Technology Q&A

Word format check…Work better in Outlook’s Tasks…Fast way to select
print area in Excel…Shortcuts…Revealing the hiding Clipboard.

Q. Boy, am I sorry I gave up that old copy of WordPerfect. At least I could figure out the underlying text formats and then change them in any way I wished. Is there a way to do that in Word?

A. Sorry, Word is not as accommodating in that department. But Word will tell you exactly how text is formatted, and then, using its formatting functions, you can make the changes you want. To uncover how text is formatted, click on Help and What’s This? Then, click on any text to generate an information box, as shown below, that describes how it’s formatted.

Q. I use the Tasks feature in Microsoft Outlook to keep a schedule of files—both documents and spreadsheets—that I must open and review in the weeks ahead. Although the feature is a handy tool for alerting me, I wonder if there is a more efficient way to accomplish that chore. Also, each time I open Tasks, all the listed to-do items are shown with their due dates. Isn’t there a way to make it show only the items that are due today, or those that are late, so I don’t have to wade through the entire list?

A. Yes, there’s a neat way to evoke Tasks to address your first question. Because Outlook is tightly integrated with Word, you can command Tasks to remind you not only to open a file on the day, hour and even minute you choose, but it can actually locate it and then open it for you. Here’s how:

Open the target file—either Word, Excel or any other Microsoft application. Then evoke the Reviewing toolbar by clicking on View, Toolbar and Reviewing, which looks like this:

Click on the Tasks icon (the third from the left: it looks like a checkmark on a clipboard) to bring up this screen:

Then fill in the appropriate boxes—setting the Due date, checking the Reminder box and the time you want to be alerted. Notice also that you can set it to open on recurring dates. Or you can assign the task to someone else and you can configure it as a project with a status report and an assigned completion date.

Now, to respond to your second question: Can you get Outlook to show only current to-do tasks?

Tasks can be configured in many different ways. The simplest (the Outlook default), shows each task alphabetically with the due date (overdue tasks are colored in red). It looks like this:

But if you click on View, Current View, Outlook will list the variations—putting tasks in categories and determining their stage of completion—which looks like this:

You can even show what tasks are due within the next seven days, which looks like this:

Look over the many options and see which suit your needs.

Q. I regularly print many different sections of a large and complex spreadsheet. Since I don’t want to print the entire workbook, I must highlight the area to be printed and then, when I evoke the print menu, I click on Selection so that only the highlighted area is printed. As you can imagine, when you have many sections to print, it becomes tedious. Any suggestions?

A. I have two. First, highlight the area to be printed and click on File, Print Area, and then lock in the section you want printed by clicking on Set Print Area. When you evoke the print command, only that section will print. Of course, when you want to print a different area, you must go back to Print Area and click on Clear the Print Area. While that won’t save you much time, it will at least ensure you capture the right area.

To really save time, use Excel’s Name function to create a kind of catalog of areas that you repeatedly print. To do that, block the first area you want to print and highlight it. Then move your cursor up to the Name box, which is in the upper left corner of the worksheet, in this case labeled A1 because the cursor is in A1.

Type in a descriptive name for that highlighted area, replacing A1. I will name it Profit/Loss. Then, one after the other, highlight all the other areas in the worksheet and give each its own descriptive name.

When you’re ready to print, click on the Name box and search for the area you want to print. When it appears click on Selection and then Print.

That should speed up your selective printing operation.

An amplification Many readers alerted me that one of my solutions to a question in the March column, while workable if you had enough stamina, was hardly the best way to solve the problem. A reader had sought a way to change his user ID, an identification that is automatically inserted when adding comments in Excel or Word. Several other readers wrote in to suggest a better way, which requires little more than a few mouse clicks. In Word, go to Tools, Options, and click on the User Information tag. Then just type the new name. In Excel, go to Tools, Options, and after you click on the General tab, fill in the new name. What could be easier?

Q. One of the things I like about Word 2000 is the expanded Clipboard—except that the darn thing disappears just when I need it most. Help!

A. It is very frustrating, but help is on the way. For those who don’t know about the Clipboard, let me review its basics because it’s a very powerful tool when copying or moving text, graphics, numbers or formulas.

In the old versions of Word, Clipboard held in its memory just one chunk of information—whether it was a word, a whole paragraph or many pages—for either copying or moving. The Office 2000 Clipboard version holds as many as 12 different selections.

Each Word icon stores a different piece of information that you’ve highlighted for copying (Ctrl + C) or moving (Ctrl + X). If you highlight one, a little tip bar will appear that displays the first 50 characters of what Clipboard had captured in that icon.

If you copy or move graphic material, it shows up in the tip bar as the word Picture. If you want to paste what’s in one icon, move your cursor to the target location and then click on the appropriate icon. The Clipboard also works in Excel.

Okay, so why does Clipboard disappear sometimes? It’s because you ignored it.

That may sound ridiculous, but here’s how it works: If you close the Clipboard three times in a row without using it, it’s programmed to conclude that you no longer need it, so it vanishes.

To open it again, either copy an item consecutively two times or click on View, Toolbars and then Clipboard.

Tip: Since the Clipboard takes up a lot of space on your screen, you can move it out of the way or even drag it to the edge of a program title bar and dock it there; once there, it will shrink to this abbreviated size:

If you like the Clipboard concept, you may be interested in more advanced tools that do even more than the one built into Windows. One of them, SmartBoard 2000 (www.smartcode.com) can, among other things, capture multiple items and access them even after you restart Windows. You can assign nicknames to items for easy recognition and password protect them, including user identifications, passwords and credit card numbers. You can download a free version of SmartBoard that comes with advertising banners, or, for a small shareware fee, download an ad-free version.

A similar product—Yankee Clipper III (www.levasseur.net)—is available free and carries no banner advertising.