When you’re under the gun with a brief or something else that’s due ASAP, the last thing you need is Microsoft Word creating some formatting snafu that defies logic. Particularly if you’re a solo attorney working sans assistant, you need to fix that formatting fast and get back to the business of legal writing. Here are some quick tricks to try.
Unless otherwise noted below, all instructions and screenshots are for Microsoft Office 2010 for Windows.
Diagnostics
The first step in solving any problem is diagnosing it. The most useful tools Microsoft Word has for figuring out what’s going on with your text are the Status Bar, Show/Hide, and Reveal Formatting.
Click Replace All and Word will delete any text to which you've applied the Hidden format. If you change your mind, just press [Ctrl]+Z to retrieve the deleted text. Uncheck the Hidden option to display hidden text. Or click Show/Hide on the Standard toolbar — t's faster. Show/Hide is a toggle, so a second click rehides all the hidden text when you're ready. Select 'Hidden Text' Word 2003 (or earlier): 'Tools' 'Options' 'View' 'Hidden Text' Word Mac 2004: On the Word menu, click Preferences, and then click View. Under Nonprinting characters, select the check boxes next to 'Hidden Text'. Tip: You can also turn the All option on or off by clicking Show/Hide symbol on the menu bar paragraph symbol.
Pimp Out Your Status Bar
The Status Bar (that long gray bar across the bottom of your Microsoft Word window) can give you a lot more diagnostic information than most users realize. To maximize its usefulness, right-click anywhere along the blank spaces of the gray bar to get this contextual menu:
I always suggest checking as many options as possible. For example, knowing that you’re in Section 3 of your document can help with diagnosing problems with headers and footers, particularly when you’ve imported text from WordPerfect (which can be very sneaky about embedding unwanted section breaks).
Turn On Your Codes
To me, it’s always useful to be able to see visual representations of things like hard paragraph breaks and tabs. Fortunately, this is easily done. Just click the paragraph symbol (called Show/Hide) in the Paragraph section of the Home tab in versions 2007 or 2010 (or if you’re in version 2003 or earlier, click the Show/Hide button in the Standard toolbar). Show/Hide is particularly useful for diagnosing spacing or justification problems.
If you find all those codes distracting, leave it on just long enough to diagnose your problem and turn it off when you’re finished.
How To Turn On Hidden Text In Word
Reveal Formatting, a.k.a. Word’s Reveal Codes Replacement
You can get a lot more information, though, from Microsoft Word’s Reveal Formatting feature. Just click SHIFT-F1, and the Reveal Formatting pane will appear on the right-hand side. Wherever you place your cursor, Reveal Formatting will not only show you how that text is formatted, it will give you hyperlinks to take you straight to the correct menu to fix it.
And if you want to know why one paragraph doesn’t look like another, simply place your cursor in the first paragraph, check the “Compare to another selection” check box, then click your cursor into the paragraph you want to compare to. Reveal Formatting will show you the differences.
Fixing What’s Wrong
If using any of the above tools doesn’t make it obvious how to fix something, or you’re just in that much of a hurry, you’re not stuck. There are a couple of different ways to simply force your formatting to behave.
Format Painter
If you see some other text in the document that looks like what you wish your misbehaving text looked like, the fastest way to make it conform is to use the Format Painter. Go to the Home tab (or, in versions 2003 or earlier, go to the Standard toolbar), place your cursor inside the text you want your misbehaving paragraph to emulate, click the paintbrush icon, then click or select the text you want to fix.
If you want to fix several pieces of text without having to repeat this entire sequence, double-click the paintbrush icon to make it persistent (in other words, to allow you to repeat the “fix” step several times), then click the paintbrush icon again when you’re finished.
Fast Fixes: CTRL+SPACE/CTRL+Q/CTRL+SHIFT+N
![Hidden Hidden](/uploads/1/2/6/8/126891861/509111740.jpg)
Frankly, there are days when you don’t care why your formatting’s wrong, you just want it fixed. Now.
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For those moments, let me suggest these three shortcut keys:
CTRL+SPACE – This removes all character-level formatting—funky fonts, underlining, boldface, italics, etc. Just select the text you want to fix and hit this key combination (hold down your Control key and press the space bar).
CTRL+Q – This removes all paragraph-level formatting—weird indents, line spacing, extra spacing before and after the paragraphs, etc. Again, select the text, hold down your Control key and press the letter Q.
CTRL+SHIFT+N – This returns the selected text to Normal formatting (however Normal is defined in that particular document’s Styles). You’ll need a bit more manual dexterity here: select your text, then hold down the Control and Shift keys together and press the letter N.
Any of these shortcut key combinations will return the text to something you can work with without you having to wander through the menus looking for a fix. And when you’re in a hurry, isn’t that what you really want?
Featured image: “fix” from Shutterstock.
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The default format for documents that you create for your business using the Mac’s native word processor application TextEdit is RTF, or Rich Text Format. An RTF document includes formatting for options such as bold, italic and underlining, and is sufficient for creating most business documents. However, if you need to give someone a copy of the document saved as a Microsoft Word file, you can easily convert it using TextEdit.
1.Double-click the document to open it with TextEdit on your Mac. Alternately, right-click the document, then click “Open With” from the pop-up menu, and then click “TextEdit” to use Apple’s native word processor.
2.Click “File” from the TextEdit application menu, and then click “Duplicate.” TextEdit creates a duplicate of the document, with the word “copy” appended to the document’s name. Close the original document.
3.Click “File” from the TextEdit menu once more, and then click “Save As.” A dialog box appears.
4.Type a name for the document, such as by adding “Word Version” to the original document’s name. Click a folder on your Mac where you want to save the Word version. Click the “File Format” drop-down menu, and then click “Word 2007 Format (docx)” to save it in a format that the latest version of Microsoft Word can open. Select “Word 97 Format (doc)” to save the file in a format readable by earlier versions of Microsoft Word.
5.Click “Save” to save the file in the format and location you specified.
References (2)
About the Author
Julius Vandersteen has been a freelance writer since 1999. His work has appeared in “The Los Angeles Times,” “Wired” and “S.F. Weekly.” Vandersteen has a Bachelor of Arts in journalism from San Francisco State University.
Photo Credits
- David Paul Morris/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Choose Citation Style
Vandersteen, Julius. 'How to Convert a Mac Document to Word.' Small Business - Chron.com, http://smallbusiness.chron.com/convert-mac-document-word-53987.html. Accessed 07 September 2019.
Vandersteen, Julius. (n.d.). How to Convert a Mac Document to Word. Small Business - Chron.com. Retrieved from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/convert-mac-document-word-53987.html
Vandersteen, Julius. 'How to Convert a Mac Document to Word' accessed September 07, 2019. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/convert-mac-document-word-53987.html
How To Show Hidden Text In Word Mac
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