Make your own icon fonts

 I needed a font that had symbols for the various Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and the Adobe PDF symbol. Alas, I couldn't find what I needed, so I started looking for a way to make my own icon font. I found a solution in minutes, and it worked perfectly.

Here's the site: fontello.com/

And here's a video on how to use it.

MS Word – Add Chapter number to Table and Figure Captions

Once more, I found a useful tip and I'm documenting it here so I can easily find it again. This time, the tip is about adding chapter numbers to Table and Figure captions in MS Word.

Normally, a Caption is entered sequentially, like this:

Chapter 1

Table 1
Table 2
Figure 1
Table 3

Chapter 2

Figure 2
Table 4
Table 5
Figure 3

But, when using an engineering-style document with numbered chapters, sometimes you need a more formal method of numbering things:

1.0 Chapter Header

Table 1-1
Table 1-2
Figure 1-1
Table 1-3

2.0 Chapter

Figure 2-1
Table 2-1
Table 2-2
Figure 2-2

The info on how to do this is in this short-and-simple video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrcAmAQWSK0

MS Word - Search for all Instances of Superscript or Subscript in a Document

Right now I am proofing a technical document for the oil and gas industry. One of the things I'm doing is copying the text from a badly formatted source file and pasting it into a new, clean document and tagging all the paragraphs with the correct styles. Some of the original formatting is very bad, so this is the fastest way to do this.

Prior to cutting the text, I use the Clear All Formatting tool (it's on the Home Tab in the Font Group) to strip out everything from the source text. This gives me a clean block of text to paste into the new document. Unfortunately, this also clears out superscripts and subscripts. After pasting the text, I compare the two documents and retag the appropriate text (CO2 becomes CO₂, for example).

But, when it comes time to proof, I need to go through the entire source document and search for all instances where the author used a subscript or a superscript. In a long document after a busy day, I can't rely on my eyes to catch each and every tiny number or letter. So, I found this process at this site, and it allows MS Word to find and highlight all instances of subscript (and a second pass finds the superscripts) using the standard Find/Replace tool in MS Word.

Thanks to Allen Wyatt for posting this great MS Word Tip:

https://wordribbon.tips.net/T013110_Easily_Finding_Superscripts.html

Since it's his material, I'm not going to reprint it here without permission. Just follow the link and thank him for this ingeniously simple, but useful, power user tip.

MS Word – Find Text, Replace with Clipboard Contents

Here's a useful tip that can help in a variety of situations.

• Scenario 1: You want to replace a string of text with a graphic (maybe replace the company's name with a graphic version of it, or want to replace a mathematics formula with a PNG graphic of it so that it will not be changed across mobile devices.
• Scenario 2: You want to find and replace a string of text that has formatting in it, like a subscript or superscript (H2S = H₂S, or 1st = 1^st).

Here's a way to quickly do that.

1. In the word doc (or elsewhere) find the thing you want to copy (graphic, properly formatted text, whatever).
2. Copy it (CTRL+C, or from the menu).
3. Use the Find/Replace command in MS Word (CTRL+H)
4. In the Find What field, enter the string of text you want to find.
5. In the Replace with field, enter this: ^c (the first character is found by typing SHIFT+6).
6. Now, whenever you use the find/replace, it will paste the contents of your clipboard.

HOW IT WORKS: This technique replaces whatever you are searching for with whatever you have in the clipboard.

That's it. A very simple solution to an annoying problem.

MS Word - Align Tabs

I don't usually post things like this, but this is useful and I want to make sure I can find it later.

https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2014/07/25/word-auto-aligning-headerfooter-info-in-portrait-and-landscape-pages/ 

This tip is for Word 2007 & 2010. It details how to insert a special tab character that moves with the page margin when inserting landscape pages into a portrait document. The tab is called an Align Tab and it is very useful.