Word and Writer
SELECT TEXT QUICKLY
Double-click a word once to select it, or triple-click to select an entire paragraph. In Word, hold Ctrl as you click to select the sentence. Hold down Alt and click and drag to select a block of text.
SUPER-SMART SELECTIONS
There’s a handy option under Editing on Word’s Home tab called Select – click this and you’ll see an option to ‘Select Text with Similar Formatting’, which enables you to quickly select all text with the same style as the current selection. The feature isn’t available in LibreOffice Writer, but it is available when editing documents online in Google Docs – position your cursor, right-click and choose ‘Select all matching text’, which produces matches based on font, style and colour as well as styles.
INCLUDE MISSPELLED WORDS IN SEARCHES
When searching for a specific word using the ‘Find and Replace’ dialog box, you can allow for misspellings – for example, ‘there’ instead of ‘their’. In Word, click ‘More>>’ and tick the ‘Sounds Like (English)’ box to do so. It’s also possible to search for variations like ‘went’ and ‘gone’ when searching for ‘go’ by ticking the ‘Find all word forms (English)’ box, too.
In LibreOffice, tick ‘Similarity search’ and then click the Similarities box to define the levels of difference if too few or too many variations are found.
REMOVE UNWANTED CHARACTERS
You can also instruct Word to search for so-called special characters such as manual line breaks or tab characters – place your cursor in the ‘Find what’ box before clicking the Special drop-down menu to select one. Similar options can be found in LibreOffice by clicking the ‘Attributes…’ button.
USE AN EXCLUSION DICTIONARY
When your word processor is set to highlight so-called misspellings (basically any word not in your dictionary), there may be certain words you want to flag up even if they exist in the default dictionary. To do this in Word, press Win-R, type %AppData%\ Microsoft\UProof and click OK. Right-click the English exclusion dictionary file – ExcludeDictionaryEN0809.lex – and choose ‘Open with’ > ‘More apps’, select your text editor (untick ‘Always use this app to open LEX files’) and click
OK. Now simply add each word you want to exclude on separate lines, save the file and they should be flagged in Word going forward.
Things are even easier in LibreOffice Writer: go to Tools > Options > Language Settings > Writing Aids. Click New to create a user-defined dictionary and be sure to tick ‘Exception (-)’ to create an exclusion dictionary, which you can then add words to by selecting it and clicking Edit.
SAVE MULTIPLE FILE VERSIONS
One way to save different revisions of the same file is to store them in a cloud folder, but you have no control over which versions actually get saved. In Writer, you can choose File > Versions to save multiple versions of the same file within one document – each version is accompanied by a date and time, and you can add comments, then compare changes, move between them and so on. The feature is also present in earlier versions of Word but was dropped from Word 2013 on.
MAKE USE OF AUTOTEXT
Save set blocks of text including tables and formatting to use later with AutoText in Word and Writer. Enter and format the text as you’d like it to appear in future documents. With the text selected, choose Tools > AutoText (Writer), pick a category for your text, give it a suitable shortcut name longer than four characters and click AutoText > New > Close.
In Word, you need to click the QuickParts button on the Ribbon’s Insert tab in Word and choose AutoText followed by ‘Save Selection to AutoText Gallery’. Complete the information in the Create New Building Block dialog, ensuring that the Normal template is selected if you want to use this block of text in future documents. Click ‘OK’.
To add the block of text to any future document, type the phrase or shortcut you assigned to it and press F3.
AUTOTEXT AND PHOTOS
In Word, you can also store images as AutoText entries for quick insertion into documents. Insert the picture into a blank document, select it and click the QuickParts button as before and repeat the same steps. Again, assign it a suitable name that can be used as a shortcut to quickly insert into the document by typing the name and pressing F3.
GET ONLINE DEFINITIONS
Come across a word or phrase you need to learn more about? Right-click it in Word and choose Smart Lookup to open a pane where you can explore Wikipedia and other related web results, plus gain a definition by selecting Define.
FIND ALTERNATIVE WORDS
Sometimes you can find that words repeat themselves in a document. Luckily, you can find alternatives with your word processor’s help: just right-click the word in question and select Synonyms for some alternative
suggestions (select one to replace the text with it) or choose Thesaurus to open the Thesaurus pane or dialog.
CHANGE TEXT CASE
Both Microsoft Word and LibreOffice Writer make it easy to change the case of a selected sentence – look for the ‘Aa’ button on Word’s Ribbon for options including sentence case, all caps and toggle case. LibreOffice buries its case-change features under the Format > Text menu. The same options are available in both suites, along with a Cycle Case option that cycles between uppercase, lowercase, capitalise each word and sentence case – press Shift-F3 to do so.
MORE CASE CHANGES
You can also change case through a Find and Replace action: make sure that Match Case isn’t ticked (under ‘More>>>’ in Word), then type the word or phrase in the Find dialog box before repeating it – with the case set correctly – in the Replace box. This ensures all instances of that word or phrase will be converted when you click ‘Replace All’.
If you’d like to change case using formatting – in other words, apply small caps or all caps – then click the Format button and choose Font to apply them in Word; In Writer, you will find the options hidden away under the Effects drop-down on the Font Effects tab.
REDUCE LINE SPACING
Click the Line Spacing button on the Ribbon (look under Home > Paragraph in Word; Format > Paragraph > Indents & Spacing in Writer) to access advanced line spacing options. Want to reduce the gap between lines, for example?
Check that both Above and Below spacing options are set to 0.
What if you want to reduce the spacing to below 1? In Word, set the Line Spacing drop-down to Multiple, then enter a figure less than 1 (for example, 0.7). Click ‘OK’ to see the effect. Writer users should choose the Proportional setting, then enter a percentage figure less than 100.
CHANGE ORDER OF STYLES
The Styles section on Word’s Ribbon is a little cramped, meaning that often you can only access a handful of styles with a single click. One way to improve matters is to streamline the list: right-click an unused style and choose ‘Remove from Style Gallery’. Another option is to reorder the list, so you’re most-used styles appear first.
You can also change the way the items are sorted by clicking ‘Options…’ on the Styles pane using the ‘Select how list is sorted’ drop-down, but a better way is to click the Manage Styles button immediately to the left of ‘Options…’. Switch to the Recommend tab and you’ll see controls for moving styles up and down the list, enabling you to change their running order.
BUILD IN NAVIGATION ELEMENTS
Styles aren’t just used to provide some consistent formatting to your document; they’re also useful for building in navigation elements. Get into the habit of organising your document using Heading and Body styles, and you’ll be able to quickly and easily build a table of contents using the heading styles to automatically mark chapter and section points.
Look for the table of contents controls on the References tab on the Word and Writer Ribbons; if you’re sticking with the classic (that is non-Ribbon) look in Writer, you’ll find all the navigation tools you need on the Insert menu.