e eloquence formatting_hell_r2
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Learn to face your formatting demons! Lesson 1: Formatting MarksTRANSCRIPT
Formatting HellFace Your Formatting Demons!Lesson 1 – Meet the Demons
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Welcome to Formatting HellHave you ever spent a precious hour trying to get Microsoft Word just to format an important document correctly?
After trying and trying and trying, you might start to suspect Word is the devil’s newest playground. Is this program supposed to be a tormentor or a tool?!
But help is here – you can exorcise your Word demons.
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Demon Hunting WeaponsThe first step to exorcising your Word demons is to know which demons have possessed your document.
To hunt them down, turn on formatting symbols. In Word 2007, the control is in the Home tab of the ribbon:
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Demon Hunting WeaponsSome people find these symbols annoying while they’re working on a document, but it’s better to learn to work with them and get used to their presence.
Demon slayers can use all the help they can get. Use your secret weapons!
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Meet the DemonsLet’s get to know our little tormentors.
Type 1: Dot DemonsHere’s what a Dot Demon looks like in your Word document (with formatting marks on, of course!):
They’re like chiggers. Here’s one at extreme magnification:
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Meet the DemonsDot Demons are also called spacing marks; they show how many spaces you have between words. There should be 1 space between each word and 2 between sentences. These guys are helpful in limited numbers, but they shouldn’t be allowed to pack up! Some people put in a whole bunch of spaces after a word in order to create a line break, but that’s never a good idea because if the text has to be edited, those extra spaces can be torturous indeed. The more there are, the worse it is…just like chiggers.
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Meet the DemonsType 2: Paragraph Poltergeists
Meet the Paragraph Poltergeist. You should already recognize him from the paragraph mark in your menu bar that allows you to turn on formatting marks. That button is a picture of how he looks in your document:
Here he is at extreme magnification:
Pretty scary, right???
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Meet the DemonsThis poltergeist is really just a paragraph mark,
or a “hard” enter (made just by hitting the Enter key). By putting this guy here, you told
Word that you are no longer in the same paragraph, so Word will set the line
spacing accordingly.
Usually there is more spacing between two paragraphs than there is between two lines of the same paragraph… and with this guy as the
enforcer, you can understand why.8© e-eloquence.com
Meet the DemonsType 3: Soft-Enter Succubus
Ah, the Soft‐Enter Succubus. She’s really more mischievous than malicious, but she’ll still cause you plenty of frustration if you let her.
Here’s how she looks in your document:
And here she is, revealed in extreme magnification:
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Meet the DemonsThis is a line break, or a “soft” enter. To get this
pretty little Succubus, you press Shift and Enter together.
All she does is break a line where you do that, and she won’t change the spacing like a
Paragraph Poltergeist will). The Succubus’s main method of torture
is to break lines where you don’t want them broken. She can make things look very
strange indeed… maybe even possessed.
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Meet the DemonsType 4: Tab TrollsMeet the Tab Troll:
He looks pretty mean when you magnify him…
…but he’s just grouchy sometimes.
Aren’t we all, really???
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Meet the DemonsYou’ve tabbed in one time if you see one of these, twice if two, etc.
While the wise author uses a tab troll at the beginning of an indented paragraph instead of 5 dot demons, the unsuspecting might be surprised when they backspace to try to delete a space or two and instead end up with no spaces at all!
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Meet the DemonsTypes 5 & 6: Grid Ghosts & Cell Sprites
If you’re using tables in your document, you may come across something like this:
Grid Ghosts and Cell Sprites never appear without one another, thanks to a partnership
they created in wartime, so prepare thyself, slayer, for more thana simple duel. 13
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Meet the DemonsWhat’s happening here is that the gridlines on the table are hidden, but the gray lines still show so you know where the cells break.
The little cell sprite in each cell shows you 2 things – the formatting of the waiting cells (the example ones are left‐aligned and
centered vertically) and the end of the cell.
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Meet the DemonsType 7: Keep-with-Next Critters
The little square next to the word “These” in the example above is the Keep‐with‐Next Critter.
Here he is at extreme magnification:
Seeing him in your document means that a formatting feature called “Keep with next” is turned on for this sentence.
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Meet the DemonsThat does exactly what it sounds like – it keeps
this sentence with whatever is next. If you didn’t intend for it to be kept with the next thing, or if you’ve somehow gotten that setting in a lot of places in your document, it can be very troublesome indeed, causing text to flow to the next page in its effort to forever stay with the
next item. Maybe you received a template from someone else already possessed with this little demon. How would you know it was there if you didn’t have your formatting marks turned on?
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Meet the DemonsThe Keep‐with‐Next critter can also be very useful, though, so if you want to use it, select the line you want to stay with the next one, then go into the paragraph settings, switch into the second tab (Line and Page Breaks), and finally check the box for “Keep with next”. Now you won’t have any problems keeping an introductory line with what it introduces.
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Meet the DemonsType 8: Break Snakes
Break Snakes don’t look so bad, do they?
At least they’re friendly enough to tell you what they are, right?
Well, not always.
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Meet the DemonsBreak Snakes can cause many problems. One is that if you have text preceding the break
that runs to the end of the line, you might not see these guys hiding out.
It’ll look something like this:
See him? On the far right there? Only his tail is showing. That’s the thing about snakes –they like to hide.
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Meet the DemonsTo see him better and determine which kind of break snake you have (of 7 possibilities!), you have to switch views. The best view for break snake hunting is the draft view. In Word 2007, you can switch to draft view either with the icons in the bottom status bar or by going to
the View menu, & then selecting Draft.
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Meet the DemonsThere are 7 kinds of Break Snakes, 4 of which are of the Section Break type. These last are the most troublesome. A Section Break Snake can cause you to lose your headings, footers, page numbering, and even your page margins if he’s in a sneaky mood. And snakes are often in a sneaky mood! Section breaks can be very useful, too, for exactly the same reason, though. For example, if you need to insert a landscape picture into an otherwise portrait‐oriented document, a section break before and after the picture will allow you to make just that page landscape‐oriented. Neat, right?
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SummaryAlright, demon slayer – you know your foes.
Remember the first step to conquering them is to see them, so turn on your formatting marks
when you’re formatting! (That just makes sense, doesn’t it?)
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CreditsMuch gratitude to all the Creative Commons artists and projects on the web.
(Devil) http://sketchory.com/s/vs7j6j6bbw98
(Sword) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sword_mirror.jpg
(Dot Demon) http://sketchory.com/s/h3m4uw297irh
(Paragraph Poltergeist) http://sketchory.com/s/z1rky56mb0ku
(Soft‐Enter Succubus) http://sketchory.com/s/wy140z9s3cyq
(Tab Troll) http://sketchory.com/s/e3xdmm289nv6
(Cell Sprite) http://sketchory.com/s/6c7qe12z06wl
(Keep‐with‐Next Critter) http://sketchory.com/s/rtb9t0yg07en
(Page Break Snake) http://sketchory.com/s/vjg9hlx21xn4
(Section Break Snake) http://sketchory.com/s/jq1mbikueeuu
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ResourcesVisit e‐eloquence.com for more help.
Other resources:The Word MVP Site http://word.mvps.org/FAQS/Formatting/NonPrintChars.htm
Official MS Word Support Site http://support.microsoft.com/kb/901125
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