Log in | Register

MS Word Question

Oct 31st, 2008 | By danberman | Category: Discussion

My expertise with MS Word was with older versions. When one highlighted a passage and applied some formatting, it did what I wanted it to do. Using it again now, I find it to have changed. i have a document that is a mixture of text and tables. If I highlight the contents of a cell, one line (with or without the paragraph mark, which used to be the controller of the preceding paragraph) and apply any kind of formatting, other parts of or the entire document gets changed. Whether I bold something, change font, center or right justify, etc. Drives me batty! Just want to change the highlighed passage or cell. I used to prefer MS Word over FrameMaker, but the latter would never act like that!

Also, I feel a lack of precision now in cell column widths. I change one and it affects the width of others. I only want them to change when I change them. If I go to tables>properties>columns and fix a size there, it seems it is overridden when I continue formatting the table.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Dan Berman

Tags: ,

2 comments
Leave a comment »

  1. Tracey November 4th, 2008 4:52 pm :

    Hi Dan,

    Hope your problem has been fixed by now. But if not, I would ensure that you have Show/Hide paragraph marks ON. And that you are NOT highlighting the paragraph mark if you want to bold, justify, etc.

    Word should not be making changes in other areas outside the cell. Not sure why this is happening.

  2. Colin November 6th, 2008 12:16 pm :

    This is a big pain, I know, I am having the same problem with RoboHelp. A few months ago, Pamela Treme gave us a good lesson on Word and RoboHelp. The nuggets she shared were as valuable as what Mr. Robinson said to Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate” movie. No, she didn’t say “plastics.” She said Word hides all of the formatting for a block of text within the period at the end of the last sentence!

    I did not know this then and it has made my editing so much better since. Try it. Position your cursor at the very end of text block and change the style. The entire block changes.

    In RoboHelp, I can view the HTML code and search for a code scrap causing the problem, but in Word, I delete the period and format the block the way I want. In RoboHelp, I create a topic page with blank text box formatted to match my existing document style. I copy the formatted box whenever I want to insert a new text box.

    Hope this helps…

Leave Comment