Taz, et al.:
Selecting the phrase and looking at the "button" . . . that's exactly the
problem. It takes a lot longer to click on each word or each comma one at a
time to check the formatting. I am in one of many professions where it is
necessary to check these things. It is common to judge someone's academic or
legal abilities by something as anal as whether the person used the correct
citation format. In legal (and academic) citations a document name is often
italicized, but the comma at the end of the document name is NOT italicized.
I did not create this system ("Bluebook"); Harvard professors did.
Unfortunately, I am stuck using Bluebook just like I am stuck using Word for
some things. Learnining to use "styles" will not make checking formats any
easier because you'd have to have a different "style" for every piece of the
citation. The italicized document or case name would have one style, but the
document's location (including the comma attached to the last word of the
case name) would have a different style, which may have a different format
from the case or publilcation date. Citation is all about italicizing and
unitalicizing and applying smallcapps every couple characters. Because you
can't see a list of all the text with applicable "styles" all at the same
time, you would have to scroll through a letter at a time to check
everything. Also, Word tends to apply the same formatting to an entire word,
so I doubt the "style" feature is even compatible for my purposes-the reason
I don't plan to spend much time learning to use it.
Responding to another comment: YES, there are a lot of people who CAN tell
whether a comma is italicized just by looking at it. It is these people who
decide or at least influence whether an article gets published or whether a
court accepts an appeal-something that can affect a client's money, custody
of their children, whether or for how long they go to prison, and, in rare
cases, whether they live or die. I don't expect you to understand, but trust
me, the citations have to be perfect because even a few mistakes damage the
writer's credibility--and damaged credibility means diminished persuasive
effect. The way the Word program is written makes checking these things a
lot more difficult than it needs to be.
Regarding my "sarcastic tone," I was responding in kind to the tone of the
"Life after Reveal Codes" article. Have you read it? It isn't exactly
written in a diplomatic tone. In addition to its condescending tone, the
content of the article shows that the author has absolutely no understanding
of the concerns faced by people who are looking for the nonexisent Word
equivalent of 'reveal codes.'
Some other silly anal things article editors and judicial clerks care about
are whether a line break inappropriately splits up citations containing
hyphens and section symbols, and whether a writer uses the correct number of
spaces between words and sentences. (The ability to spot extra or missing
spaces seems to be even more prevelant than the ability to spot
inappropriately italicized commas.) "Life after Reveal Codes" doesn't even
suggest the partial fix of clicking on the 'paragraph' symbol (shortcut Ctrl*
a/k/a Ctrl+Shift+8) to toggle "reveal non-printing characters," which
displays a little "dot" for every space so you can easily spot extra or
omitted spaces. A Word user who doesn't know about "reveal non-printing
characters" must arrow through a character at a time to check for the correct
number of spaces. As for keeping characters together, "reveal non-printing
characters" helpfully displays symbols for non-breaking spaces and hyphens
(a/k/a "hard space" and "hyphen character" to WP users-Microsoft does get
points for picking the more intuitive name). Before I found out about
"reveal..." I actually checked this by inserting dummy text to force a
citation to the end of a line to see if the statute number stayed together
despite the hyphen or space after the section symbol. The only other
alternative was to manually fix inappropriately "split" text during the final
proofread-when I needed to be concentrating on other issues.
Thanks to all for confirming my suspicions that it just can't be done in
Word. And I do appreciate everyone trying to help. Unfortunately, no one
seems to fully appreciate the real issue; as a result these postings are all
just regurgitations of what others have already posted.
Thanks anyway.
"CyberTaz" wrote:
Double-click the comma in question & look at the Italics button on the
formatting toolbar. If the button is pressed in, the comma is italicized -
If the button is popped out the comma *isn't* italicized... But as Graham
suggested if the document is properly formatted it shouldn't be necessary to
check every comma in the document. If styles are used single characters
simply don't get left out of the process.
If a certain phrase is suspect, select the phrase and look at the button. If
*any* of the phrase isn't italicized the button will be popped out and
clicking it twice or - better yet - reapplying the appropriate style will
reformat the selected content completely.
I understand where you're coming from & have had to deal with many people in
a similar situation. You've learned to use WP effectively & have been forced
to use a different program against your will. The natural tendency is to
fight it every step of the way rather than learning to use the new tool, but
it isn't a matter of "better or worse" it's simply a matter of *different*
On another level, I sincerely hope that
Ok genious,
wasn't written with the venomous sarcastic tone the phrase evokes. The
people here aren't responsible for you situation and are volunteering there
time & knowledge to help you make the transition as smooth as possible.
Don't take your anger & resentment out on them.
Regards |:)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac
On 8/18/07 5:00 AM, in article
, "ALeiS"
wrote:
Ok genious, how do you see ALL the text formatting at the same time? For
example, in the world of legal writing, it is important that text and
citations
use several different text attributes (italics, smallcaps, underline, bold),
and
there are people who get upset if a comma isn't italicized. It's a real
pain to
have to arrow through the text a letter at a time to check on the font
attributes, and it's too easy to miss things like that just by glancing over
the text and trying to guess based on visual impression. I am not one of
those individuals gifted with the ability to discern whether or not a comma
is italicized. So is there or is there not a way to see all the attibutes or
formatting or codes or whatever you want to call them--all at the same time
and not in some box floating at the right of the page that only shows the
attributes of a little piece at a time?
"Dian D. Chapman, MVP" wrote:
You might want to read this article...
Is there life after "Reveal Codes"?
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/RevealCodes.htm
And you might also want to learn how Word works. Realize it is NOT WP
and works differently.
Dian D. Chapman, Technical Consultant
Microsoft MVP, MOS Certified
Editor/TechTrax Ezine
Free MS Tutorials: http://www.mousetrax.com/techtrax
Free Word eBook: http://www.mousetrax.com/books.html
Optimize your business docs: http://www.mousetrax.com/consulting
Learn VBA the easy way: http://www.mousetrax.com/techcourses.html
On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 09:23:02 -0700, "Rachel King" Rachel
wrote:
Help. Please urge Microsoft to give us "REVEAL CODES" like the reveal codes
in Corel's WORD PERFECT not the "reveal codes" in Microsoft Word. Microsoft
words' reveal codes is worthless -- it only shows some codes, That's why I
still love Corel's Word Perfect because when we have a problem with
formatting or anything we can turn on "reveal codes" and we can see every
single code and we can try to delete various codes to ascertain what is
causing the problem. I still don't know how or why some key strokes cause
different effects and if we had "reveal codes" which would reveal ALL codes,
we could figure out what causes problems on our own. We need to be able to
troubleshoot ourselves and we cannot so long as we do not have reveal codes!