continue adding words to the first list item, as required. Press Enter for the next item.
5. Continue adding other bullet list items — each one should now start with a lower case letter.
6. Apply the bullet style to your list, as required.
7. Start typing the next paragraph. Notice that the first letter of the word is in lower case — you will have to manually change this one to upper case. It’s in lower case as it’s following the ‘follow formatting’ rule (and not 100% either!). But changing one lower case letter here is easier than changing many in a long list.

Unfortunately, this trick works for a single list sequence. Once you’ve switched back to the upper case letter for the start of the next paragraph, that setting will hold for the rest of the document unless you change it again. So, you’ll have to repeat the Ctrl+Z trick after the first word in any later bullet lists.   However, once you’ve got into the habit of doing it, it shouldn’t be hard to remember.

Other tips:

• To quickly change case, select the letter/word/paragraph, then press Shift+F3 (see http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/word-change-case/ for more details)
• To change the case of the first letter in a bulleted list, see http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/word-change-the-case-of-the-first-letter-of-each-bullet-list-item/ (note: this doesn’t work very well in Word 2007 and later, though it worked really well in Word 2003)

[Links last checked February 2013]

Word: Moving a table row quickly

Here’s a neat trick I learned from this post: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-tips-for-working-with-word-tables/3594

You can quickly move one or more table rows up or down a table by pressing Shift+Alt and either the up or down arrow key.

Who knew? That one was new to me, but I suspect I’ll use it quite a bit!

Word: Extracting original images from a document

It used to be that if you wanted to extract your graphics from a Word document in pretty much one step, you had to save the document as a web page. This created a folder containing the graphics. But the graphics were saved as — or converted to — fuzzy JPGs, crisp PNGs, or GIFs, depending on the original format of the images. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked — to a point.

I’ve recently discovered (via this website: http://www.indesignmag.com/Content.asp/id/tipoftheweek-2012, which I was alerted to by Chuck Green’s Ideabook.com newsletter) that you can extract graphics in their original formats from any DOCX Word document (i.e. Word 2007, 2010, etc.) by changing the file extension to ZIP, then unzipping that ZIP file.

You end up with a whole slew of folders and XML files, and in amongst them is the word > media folder, in which you will find your original graphics, in their original sizes and format.

Very neat trick!

[Links last checked January 2013]

 

PDF: Corrupted image and lost links

A work colleague called me. She’d discovered that an image in the Word document she was creating a PDF from was corrupted in the resulting PDF. She tried creating the PDF using the PDF/A setting and that worked to a degree — the image was now OK, but she’d lost all her clickable links (Table of Contents, cross-references, etc.). She needed both an uncorrupted image AND clickable links, but couldn’t get both using the ‘save as PDF’ option in Word 2007.

I remembered this document — there were a couple of images in the document that weren’t really images; they were linked Visio objects. And the ‘corrupted’ image was one of these. I suspected that’s where the corruption was coming from, especially as she told me in her phone call that she’d saved the document to her desktop for the purposes of PDF’ing it (the document and the Visio diagram normally live in the client’s SharePoint site); that made me think that the link to the Visio diagram got broken in the process of creating the PDF.

I got her to save the document under a different name (just so she didn’t mess up the one she already had), then got her to copy the (Visio) image and paste it as a picture, then remove the original Visio image. Next I got her to try saving it as a PDF as normal (i.e. not PDF/A), and everything worked! The image was no longer corrupted and all her links worked.

Finally, I suggested that she speak to the author of the document to see if he really needed the linked Visio diagram — if it was unlikely to change, a static image (like the one she’d just created) would appear to be the same and wouldn’t corrupt in the PDF creation process; however, it wouldn’t be able to be edited from within the Word document.

As an aside, it’s likely she wouldn’t have had this issue if she had PDF’ed the document from within SharePoint as the links would have worked correctly. By copying the document to her desktop, it’s likely that those links got broken.

Word 2010: Keyboard shortcut to paste unformatted text

In Word 2003 and 2007, you couldn’t easily paste copied text as unformatted text. You either had to go through several clicks in the the menus, or set up a macro and assign a keyboard shortcut to it (see this blog post for how to do this in Word 2003/2007: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/word-keyboard-shortcut-to-paste-unformatted-text/).

However, in Word 2010 you don’t have to do any of that as there’s a quick and easy way to paste as unformatted text using the keyboard. Laura alerted me to it in her 13 November 2012 comment on the Word 2003/2007 post above, and, with some more help a few days later from Xuberi, I finally got it!

To paste copied text as unformatted text in Word 2010 using the keyboard:

1. Press Ctrl+v to copy the text into your document.
2. Press Ctrl to activate the Paste Options icon.
3. Press t to select the ‘Text only’ option (pressing t is a separate action to pressing Ctrl in step 2 — DO NOT press them together otherwise it won’t work).

More detailed explanation:

What happens in Word 2010 when you press Ctrl+v (Step 1) is that you get the Paste Options icon, and it has (Ctrl) next to it, indicating that the Ctrl key activates the options (you don’t get this in Word 2003 or 2007):

So when you press Ctrl (step 2 above), the Paste Options display:

Now you press the key for the paste option you want — hover over each option’s icon to see which key activates it:

The keyboard options are:

• H — Use destination theme
• K — Keep source formatting
• M — Merge formatting
• T — Keep text only (the unformatted text option).

See also:

• How to paste as unformatted text in Word 2003/2007: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/word-keyboard-shortcut-to-paste-unformatted-text/
• Office 2010: Paste options button not displaying: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2012/04/12/office-2010-paste-options-button-not-displaying/

[Links last checked November 2012]

Word: Number of rows and/or columns in a table

Jeff wanted to know how to find out how many rows he had in a very long table in his Word document. Word Count doesn’t tell you — it tells you how any lines in the document, but each cell (except one) in a table is treated as a ‘line’ for Word Count purposes.

You can find out how many rows (and/or columns) there are in an individual table by checking the table properties. Here’s how:

1. Select the entire table. This selects all rows and columns.
2. Right-click on the selected table and select Table Properties from the shortcut menu.
   
3. Click on the Row tab — the number of rows selected is listed at the top of the dialog box.
   
4. Click on the Column tab — the number of columns selected is listed at the top of the dialog box.
   
5. Click Cancel to close the Table Properties dialog box.

NOTE 1: If you now select another table to check its number of rows and columns, you may find that when the Table Dialog box opens to the last-viewed tab (Row or Columns, no numbers are displayed. Just go back to the Table tab, then click the Row or Column tab again and the number will display.

NOTE 2: Merged cells are mostly treated as though the rows and columns existed as they did when the table was first created. However, if you’ve merged all the cells from several adjacent rows, the row count will reduce.

Cross-references

One of my colleagues asked me some questions about cross-references.

But first, a bit of backstory…

We’re preparing a very large Word document (800+ pages) and each Section (about 18 of them) is being prepared by a different author. At some point, I will have the job of bringing these individual Sections (aka chapters) together into one BIG Word document prior to it going out to the printer and prior to it being PDF’ed and put online for public distribution and comment. I’ve designed the Word template and the styles to make this job easier; I’ve tested the process of compiling the document’s Sections; and I’ve documented the ‘gotchas’ I’ll have to watch out for.

In the meantime, the authors have been beavering away on their Sections. One of the ‘best practice’ things they’ve been doing is inserting automated cross-references for tables, figures and subsections WITHIN their Section, and inserting plain text Section/subsection/table/figure numbers and captions/headings for what will eventually be automated cross-references to other Sections once the document is a single document. It will be my job to create the automated intra-Section cross-references.

But there must have been some discussion in the office about the number of these cross-references to other Sections — perhaps authors were finding it cumbersome to add them, perhaps they were concerned about the readability of the document when it was peppered with cross-references within the text. Maybe something else. So my colleague contacted me to get my advice.

Here’s a summary of my response:

• Consider WHY you have a cross-reference (x-ref) to another section, table etc., whether it’s to something in the same Section or in a different one. The bottom line is that x-refs to a Section/subsection help you avoid repeating the same information in multiple places, or refer to a table/figure that follows or has gone before that provides the information the reader needs to make sense of the narrative.
• Consider HOW a reader will approach a x-ref. In print, they have to flick the pages to find the supporting information, but in online (PDF) they only need to click the link to go to the relevant part to read the information, then can click back to return to where they were. Clicking a link is a simple process for the reader, though going back in a PDF is not quite as straightforward. (See my blog post about this from 2010: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/acrobat-back-and-forward-buttons/)
• Consider WHEN to insert a x-ref or not. If the reader MUST know about something that’s gone before or is to come (e.g. Section 8 Assessment Method) to properly inform the current section, then a x-ref is necessary. Likewise, if the data that supports a claim is held in a table or figure, then a x-ref to that table/figure is necessary. However, if the x-ref is a ‘nice to have’ and just offers a link to related (but not essential) information for the reader, then the author has to decide whether to include it or not.
• Consider WHERE to insert a x-ref. Essential x-refs to other Sections and to tables/figures should go as close as possible to where the referring information is written (which is what you do now). However, for the ‘nice to have’ related x-refs that aren’t essential, consider whether breaking them out into a sidebar/box/list at the bottom of the Section/subsection might be more useful to the reader than peppering them throughout the narrative. If you do pursue this option, make sure the [government regulators] are happy with the idea first and that there’s nothing in the requirements documentation that prevents you from doing so. Also, I suggest you test it on a single Section to see how easy/hard it is to do and how convenient/awkward it is for a reader to deal with.
• Consider WHO will read the document and HOW they will read it. Some readers of the doc will only focus on one or two Sections (e.g. the Department of Fisheries might only focus on marine Sections and ignore terrestrial fauna sections), while others may read the entire document. For a reader who has a limited focus, you cannot assume that because they are reading Section 9 that they’ve read the preceding Sections 1 to 8; even for readers who read the entire document, you can’t assume that they’ve read and remembered what was said in earlier Sections.
• Please DO NOT consider converting the existing automated x-refs into manual ones. There be dragons… Future updates to the documents (e.g. insert/delete a subsection, table/figure) would mean that existing references to subsection numbers, table/figure numbers would be out of order and it would be a nightmare to try to find and fix them all. Automated x-refs mean that you can add/delete material without upsetting the links.

Ultimately, knowing who the likely reader is for this document and how they will access the document will dictate the direction my colleague will take. After all, such a document is about the reader, not the writer, so whatever is easiest for the reader to deal with should prevail over any ‘it’s too hard’ issues that the authors may have.

See also:

• Other posts from this blog related to cross-references: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/tag/cross-references/

[Links last checked October 2012]

PDF won’t deal with Word landscape pages properly

One of my work colleagues sent me a Word 2007 document and its resulting PDF and asked me to see if I could figure out what was happening with two landscape sections.

Both sections looked like this in the PDF, though they looked perfectly fine in the Word document — notice how the two pages with the maps have headers and footers going off the page and that the page is the same dimensions as the Portrait-oriented page above:

I tried several things — re-creating the PDF using Acrobat, using Word’s PDF option, fiddling with the settings in Acrobat etc. all to no avail. In fact, for some tests, I just made it worse!

So I decided to take a closer look at the Word document, and there I found the problem. What appeared to be a landscape section wasn’t. It looked like a landscape section and when I checked the Orientation options on the Page Layout tab in Word, it said it was Landscape, but when I opened the Page Setup dialog box, all was revealed.

The first thing I noticed was that Portrait was selected, not Landscape, even though Landscape was showing as selected on the Orientation button on the ribbon. WTF?

So I checked the Paper tab settings. One of the authors had set a Custom size for the paper size and defined a width and height that matched a landscape A4 page, thinking they were doing the right thing, but in hindsight they weren’t — it was a case of a little knowledge is a dangerous thing!

Just in case this custom page size was the cause of the odd PDF, I changed the page orientation setting on the Margins tab to Landscape.

I then went to the Paper tab to change it back to A4, but it had automatically changed to A4 after I switched to Landscape:

The next test was to save the document and re-create the PDF. The landscape section that was misbehaving now worked fine! So I changed the other incorrectly defined landscape section in the document and re-did the PDF.

Everything was right with my world again! ;-) And my work colleagues were very happy.

Actually, it wasn’t quite right… I found that the PDFs I generated had a lot of excess space above the headers and below the footers throughout the document no matter which PDF creation method I used. I only did a couple of tests to see what was causing it. But I just didn’t have the time to investigate, so I opened the document on my other computer in Word 2010 and re-created the PDF from the default settings and it worked — all that excess space disappeared. I still don’t know what caused that space issue — maybe I’ll have time to investigate the reason next week when some of my deadline pressure is off.

Update: The excess space above/below the headers and footers was related to the track changes view. The document had Final Showing Markup selected on the Review tab in Word as the authors need to show the readers the tracked changes. When I changed the view to Final and re-created the PDF, all that excess space above/below the headers/footers disappeared (as of course, did the excess space on the right for the tracked change markups). But of course, the track changes weren’t visible now. I know that most of the PDFs created by my client have track changes showing and DON’T have this issue with excess space about the headers/footers, but I haven’t yet figured out why it did it with this document. More investigation required…

Update 2: Gerald (comment 1, dated 18 Oct 2012 below) suggested turning off the balloons for comments and formatting in the Track Changes settings in Word. I did, and it worked — the excess space above the headers and below the footers disappeared! This was in Acrobat Pro X and Word 2007. On my other computer, I have Acrobat Pro 9 and Word 2010 and I didn’t get the excess space issue; however, on checking my Word 2010 Track Changes settings, I saw that they were set to show balloons Never, so it looks as though that’s the critical setting. That said, why does Acrobat add space above/below the headers/footers when the Word setting for the balloons is 6.5 cm right (or left; there are no options for top/bottom)? Interestingly, I used the ruler in the PDF to measure the space above/below and both were about 3 cm, so it looks as though Acrobat is not only adding a 6.5 cm space to the right to accommodate the comment balloons, but also adding a combined 6.5 cm to the length of the page too. As a side note, when I turned off the balloons, any comments in the document remained hidden in the PDF — there was a marker to indicate there was a comment, but the comment wouldn’t display in the PDF at all.