Tips, Tricks, and Humor

Select a Column of Text in Word - Even if You Don't Have a Table

You can make columnar text selections through multiple paragraphs in Word. Hold down Option (MAC) or Alt (PC) and drag the mouse across the text you want to highlight. Very cool!

Easily Remove Hyperlink Formatting from Word Flyers, Letters & Brochures

Word is set by default to convert email addresses and URLs into live links, and that's its built-in Character Style for them. For a printed flyer or brochure, however, you may not want all those underlines. You can quickly and easily clear out all the hyperlink formatting in a Word document. Here is how:

Just select all the text (MAC/PC: Command/Control-A), then press Command/Control-6. You have to use the "6" from the top row, not from the number pad. All the hyperlink formatting disappears, but the linked text remains. No other formatting is removed.   — Kazimierz Kapusniak, attributed by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion on November 12, 2007

Add Columns of Numbers in Word

The AutoSum button is simple to use. You put your cursor in an empty cell below a column of numbers, click the AutoSum button in the toolbar, and Word inserts the sum of the numbers above into the cell. Numbers in parentheses or prefixed with a negative sign (a hyphen) are correctly calculated as negative amounts. Alternatively, you can put your cursor in an empty column at the far right of a table, and click AutoSum to get the total of the numbers in the row.

However, AutoSum works only on tables. You can convert regular text to a table via Word's Table > Convert > Text to Table feature. This works best if you separate the columns with a tab.

AutoSum also requires that every cell in the added column be filled with a number. If your columns in contain text entries (for example, "n/a" or "see below"), or are empty, autosum won't work.

Word has a far more forgiving and flexible AutoSum feature called "Calculate." It doesn't require a table, and it's smart enough to ignore empty paragraphs and text in a selection. Not even Excel can do that.

Secret Word Feature: Calculate

Open the Tools > Customize > Commands dialog box (in either the Mac or Windows versions of Word), click on the Tools category, and scroll down until you see the command "Tools Calculate." Drag the command and drop it onto a toolbar you use all the time. (I dropped it onto the Standard toolbar.)

Now you can make just about any sort of selection in your Word document -- if you don't have a Word document to begin with, just copy/paste a table or text from your layout program into a new Word file and run it from there -- and Tools Calculate will tell you the sum of the numbers contained in the selection.

And that's the beauty of it. Unlike AutoSum or Excel, the Tools Calculate command ignores everything that's not a number in the selection when it computes a total. It works with selections of table columns or rows (even if the selection includes text, merged cells, or empty cells). It works with columns of numbers made with tabs and spaces. It even works on sentences and paragraphs!

For example, if you select the sentence, "Mary had 15 apples, Joe had 10, and Jennifer had 3;" and click on the Tools Calculate button, the status bar at the bottom of the document window reports, "The result of the calculation is 28." If poor Joe had -10 apples (negative 10), the message would say, "The result of the calculation is 8." Pretty smart!

You don't have to memorize what the status bar says. Word automatically puts a copy of the calculation in your computer's Clipboard memory. So after running the Tools Calculate command, you could click a text insertion point in the Word file (or in any document in any program), choose Edit > Paste (Command/Control-V), and the calculation result is pasted into the text flow, matching the current formatting. Now that's cool!  — Excerpted from article by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion on November 12, 2007

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