Smart Quotes in AutoCorrect Entries

Smart quotes can add a finishing touch to your text. You might expect that when AutoCorrect is used to add text, it would also include smart quotes. This is not necessarily so, for the reasons described in this tip.

Read this tip »

(Thanks to Fred Lanting, Aprile Morgan, Carole Haley, Christa Vincent, Simon Jones, and Steven Morgenstern for contributing to this tip.)

Creating Thin Spaces

Thin spaces are a typographic device that allows you add a bit of space between elements of a document. There are no thin spaces available in Word (as separate characters), but you can create the same effect produced by thin spaces by using the ideas presented in this tip.

Read this tip »

Become a Mail Merge Wizard

Do you want to become a mail merge magician? Discover everything from the basics to being able to complete all your documentation needs—it's all here! Experience the magic today!

Deleting Footnotes and Endnotes

Deleting either footnotes or endnotes is a simple process. Just select the reference mark and delete it. Assuming you are using automatically numbered notes, the remaining notes are renumbered for you, as if the deleted note had never existed.

Read this tip »

Character Frequency Count

Word collects a wide range of statistics about your documents, but one of the things it doesn't collect is how many times individual characters appear in the document. (This would be considered a "frequency count" of each character.) You can create a macro to count the characters, but the approach you use to the macro will determine how efficiently the requisite counts are collected.

Read this tip »

This section is for those having problems making Word behave. If Word is giving you fits, feel free to submit your own Help Wanted question.

If you have a solution for the problems below, click the link after the problem to send us your answer. (All responses become the sole property of Sharon Parq Associates, Inc., and can be used in any way deemed appropriate.) If your response is used in a future issue, you will be credited for your contribution to the answer.

Finding and Removing Stubborn Graphics

I am re-formatting a long document (over 300 pages) that was converted from PDF to Word. I have lots of experience with Word and styles and using Find and Replace to fix badly formatted documents. In this case there is a problem I can't figure out. The original document has horizontal lines in the header and footer that were converted to graphic lines in the Word document. I want to delete all those graphic lines, but searching for ^g doesn't find them. Is there a way I can automate the removal of these graphic lines? I'd rather not have to click and press Del 600+ times.
—Anita Weller (provide an answer for this Help Wanted question)