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Application Tips

Tips and tricks for everything from Adobe to Zoho!

Find and Replace

One often overlooked feature in word processing programs like Word, WordPerfect and even Microsoft Works is the Find and Replace function. It is used to locate and replace a frequent use of a word with a different word in a document. You might use it if you right contracts, leases or some other long document and need to make a quick change. Here’s how to use it:

  1. Open your document in your word processor
  2. Click Edit –>Replace from the menus
  3. Type a word or phrase in the "Find"  box
  4. Type the word or phrase that you want to replace the found word with in the "Replace" box
  5. Click Replace All

That’s it! Give it a try the next time you need to make a few adjustments in a document. 

Selecting or Highlight Text Tips

Selecting Text on the web or with your word processor:

* Double click on a word to select it
* Click and drag in the margin of your word processor to select entire lines of text

If you have text that you need to select that spans multiple pages, then click once where you want to start selecting, then hold the shift key down and click your mouse after the last word you want to select.

Print your Word document on one page

If you have a letter or some other document you typed in Microsoft Word 97 or 2000, and you want to print it on a single page then this tip will save you some time and frustration.

Before I discovered this feature, I would adjust the margins, shrink the font and make other formatting changes to make my letters fit on one page. Thankfully, one of the more useful additions to Word 97 and Word 2000 is the ability to shrink a document to one page automatically. Here’s how.

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1. Type and edit your document as normal
2. Click on File, then Print Preview
3. Click on the “shrink to fit” icon

Disable or Change Clippy

Who is ‘Clippy’? He’s the little paper clip guy that pops up in Microsoft Word, Excel or any other Microsoft Office program in their 97 and 2000 versions. In the computer world, he appears to be like the Dallas Cowboys…people either love him or hate him.

If you are on the dislike side of the fence, follow this procedure to disable him once and for all:

1. RIGHT Click on Clippy
2. Click on Options (not Hide)
3. Uncheck the box that says “Use the Office Assistant”
4. Click OK

If you start to miss him, just click on Help from the menus and then click on Show Office Assistant

Customize Office Toolbars

Starting with Microsoft Office 2000 and the XP version afterward, software engineers in Redmond decided that showing an entire menu in Word, Excel or any of the Office programs would confuse software users.

Instead of showing the entire menu when clicking on File, Edit, Format, etc, from the menus, we are presented with an abbreviated menu showing only two or three options. In order to view the entire menu, we can either wait a few seconds (who has that kind of time) or click on the double arrows at bottom of the menu.

Thankfully, you can reverse this process, if you wish. You can restore order to the Office menu system and view all the menus with a single click. Follow these steps for either Office 2000 or Office XP products (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Front Page, Access, Outlook (not Express), and Publisher):

Create a Watermark in Microsoft Word

Believe it or not, the post office is capable of mailing a real letter! Letter writing in this era of email is slowly becoming a lost art. However, if you had some nice stationery to write on, you might be more willing to write letters. Even if you want to ‘write’ your letter on your computer, learning how to do so with some nice self-designed stationery would be nice.

Watermarks are the very lightly printed backgrounds on a piece of paper or stationery. You can create your own custom stationery with a watermark to print out independently or with a typed document using word quite simply. Here’s how: