But I don’t want to be a business person, that’s why I’m an artist

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We’re artists, and a lot of us are very visual people. So this week, we’re looking at using images in Microsoft Word.

I’m Alia Vryens, and I’m the Microsoft Word wizard here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. This week, I wanna talk about images and what we can do with them in Microsoft Word. As always, it is a fairly simple topic, but there are a couple of tips and tricks that I wanna show you that you might not know about. So let’s go.

First off, I wanna caveat this tip with a warning. If you’re dealing with really image-dense documents, Word is not gonna be your friend. It’s really not designed for amazing desktop publishing. In a perfect world, anything really image or design-rich should be done in Adobe InDesign. But at a pinch, even PowerPoint is better to work in than Word. Best thing is the tips I’m gonna give you now will also work in PowerPoint. And in the extended version of this tip, over on our members site, I’m gonna show you how you can set up PowerPoint quickly to become a really powerful desktop publishing tool. So check that out.

But there are gonna be times when Word just has to be the thing that you have to use. So here are some things you can do. Okay, you can see here that I’ve got an invoice that I’m gonna send out. I picked an invoice so that we’ve got tables and different elements on the page. But, also, this tip is coming from a question one of the artists in our community had that was specifically dealing with this kind of document, and I’m happy to try and help. I’d like to include some pictures of the art that the invoice is relating to. Now I’m gonna assume that you know how to add images, so let’s skip forward a bit.

Here, I have two images already inserted. I wanna add one more. But you can see when I added it, the picture is way too large. I want it to be the exact same size as the other two images I already have there. So I click on one of the existing images. Make sure you’re looking at the Pictures Tools tab in the ribbon at the top. See at the top right, it has size dimensions listed. Take note of just one of the dimensions. In this case, I’m gonna remember that the height is 3.9 centimeters. Now, click back on the larger image. Then click into the height value in the size dimensions and highlight what’s written there. Type 3.9 and hit enter. And, voila, the image resizes keeping its proper ratio. And now it’s the exact same size as the other ones I have already there. Cool, huh? Cool.

So the next thing I wanna show you is replacing an image that’s already in your document. So I like having these three images here, but I’ve decided that one of them isn’t quite right. But I’ve already got everything sized correctly. So what do I do? Well, right-click on the image that you wanna swap out and click Change Picture. We wanna insert something that I already have on file. So I click “From a File” and Browse. I select the new image that I wanna drop in and I click Insert. It insets the image in the place of the one that I already had there. And because both images were the exact same dimensions, the new image inserts as the exact same size as the one that was there already. I mean this means that if you have a layout that you like, you can change the images around without shifting things around too much. Pretty nifty.

Okay, let’s have a look at placing images were you have a lot of text. You have a few different options. Here’s my document. I wanna insert a picture in the middle of it all. I’m just gonna resize it a bit to make it a bit obvious what we’re gonna do. There we are. There are two things that we can use to improve how this looks in amongst our text, layout options and position. Layout options lets you decide how the image interacts with the text around it. The default when you insert an image is to have the image in line with text, which basically means Word treats the image as it would treat a paragraph. It will see it on the page, above and below the other paragraph text, and it’s kind of beholden to the same kind of rules that the rest of the text is, you know, whether it’s left-justified, right-justified, the padding above and below, all that kind of stuff. Images with this layout option can’t be dragged on to just any old part of a document. They fit in line with the text justified in the same way.

Other useful layout options, though, include Square, which lets you wrap the text around the image and lets you click and drag the image wherever you want it on the page, where if you drag it, the text is gonna wrap itself around the image. See what I’ve done there? Tight and Through do a similar job, but that’s kind of more apparent when you’ve got an image that’s a different shape. See here, with my circle, see how the text wraps to the edge of the circle in a curved line. The Top and Bottom option makes it look the same as an in line text, but it actually lets you click and drag it on to any part of the page. Behind Text will let the text display over the top of the image. And In Front of Text will let the text, you got it, go behind the image, right. Obviously, this lets you do a bunch of different things with your layout that can be really useful.

So next, position. Position is a bit like layout options, but it’s a bit more like a preset to make the document look good. It’s under the Picture Tools tab in your ribbon, the basics. Position basically gives you some options on where in the document you wanna put the image, top left, top right, middle, bottom middle, you know, wherever you wanna put it on the page. The image is set to have text wrapped around it and goes to the point on the page that you select. Cool.

And, lastly, I wanna show you the align function, which helps you arrange images on the page. I’ve added a few more elements onto my page to help me show you what we’re talking about. Under the Picture Tools tab in the ribbon, we have an Align button that gives us a lot of options. If you have just one image selected, choosing any of these options will align that object to the page in the way that you selected. For example, selecting the top image and choosing Align Left aligns that image to the left of the page, same if I choose Align Center, Align Right, Align Top, etc., etc.

But if I choose multiple objects by holding Shift on the keyboard and clicking until I’ve selected everything I want to move and choosing this same option, Align Left, instead of aligning to the page, the objects actually align to themselves. See how the left edges have all matched up now. I can also change it to Align Right, and now they’re all aligned to the rightmost edge of the collection of images. Pretty nifty. We can also distribute horizontally and distribute vertically, which is gonna balance out the distribution of the object along those two axes. Now, as always, have a play and see what you can get it to do.

And that’s it. Leave me a comment with any questions you have or suggestions for other things you’d like me to go over. Now I have a lot more that I can talk about when it comes to images and documents. So if you want me to make a part two on this, let me know in the comments below.

In the extended version of this video, I’m gonna talk about how to use PowerPoint as a cool desktop publishing tool instead of just for presentations. So if you’re interested in that, head over to our website and sign up for the ASAP membership site. As always, make sure you subscribe to our hot tips and check out our website at auspiciousartsincubator.org.

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John Paul: Welcome to this weekly podcast of Hot Tip Tuesday presented by the Auspicious Arts Incubator, building sustainable arts businesses.  
 
Alia: Copying content between Microsoft programs can sometimes be annoying, so here’s a quick tip to make life much easier. I’m Alia Vryen, and I’m the Microsoft Word wizard here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator, and I’m back this week with another quick tip for you to get your documents to look the way you want them to look, fast. I put it out to our community of artists to see what problems that you might be having that I could potentially help you with. So, this week’s tip comes courtesy of a question from Tricia Stedman [SP]. So, thanks, Tricia. Tricia said she’d been having problems copying and pasting text from one Microsoft program into another, like from Word to Excel or PowerPoint, and then losing all of the formatting that she’d done. And this is an issue that I see a lot of people struggling with, so I thought it would be an easy one to try and fix with you.  
 
Now, I’ve talked to you before about how to style a document using style sheets or copying the existing formatting using the paintbrush tool. Well, how can we make sure that we don’t lose all of that good work when we want the same text in a different program? Let’s look at my example. I have a Word document that has a couple of headings, some paragraph text and some bullet points. I’d like to copy this over to my Excel document. So, I highlight everything, I press Ctrl+C, or command and C on a Mac, for the copy, and then Ctrl+V for paste into the Excel. Now, here’s where things get interesting. Sometimes, in the newer versions of Word, it can tell what you’re trying to do and helps you to be smart. You can see in my example that it actually copies all of the formatting across really easily. But sometimes, especially in the older versions of Word and Excel, this process doesn’t go so smoothly and you’ll actually get something that looks like this, all plaintext and none of the nice formatting.   
 
Now, there’s a little tool that can help make sure that you keep the look of the text that you want, which is called “paste special.” Now, most, if not all of the Microsoft suite of programs have a version of this button, and they can be used in a bunch of ways. In this example, this is what I would do. I would copy the text that I want in the Word file, I would go to my Excel file, and then find the “paste special” button in the top left. The first little icon displayed there is what we want right now, and if you hover over it you’ll see that it’s called “keep source formatting.” And when you click it, it’s gonna put the text that you copied into your new document, using the formatting that you had in the Word file. You can also do the same thing between two Word documents that have different style sheets. See, in this other document I have, it has different looking headings, and I wanna copy the text from my first document but I want the text that I’m copying to look different from the stuff in the new document. So, I copy the text that I want, highlight and Ctrl+C, and then I go to the other document I wanna paste into, I put my cursor where I want to insert the text. I go to the “paste special” button and select the icon, “keep source formatting.” And see now, how the text is pasted in, looking like the first document and not matching to the second document.  
 
The next place that it’s really useful to know about the “keep source formatting” option is when you’re working in PowerPoint. So, here’s my presentation. It’s got a green style to it and I’ve got a couple of slides. I wanna add some slides from my different presentation that I’ve done, this purple-looking one, and I wanna keep the purple slides looking purple. So, I select the slides I wanna copy, and if you don’t actually know how to do that, you click on the first page thumbnail at the left of the screen, you hold down shift and then you click on the last page thumbnail that you wanna copy, if there’s more than one that you wanna copy across. If I hold shift, it’s gonna allow me to select more than one page, and will actually select all the pages in-between the two that I’ve selected. It’s a bit nifty. Anyway, then I go to my first presentation and I right-click in-between the page thumbnails at the point that I wanna add the new slides, and I’m given the “paste special” option box. This time, it’s the middle icon that’s the “keep source formatting” option. We select that, and you’ll see that the slides are added, keeping the purple look. If we hadn’t used this function, the new slides would’ve inserted, trying to copy the existing green style. And that’s it.  
 
Check out our new members’ site, where I actually go over this tip in more detail, and I look at some of the other “paste special” functions that can be really helpful. We have other weekly, monthly content, including live Q&A sessions, interviews with industry members and handy eBooks. On this video, leave me a comment with any other questions that you have or suggestions for other things you’d like me to go over, and make sure you subscribe to our Hot Tips and check out our website at auspiciousartsincubator.org.  
 
John Paul: Thanks for listening to this week’s Hot Tip Tuesday podcast. All of these podcasts in the Hot Tip Tuesday series are curated by myself, John Paul Fischbach, the CEO and Chief Alchemist here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator, and are produced by Alia Vryens. Check us out if you wanna see this podcast, because sometimes there are visuals that don’t translate in a podcast. And you can see those videos if you check out our website, www.auspiciousartsincubator.org. And there’s a drop-down menu for “quick help for artists,” where you can see the video version of this podcast. 

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Hi, I’m Alia Vryens and I’m the Microsoft Word Wizard here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. This week I’m actually shifting my main focus from Microsoft Word tips and looking at website design. Last time I was on here for Hot Tip Tuesday I talked about styles and how to use your style sheet in Microsoft Word. Today we’re going to look at a similar thing but this time for your website.

One problem in talking you through this is that there are so many different ways to build websites. It’s going to be hard to visually show you examples of what I mean for everything but we can still do this. Our Hot Tip Tuesday site is built in WordPress and it’s one of the most popular platforms for us artists to make things in. That is what I’m going to be using today to show you things. Just so you know if you’re not using WordPress that principles that I’m going to talk over are still really relevant and even though things might look a bit different in your world. Keep all of this in mind because it’s really important.

Styles, when we look at the Word document in my last tip we had Heading 1, Heading 2, Paragraph or Normal or Body Text. These things also actually exist in website land. We talked last time about how making these things Heading 1 and Heading 2 not just aesthetic but also functional and this is really relevant for websites.

Let’s look at an example of some pages in our Hot Tip Tuesday site. This text has been marked as Heading 1. This text has been marked as Heading 3 not Heading 2 for reasons, just trust me and this text is paragraph text or body text. Why is it important to mark all of these things out? Take a look at the front page of our website. We have so many Hot Tips. At this stage we’re like over 120 or something. Each Hot Tip is actually a different page so by making sure that everything is labelled correctly as heading one or paragraph text. I know that it’s going to look the same on every page. It’s going to be consistent and that is really important for good web design.

I’ve told WordPress like I said in your case it might be a different website building platform in the backend which bits of the page I watch. This is what the text editor for WordPress looks like. Just like in word I can highlight part of the page and then use the style dropdown to set it to what it should be.

On the aesthetics of things there’s a lot we could talk about in terms of good website design but a couple of the best practices to keep in mind, pick one or two highly colors and generally stick to them. Pick up to two fonts and stick to them. Also dont assume you’ll always remember everything that you have chosen because you’re like oh yes, I totally got this. Then in a few months’ time you’re running around trying to figure out what it was that you did. My suggestion is to make a little notepad or Word document on your computer and just write the fonts and the colors that you’re using and save it somewhere you can refer back to.

The way to note down colors, there’s a few different ways that you can write them down but hex color is the most commonly used by website builders. What the hell is hex color? That’s all right. I’ll go over it. Hex color codes are the # symbol followed by six characters. When you’re looking around for things that is what you’re looking for. For example black is always #000000 and white is always #FFFFFF. There’s going to be all kinds of different combinations for different colors.

How you find the color codes and all of that hit me up in the comments and I’ll talk you through your specific situation because it’s going to be different for everyone so I can’t go over it all but like I said, style sheets isn’t just thinking about aesthetics it’s also functional.

Do you know much about website SEO? It’s okay if you dont. Just know that Google and other search services really like websites that have clearly defined headings and paragraph text. If you design your site well your website will appear more often when people are searching for things that are like you. I think I’ll ask Craig to do a Hot Tip about this sometime in the future and talk more about what SEO is and how to make your website rank better. When it comes to all of this I know a little bit but he knows a lot so let’s leave that to him.

That’s it. That’s my Hot Tip for this week. Leave me a comment with any questions that you have or suggestions or other things that you would like me to go over and make sure you subscribe to our Hot Tips and check out our website at AuspiciousArtsIncubator.org.

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Hi, I’m Alia Vryens and I’m the Microsoft Word Wizard here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. I’ve given you a few tips in the past that helped you get a document to look the way that you want it. I’ve actually made a playlist that collects all of my Word tips together. If you haven’t seen them yet I recommend that you go back and have a look but today I’m going to talk about something that takes a step forward from a few of those tips. This is kind of like the next level in document design and production but it’s still really simple and easy so don’t be alarmed.

Today we’re going to talk about styles and look at what a style sheet is. Styles are basically preset formats that you can configure to make everything in your document consistent and look awesome. You can create styles for anything that is text based, anything that you’re putting in your document like headings, bullet points, body text, tablet text, honestly anything.

What are styles good for? I find it really handy to work with styles if I’m making a long document that I know will have a lot of headings and a lot of different bits and bobs because I can use the styles to make everything consistent with just a couple of clicks but more importantly it’s the best and easiest way to make sure that your branding is consistent across all of the documents that you’re sending out. When it comes to marketing and branding consistency is key to making you look professional.

Right now I dont want to go into too many tips about how to make a good looking set of styles. You’re an artist. You’ll know when something is looking good or not but the basics pick only one or two highlighted colors in your document and try not to use more than two fonts.

Let’s have a look at what we’re doing. When you first start a blank document a set of styles has already been selected for you. You can look at the ribbon at the top of the screen and you’ll see what I’m talking about. In my example I can see styles already for Normal, Heading 1, Heading 2, Title, Subtitle etc.

Let’s have a little play and see what these do. I’ve put some dummy text into my document and by default it’s marked it as Normal. See how Normal and selective the blue box in that ribbon. Highlight the Heading 1 text and then click Heading 1 in the ribbon at the top and then the text changes to match the style of Heading 1. I can do the same thing for Heading 2.

Next in the Styles Section, in the ribbon at the top there’s a little tiny arrow at the bottom right corner. Click that. The Styles Panel is now going to pop up and lock itself to the right of your screen. This shows a longer list of all the styles available for you to use. You can click styles in here to apply them and add new ones and modify existing ones as kind of basically the main hub of where you’re going to be doing all of this stuff.

I’m going to change my quote text by highlighting it and clicking quote in that panel on the right side. Then I’m going to add another quote at the end of my document. Now I have decided it doesn’t look quite right. I’ll change the quote text to how I want it to look with my formatting options. Now I want to update that style in the style sheet. I’ll make sure I’ve got the quote that I’ve improved the look of highlighted and then I right click on quote in the styles panel on the right and then click update style to match selection.

See how the other quote that is already in the document changed how it looks. Yes, right? Cool because they’re all linked. This is one of the really powerful tools that you’re using styles for. One simple change will change everything of that type in the same document.

The second really powerful tool when using styles is referencing and tables of contents because styles aren’t actually just aesthetic. They’re also telling the document that this bit of text is a particular type. Have a look what I mean. I’ve now added a couple more headings to my document and I’ve styled them Heading 1 and Heading 2 using the styles panel. I’m going to insert a table of contents. I click at the top of my document. I go to references and then the References Tab at the Ribbon at the top and click table of contents.

There are heaps of options here. Let’s just pick the first one. It automatically inserts a table of contents with all the headings that I have in the document already because it knows and will track things as they move what page the headings are on and I can now edit how this looks? What page elements it’s looking for and all sorts of things. The other cool thing with a table of contents in a Word document is I can also hold Ctrl or Command on a Mac and click on the table of contents and it will take me to that part of my document so that you can kind of skip around your document as you’re working with.

There are lots of other things that I want to talk about here but I’ll be here for half an hour and I’m probably really already over time. Comment below and let me know if there is something specific you’d like me to go over with styles and table of contents and all of that cool stuff. Let’s just do a little recap. Use style to get your branding consistent across your documents. Create a style sheet by updating the styles in the style panel to how you want them and then you can either save the file as a template which is like whoa, advanced. Everybody calm down or just have it as a basic Word document that you can do a Save As on whenever you’re creating something new.

Remember this is not only aesthetic but also functional as you’re identifying different elements in your document and telling the program what is what. When you’ve done it it can be used in a number of different ways. That’s it.

Leave me a comment with any questions that you have or suggestions for other things you’d like me to go over. Make sure you subscribe to our Hot Tips and check out our website at AuspiciousArtsIncubator.org.

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Hi. I’m Alia Vryens and I’m the Microsoft Word Wizard here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator and this week we’re going to roll up our sleeves and talk about something that will take your Word skills to the next level. In Hot Tip #87 we talked about how to break up your document using Page Breaks. I said you should use Page Breaks wherever you can and avoid Section Breaks because they get a bit complicated.

Today, we’re going to delve a little way to when and why Section Breaks are actually a really good idea, but first, the reason why I said to avoid Section Breaks whenever you can is 9 times out of 10 when someone comes to me with a funky looking document (and by funky I mean smelling really bad), weird formatting hiccups have happened because of the Section Breaks. I’m not going to in to why this happens but just note if something strange is happening turn on your Paragraphs Mark’s button, (remember Hot Tip #86?) and investigate your Sections. But dont be scared, Section Breaks can actually really be a great tool.

Section Breaks basically allow you to set rules for that section of your document that are different to the rest of your pages. What do I mean by that? Say that you want to have one of the pages of your pages in landscape rather than in portrait. What you do is you put your cursor at the bottom of the last page that you want to keep in portrait and then insert a section break. You click anywhere on the next page, the one that you want to change to landscape. You to Page Layout in the ribbon at the top of your screen. Select Orientation and then Landscape. You’ll see it will flip that page but not the pages before it.

To change the rest of the document back to portrait you insert another section break at the bottom of the landscape page, click to the next page again and then change the orientation again. You’ll have one page in the middle of your document that is a different orientation to the rest. You can do the same thing if you need to change the margins on one page but you dont want them changed throughout the rest of your document. You isolate the page that you want to change like I said before by putting a section break before it and at the bottom of it then you make the changes that you make to that one page and it won’t affect the rest of your document.

Then finally, do you work with page numbers? If you’ve got a long document sometimes that will happen. Section breaks can reset page numbers to start from one again but they can also continue numbering from the previous section. I’m not going to go into lots of these in detail but it’s just something to keep in mind. If your page numbers are not doing what they should be doing section breaks could be the culprit. Just check Paragraph Marks, do you see any section breaks, and then investigate from there.

That’s my quick overview of what section breaks are good for and what to look for if something is not quite right in your document so that’s it. Leave me a comment with any questions you have or suggestions for other things you’d like me to go over. Make sure that you subscribe to our Hot Tips and check out our website at AuspiciousArtsIncubator.org.

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Hi. I’m Alia Vryens and I’m the Microsoft Word Wizard here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. This week I want to talk about working with tables in Word and four things that you might not know about that are going to make your life so much easier. I’m going to assume that you know how to insert a table into a document. If you dont leave me a comment and I’ll leave a quick little supplement to this Hot Tip.

First, my number one used tool when making tables look good is the Distribute Columns button. After you have inserted your table and you have written your content in, you’ll see two new tabs appear in your ribbon up the top of the screen called Table Tools, Design and Layout. See in my example table how I have one large column on the left and then two smaller columns. I want these two smaller columns to be the same width: so instead of having to do this by eye and manually, I highlight both columns then click Table Tools Layout and then Distribute Columns. It’s going to automatically adjust everything and viola, we have a much prettier table with no effort.

Next, my table has a header row at the beginning but my table spreads over multiple pages in my document and I want to repeat the header row in every page but dont want to have to do it manually because uh. You’ll highlight the first header row and right click then select Table Properties. Then in Table Properties select the Row Tab. In the Row Tab check the Repeat Header Row at the top of each page check box and click OK. That row is going to be automatically repeated on each page that your table spreads across. Pretty cool.

Speaking of spreading across multiple pages one of the really annoying things that can happen is when you have a row with lots of content in it and it keeps splitting across the page. You can easily keep all of that information together. Highlight the row in question or even you can highlight the entire table fi you want this to happen for all of your rows and right click. Go to Table Properties and then the Row Tab and then uncheck the box that says allow row to break across pages and click OK. Now the rows aren’t allowed to spread across the pages and they’re going to shift down and always stay together.

Lastly, another common thing is that you’ve done your table up and it’s looking great but then you add in another column and then suddenly the table is kind of spread out across the side of your page and it doesn’t fit inside your margins anymore. The easiest and fastest way to fix this is to highlight the whole table, right click, go to Table Properties and then go to the Table Tab. Check the box that says preferred width and then you change the little drop down menu from centimeters or whatever it’s saying there to percent and you set that percentage number to 100. Then when you click OK your table is going to automatically resize to fit inside the margins of your page.

That is my Hot Tip for this week. There are lots of little things that I could share about tables so leave a comment with any specific problems you’re having and I’ll be happy to offer some insights. Also make sure you subscribe to our Hot Tips and check out our website at AuspiciousArtsIncubator.org.

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Hi. I’m Alia Vryens and I’m the Microsoft Word Wizard here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. This week I have a super quick tip for you. How often do you have two similar documents that you need to compare or different drafts of the same document or maybe you’re working in a team and different people have made different revisions to different sections and now you need to collate everything?

There are ton of different ways that you can manage this kind of situation and I know Craig, our IT Guru here at the Incubator would love to talk to you about things like using Google Drive and Microsoft SharePoint but if you’re not quite ready to take the plunge into those areas here’s a cool thing that you could do.

Open up the two documents that you want to compare in Word. Two is all we’re going to deal with at this stage. Just trust me on this. On the ribbon at the top of your screen click on the View Tab then click view side by side. If you have more than one document open a little box is going to ask you which document you want to compare. You just select which one, click OK.

You’ll see that the Word document windows will kind of rearrange themselves. They’ll now be sitting side by side and you’ll also notice that by default when you use your mouse scroll wheel to move one document up or down the other one is going to follow you. It’s kind of nifty.

This is called synchronous scrolling and it can be really useful if you’re comparing two documents that are really similar because you’ll always be viewing the same part of both documents as you scroll but for whatever reason this may not be always what you need so I’ll tell you how to turn this off.

Because your ribbon is a little squished up right now because you’ve got the two side by side things are going to look a little bit different to how it was before but look at the View Tab still. You’ll see that there are three small icons stacked on top of one another. One looks like two pages next to each other and the next one has an arrow pointing up and down. The third has two arrows pointing at each other.

The second button with the arrow point up and down is what you’re looking for. It turns synchronous scrolling on and off. If the button is shaded blue that means synchronous scrolling is on and both documents will move together. If you click the button off you can scroll through one document without the other one following suit.

This is my favorite way to go through different documents and make sure that draft changes from one member of my team has been incorporated into the final documents and other things like that.

That’s it. Leave me a comment with any questions that you have or suggestions for other things that you would like me to go over. Make sure you subscribe to our Hot Tips and check out our website at AuspiciousArtsIncubator.org.

The post Which doc is the best? appeared first on Auspicious Arts Incubator Art Business.

Video:

[embedyt]https://youtu.be/WgxIm3F5dfw[/embedyt]

Podcast:

[powerpress]

[miniorange_social_sharing]

Video Transcript:

Hi, I’m Alia Vryens and I’m the Microsoft Word Wizard here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator and this week I’m combining two of my previous tips, a new super useful tool.

In Tip 89 we talked about the paintbrush tool and how useful it is when you want to format multiple sections of your document in the same way. In Hot Tip 91 I told you about my secret weapon using F4 on the keyboard that lets you repeat the last action.

What if we could combine these two things? When we talk about the paintbrush tool you’ll remember, maybe that it was all using a mouse, no keyboard shortcuts. You select the thing that you wanted to format, hit the button, go back and you’ll be going back and forth between those two things.

It was really useful but it’s also a little bit time consuming so I have something very cool to show you but you’ll have to follow along with me. My suggestion is watch this tip until the end then go back, open up a word document, play the video again and then do the steps with me as I say them.

First, open up Word. Then go to file and options. Go to quick access toolbar and in here we’ll see a bunch of other functions and buttons that Word will let you use. Go to the Choose Commands from the dropdown menu and select All Commands. Scroll down and find Apply Style. Click on that and then click on the Add button. It’s going to shift that little button over into your Quick Access Toolbar. Click okay and close the window.

Now look at the top right of your window. You’ll see little icons up there. Likely you’ll have a little Word icon, a little Save icon, an undo arrow, a little circular arrow or some variant of all of those things. In addition because you just added Apply Style you’ll also have a little icon that looks like an eyedropper. This new button Apply Style will now always be there every time you open or start a new document.

What does Apply Style do? Basically it remembers the formatting settings that you last used with your paintbrush tool. That means if you’re copying the format of a heading just for example and you go and do some other things in your document. Later you can highlight some more texts then click Apply Style up on the top right and it’ll format the new text the same way that you did before.

What this means is you dont have to keep going back and finding that heading that looks totally awesome, highlighting it, clicking the paintbrush tool and then formatting your new text. You can just click Apply Style instead. Cool but what about my other tip, the F4, repeat last action tip?

I love keyboard shortcuts and I find that they save me a lot of time so in this instance if I’m going through a document and formatting a bunch of headings in the same way I like to use the paintbrush tool the first time. Then I click Apply Style the second time I want to make something pretty and then after that I’ll just scroll through my document and I find the changes that I want to make and I hit F4 or Command + Y on a Mac as I go.

That’s it. That’s my nifty way of creating fast formatting changes at my documents when I have a lot of the same text to take care. Have a little play, experiment and see what others things and what other programs you can use this in like PowerPoint or Excel. It’s kind of up to you to figure out what works for you.

Leave me a comment with any questions that you have or suggestions for other things that you would like me to go over and make sure that you subscribe to our Hot Tips and check out our website at AuspiciousIncubator.org.

The post Best way to keep docs looking great appeared first on Auspicious Arts Incubator Art Business.

Video:

[embedyt]https://youtu.be/kDyfP2Ld6xw[/embedyt]

Podcast:

[powerpress]

[miniorange_social_sharing]

Video Transcript:

Hi, I’m Alia Vryens and I’m the Microsoft Word Wizard here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. This week my tip is my powerful super-secret weapon that I use every single day. I have a magical button on my computer that lets me repeat the last thing that I did. What does that mean? For example I’m going through my document and I have a lot of different paragraphs that need to be indented. I need to shift the margin across. I find the first place that needs to happen and I set the margin to how I want it. Then I put the cursor at the next place I want to change and I just press F4 on my laptop or Command Y if you’re on a Mac.

I go to the next bit of my document. I press F4 and then it happens again and then again and again so then I make of the text a different size. I go to the next bit of text that I want to resize. I press F4 and it will do the same thing again. It will change it to the size that I change to the last time. Basically it just repeats the same action again and again and it saves you a lot of time.

I can also do it in Excel. Say I want to delete a row, I highlight a row. I right click and say delete then I can go to a different row, highlight it and then just press F4 on the keyboard. It means instead of having to select it, right click, find it in the menu, select the next one, right click, find it in the menu, I just hit one button.

Another example I might be in PowerPoint and I have a few different colored squares. I fill one with red and I want to change the others throughout the presentation also to red. I select the next one and press F4. It will turn red and then the next and the next. It saves me so much time so I’m really happy to share my super-secret weapon with you.

That’s it. Leave me a comment with any questions you have or suggestions for other things that you would like me to go over. Make sure that you subscribe to our Hot Tips and check out our website at AuspiciousArtsIncubator.org.

The post Time saver in WORD appeared first on Auspicious Arts Incubator Art Business.