Take Control of Your Installation

by Don Mankowski

If you're using one of your newly-created commands quite frequently, you may get tired of pulling it out of the macro list each time. Furthermore, WORD provides many other functions that you might find useful, but which are consigned to the deep recesses of some menu and not accessible via keystrokes. In this article, I'll explain how to customize your menus and keys.

Adding one of your (or anybody's) macros to a menu.

Start WORD. You might want to load a file upon which to practice.

Tools

Customize

In the Customize window, select the Commands tab

Scroll the Categories list until you find Macros, and click it once to highlight that word.

Scroll the Commands list until you find Normal.NewMacros.StripParaMark (or ...OneSpaceMax; these are the macros we created in previous lessons). Click it once to highlight the name.

Now, mouse-grab (click on it and hold the button down) that phrase

(Normal.NewMacros.StripParaMark) and mouse-drag it right up to the drop=down menu bar of your WORD screen (the one that says File Edit View ... and so on). I chose to put mine under Format, but you might prefer Edit or another menu choice. Whatever, you will find that the menu for your choice expands downward.

Drag the highlighted phrase down the menu until you find a good place for it -- probably not up top where it will sit with the everyday commands, but down near some function of similar importance, and drop it there. On my Format menu, I put it about where Change Case is.

Note that the name is a jawbreaker phrase, so before you leave, right click the new item, and in ther box beside Name, go in and edit it to remove Normal.NewMacros. and to leave just StripParaMark. Then press [Enter].

[Close] the Customize window.

That's it! Now this command will be available whenever you pull down the Format menu (or whichever menu you stored it under).

Adding a macros to a key or key combination.

Start WORD. You might want to load a file upon which to practice.

Tools

Customize

In the Customize window, click on [Keyboard].

In the window that results, Customize Keyboard, Scroll the Categories list until you find Macros, and click it once to highlight that word.

Scroll the Macros list until you find StripParaMark (or ...OneSpaceMax). Click it once to highlight the name.

Click once in the box under "Press new shortcut key:" just to get the cursor in there.

You now get to press a key (or key combination) to which will be assigned this function.

You may not use key [F1], as that's reserved for "help." You probably wouldn't want to anyway. The plain function keys [F2] through [F8] are assigned fundamental tasks like Open and Save, and probably shouldn't be redefined for esoteric tasks like this, although it's certainly your right to do so. (Ascertain that nobody else in your office or household relies upon these keys as defined before you do so.)

However, it is generally safe to use these keys or other keys preceded by [Shift], [Ctrl] or [Alt] or combinations thereof. You will be warned if you're about to reassign some combination that should be left alone. Still, you might want to put your favorites at [F12] or [Shift]+[F12] or [F11] and so on. Use something with "mnemonic" value. [Alt]+[P] is better that, say [Alt]+[Z], because "P" suggests "paragraph."

For commands that do drastic things, like reformatting big pieces of a file, you might want to use combinations that aren't particularly easy to enact, like [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[P] for StripParaMark, and [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[1] or [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[spacebar] for OneSpaceMax.

Use your imagination.

It has probably occurred to you that you could define a key or a menu item to provide in just a few clicks or strokes, your signature or your return address. Easy enough. With a document open, start macro recording, enter everything you want, clean it up and format it nicely, then stop the recording. Whenever you call up that macro, whether by running it or by invoking it with a menu command or a keyboard command, it will insert your information at the current cursor position. Other frequently-used text that must be correct, like certain legal reminders and disclaimers, can be similarly stored and recalled.

More Keyboard Tricks

For very simple tasks, WORD already has the means to define special keys.

How about the "em-dash," that lonnnng dash, the one you used to use two hyphens to simulate in the old typewriter days?

Start WORD. Load your document.

Insert | Symbol (i.e., click Insert on the menu bar, then Symbol on the resulting menu).

Select the Symbols tab

In the box beside "Font:" scroll until "Symbol" appears. (You'll note that you can bring up other fonts as well, but this is the one we want now.)

The long dash is on the sixth line, about three-quarters of the way over, Highlight it with a click.

Now, were you to click on [ Insert ], WORD would put this character into your file at the current position -- easy enough -- but instead, click on [ Shortcut Key ].

Click to put the cursor in the box under "Press new shortcut key:"

Hold down the [Ctrl] key and press the standard "hyphen" key, the one just to the right of "zero" on most keyboards.

The box shows that [Ctrl]+[-] has been selected. Click on [ Assign ].

Then [ Close ] this window. Next, [ Cancel ] the symbol dialogue window.

Back in your document, test it out!

Note that hitting just the hyphen key puts a short dash, a hyphen in the text. Of course/

[Shift] + [hyphen key] puts the "underscore" symbol in your text. Naturally.

But, voila, [Ctrl] + [hyphen key] now supplies the long dash. Extraordinary!

I chose [Ctrl] + [hyphen] as the easiest sequence to remember, but you could have used something else.

[Shift]+[4], of course, gives you a dollar sign. If you need them. why not assign to [Ctrl]+[4] or [Alt]+[4] the British pound sign (£) – or the cent (¢) or the yen (¥) symbol? (They're in the (normal text) character set.)

If I'm doing a lot of math equations, I might want to assign the (p) "pi" symbol to [Alt]+[P] or [Ctrl]+[P] or even [Alt]+[Shift]+[P] or some other such combination. Maybe I'll need that raised "2" that indicates the square of a number, or the infinity symbol. Chemists and statisticians might need ready access to the alpha, beta and gamma symbols. And they can have them.