Microsoft Office 2003: Ctrl+F1 closes the task pane

Just because I couldn’t find this information when I was searching for it now: In Microsoft Office 2003, the keyboard shortcut to close (hide) the task pane is Ctrl+F1.  (The task pane in Office 2003 is the panel on the right side of the window that is usually hidden, but opens to show certain information such as Help (upon a press of F1), “Getting Started”, the Office clipboard ring, and other items.) 

This shortcut applies to Word 2003, Excel 2003, and PowerPoint 2003 (possibly among others).

Tip: Navigate “Back” like in a browser in Microsoft Word

Quick tip: In Microsoft Word, in a document with in-document hyperlinks, after navigating to another location in the document by clicking on a hyperlink (typically by holding Ctrl and clicking the link, as Word will prompt when the mouse cursor is hovered over a link), you can go back to where you were before in the document by using Alt+LeftArrow (hold down the Alt key and press the Left Arrow key) – similar to clicking on the Back button in a web browser.

Alt+RightArrow also works to go forward once again after using the Alt+LeftArrow shortcut to go back.

These are a good shortcuts to be aware of, since Word doesn’t by default show Back/Forward buttons in the toolbar like a browser does.  (This is the case in Word 2003 – I don’t have a copy of Word 2007 in front of me at the moment to check.)

In Word 2003, you can get Word to show Back/Forward buttons in the toolbar by making Word’s Web toolbar visible.  (Right-click a blank area of the toolbar at the top of the Word window, and select Web from the context menu that appears.)

The Alt+LeftArrow and Alt+RightArrow keyboard shortcuts to navigate Back or Forward respectively also work in most web browsers on Windows.

Creating Mirrored Content in MS Word

It is possible to set up sections of “mirrored content” in Microsoft Word, such that the same content appears in two or more places in the document, and changes to the content in the “master” location are automatically mirrored to the other instances of the content.

The following instructions apply to Word 2003; I’ve done this in Word 2007 as well, but the specific procedure will differ slightly due to 2007’s use of the Ribbon interface rather than the traditional menu.

1. Designate the master content

To designate the “master” (primary) version of the content to be mirrored, select the content (e.g. by left-clicking and dragging the mouse cursor over it), and then create a “Bookmark” on the content by selecting Insert | Bookmark from the menu.  In the Bookmark dialog, add a new bookmark and name it whatever you like.

Tip: You may also want to enable “Show Bookmarks” at Tools menu | Options | View tab, so that you can see the bounds of the bookmark you created.

2. Place the mirrored content

Now, go to the place in the document where you want the mirrored copy of the content to appear.  At that location, add a “Cross-Reference” via Insert menu | Reference | Cross-reference.  In the Cross-reference dialog, set Reference Type to “Bookmark” and Insert Reference To to “Bookmark Text”; in the For Which Bookmark field, select the bookmark you created. 

Optionally, you can leave the “Insert as hyperlink” dialog checked.  If this is checked, the mirrored content will still appear normally (it won’t be underlined like a typical World Wide Web hyperlink), but readers of the document will be able to Ctrl+click the mirrored content to jump to the location of the master copy of the content.

Finally, click the dialog’s Insert button, and then the Close button.  The mirrored copy of the content should now appear in the document!

3. Updating the mirrored content

The mirrored content will not immediately automatically update when the master content is updated.  You can update the mirrored copy manually by right-clicking the mirrored text, and selecting “Update Field” from the context menu that appears.

You can update all of the mirrored content in the document at once by selecting the entire document (Edit menu | Select All; or press Ctrl+A), right-clicking anywhere in the document, and selecting “Update Field.”  All mirrored content fields (and any other fields that may be present in the document) will be updated.

Alternatively, you can set Word to automatically update all fields in documents each time the document is printed.  To do this, in Tools menu | Options | Print tab, select the Update Fields check box.

Bonus Tip: Capitalizing the mirrored content

Optionally, you can make the mirrored content appear in ALL CAPS even if the master content is mixed-case.  To do this:

1. Right-click the mirrored content; from the context menu, select Edit Field.
2. In the Field dialog, click the Field Codes button. 
3. In the Field Codes text box that appears, type the following text at the end of the existing content of the text box:
   

   \* UPPER

4. Click OK. The mirrored content should now appear in all uppercase!

(Thanks to Graham Mayor for the tip on the capitalization field switch. See Graham's site for lots of other advanced tips regarding what can be done with Word fields.)

Tip: How to easily reorder bullet points in MS Word

A quick tip on a discovery I just made: You can quickly reorder bullet points in Microsoft Word putting the caret in the bulleted item to be reordered (i.e. click on the item), and then use Alt+Shift+UpArrow or Alt+Shift+DownArrow to reorder the selected item within the list of bullet points.  Apparently this works in other MS Office programs as well (such as PowerPoint).

I’ve found that this works a lot more nicely than cutting the item to be moved, and then pasting the item in the new location in the list (since often, line breaks need to be fixed up after the new item is pasted in.)

Bonus tip: Alt+Shift+LeftArrow and Alt+Shift+RightArrow will indent/unindent the selected bulleted item.

Excel tip: Shift+F2 = Edit Cell Comment

A quick tip for Microsoft Excel that I've just found, and is currently making my life easier: Shift+F2 jumps to editing the cell comment (note / annotation) for the current cell.

This is a lot nicer than having to go over to the mouse and right-click on a cell, then choose "Edit Comment" (or "Insert Comment" in the case of a cell that doesn't have a comment yet) from the context menu when doing heavy editing work on an Excel sheet.

This works in Excel 2003; it might also work in other Excel versions as well.

Bonus tip: F2 alone (without holding Shift) edits the existing value in the current cell.  This is another time-saver that allows you to edit the value in a cell without having to move over to the mouse. 

The use of F2 to mean "edit the current value" is a semi-standard that works in many other Windows applications as well.  For example, F2 in Windows Explorer begins editing the name of the selected file or folder (to allow the file or folder to be renamed).

Mapping "Find Next/Previous" to F3/Shift+F3 in MS Word

Earlier today, after years of using Microsoft Word, I finally decided that I'd had enough of reopening the Find dialog every time I want to do a "Find Next" or "Find Previous" – that is, to have Word search up or down from the current caret position to find the next (or previous) instance of the string that I had most recently searched for via the Find dialog.

Visual Studio comes with this functionality by default, mapped to F3 for Find Next and Shift+F3 for Find Previous. Some other applications including Firefox and Notepad2 (Florian Balmer's excellent lightweight Notepad-like text editor) support these keyboard shortcuts as well. (Regular old notepad.exe supports F3, but not Shift+F3.) I'm very accustomed to using F3/Shift+F3, so I set out to get my copy of Word to support these.

(Update 4/28/2009: Jeff Cogswell commented with a much better solution to this problem that doesn't involve writing a custom macro, as detailed in this post -- see the comments on this post below for his solution!)

A search revealed that Microsoft Word supports a "Find Again" function, mapped by default to Shift+F4 and to Ctrl+Alt+y, but that isn't what I was looking for; I wanted to be able to easily search in either direction without having to open up the Find dialog and alter the setting of the search direction option.

So I ended up writing a couple of simple VBA functions using Word 2003's integrated Visual Basic Editor to do what I was looking for:

Sub FindNext()
  
   DoFind True

End Sub

Sub FindPrevious()
  
   DoFind False

End Sub

Sub DoFind(findDirection As Boolean)

   'Save the initial Find direction in order to restore it when we're done,
   'so that we don't alter the current "Find Up" setting in the regular Find dialog.
   Dim initialFindDirection As Boolean
   initialFindDirection = Selection.Find.Forward

   'Do the Find in the requested direction.
   Selection.Find.Forward = findDirection
   Selection.Find.Execute
  
   'Restore the initial Find direction.
   Selection.Find.Forward = initialFindDirection

End Sub

I determined that the Selection.Find.Execute statement was the key to getting Word to repeat a Find operation by using the Tools | Macro | Record New Macro functionality to record a macro of the built-in Ctrl+Alt+y "Find Again" shortcut, and then inspecting the resulting generated code in the VBA editor. Using the editor's intellisense functionality, it was simple to determine that the Selection.Find.Forward property was what controls the direction of the Find.

At first, I just wrote the FindNext and FindPrevious methods, setting Selection.Find.Forward to the appropriate value, and then calling Selection.Find.Execute. When testing those methods, though, I noticed that the setting of the Find direction carried over to be the new initial value for the Find dialog; i.e. after running the FindPrevious method, the next time the Find dialog was used, it would be set to find in the Up direction by default. I added the DoFind method to handle this issue, by temporarily setting Find.Forward to the necessary value, doing the Find, and then setting Find.Forward back to its original value.

To use these FindNext and FindPrevious functions yourself in Word 2003, paste the code above into the VBA editor (Tools | Macro | Visual Basic Editor), and save them. Then, map the F3 and Shift+F3 keys (or other keys of your choice) to FindNext and FindPrevious respectively by using the Customize Keyboard dialog (Tools | Customize, then click the Keyboard button at the bottom of the Customize dialog).

I would imagine that these functions should be similarly usable under Word 2007 as well, but since 2007's menu system and customization interface have changed, there are likely to be some changes to the steps necessary to enter the functions and map them to the F3 and Shift+F3 keys.

Email client usability: Replying to your own sent items

Here’s a scenario that I think is fairly common: I’m having an email conversation with another person (“Melissa” in this example). I reply to Melissa’s email; then, later, before I’ve gotten a new reply back from Melissa, I come across additional information that I want to send to her as part of the same email conversation.

To do this, I could just re-reply the most recent message that I got from Melissa – the one I already replied to earlier -- but in that case, my earlier reply would be dropped from the conversation when Melissa responds and the conversation continues:

What I really want to do instead is to reply to my own latest message in the conversation, so that the entire thread of the conversation will be preserved in the message:

Unfortunately, some modern email clients do not have very good support for this scenario, including (as I write this) the latest versions of Microsoft Outlook and Novell GroupWise.

• In Outlook (versions 2003 and 2007), if you Reply to a message in your Sent Mail folder, Outlook populates the "To" field with your own address, instead of populating it with the address (or addresses) of the other conversation participants. If you "Reply to All", both your address and the other participants' addresses are populated in the "To" field. In both cases, you need to fix the "To" field manually to make it have only the recipient(s), and not yourself.
• In GroupWise (version 7), the application doesn't permit to you do a Reply on items in the Sent Items folder at all! (The menu item Actions | Reply is disabled when an email message is selected in Sent Items.) Instead, you are obliged to use the Forward feature instead, and then clean up the header fields of the new message by deleting the "Fwd:" that automatically gets prepended to the subject line, and manually re-entering the address (or addresses) of the other conversation participants.

Gmail does handle doing a reply to a sent item correctly – good job by the usability guys at Google! Some other, older, mail clients may have handled this correctly as well; thinking back to my time at Michigan, I'm fairly sure that the now-venerable Pine email client handled this case properly.

It would be nice if Outlook and other mail clients that behave similarly would put the other conversation participants' addresses in the "To" field (and the "cc:" field when applicable) instead of your own address when you reply to an email message in your own sent items folder.

Office 2007 Ribbon: A step backwards in keyboard usability?

I've had a few more chances to play with Office 2007 since installing it from MSDN a couple of weeks ago. Although I'm still getting used to it, I like the mouse UI that the new Ribbon interface presents. What I'm having a lot more trouble working with is the keyboard interface.

I'll confine my comments here to Word 2007, which aside from Outlook (which doesn't use the Ribbon in its main window) is the Office 2007 app I've had the chance to use most so far. I'm a big fan of using keyboard shortcuts to execute frequently-used commands in applications, so in my work with Word 2007 so far, I've tried to continue and use the keyboard shortcuts that I'm familiar with from Word 2003. However, although Office 2007 is advertised to support Office 2003 keyboard accelerator sequences, I have run across a couple of instances already where the Word 2003 keyboard accelerators are altered or broken in Word 2007.

Office 2007 also doesn't provide any "forward breadcrumbing" for Office 2003 keyboard accelerator sequences. For example, if I want to do the Office 2003 command "Table | Insert | Row Above", and I know that the 2003 accelerator sequence starts with Alt+a (Table), I (Insert), but then I'm not sure which letter of "Row Above" is the final step of the sequence ("r"? "a"? something else?) then I'm out of luck in Office 2007; Office 2007 shows the keystrokes of the sequence I've typed so far, but provides no feedback regarding the available keystrokes to continue the sequence.

Using a Word 2003 keyboard accelerator sequence in Word 2007

(In Office 2003, the menu would have opened along with my typing so that I'd be able to glance up and see the underlined letter in "Row Above" which is the correct final keystroke for my command. It turns out to be "a" in this case, in case you were wondering.)

So today, I tried to start using (and memorizing) the new keyboard accelerators built into Office 2007. 2007 does provide nice "forward breadcrumbing" for its new keyboard accelerators; when the Alt key is first pressed, the available shortcuts corresponding to each visible Ribbon option are displayed, and new available options continue to be displayed as you progress through the keystroke sequence.

My problem with the new 2007 accelerator sequences is that in general, they don't seem to lend themselves to memorization very well at all. In Office 2007, the accelerator sequence for "Insert Table Row Above" is alt+j, l, a. (Alt+j, l brings up the Layout ribbon section; a does the Insert Above.) There doesn't seem to be an "obvious" mnemonic for this sequence. (I found myself thinking "Justice League America!" for this particular sequence, but I'd hate to try and extend that paradigm to all 2007 accelerator sequences...)

Most 2003 sequences corresponded fairly well to the command you were executing, making them easy to remember. (Alt+e, f for Edit | Find, for example.) Even the 2003 sequence for Table | Insert | Row Above (alt+a, i, a) was pretty good when you remember that alt+a was the accelerator for the Table menu (alt+t being used for the Tools menu).

The "Insert Table Row Above" is actually not too bad as 2007 accelerator sequences go, either. The 2007 accelerator sequence for the basic "Find" operation is Alt+h, z, n, f, d, f -- 6 keystrokes! And not terribly intuitive, the most questionable sequence being "z, n" to open the "Editing" item on the "Home" ribbon.

The Word 2007 Ribbon after pressing Alt+h. "z, n" is the accelerator key sequence for the "Editing" item.

(You can, of course, alternatively use the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut to bring up the Find dialog, but many commands don't have a simple Ctrl-key shortcut that can be used for quick access.)

Another point about Office 2007 keyboard accelerator sequences is that they will switch the active (visible) section of the Ribbon; so if you were working with the Home section of the Ribbon, and then type the 2007 "Insert Table Row Above" accelerator sequence, the Ribbon switches to make the Layout section visible, and you need to subsequently manually switch the ribbon back to the Home section (either by clicking it with the mouse or with the accelerator sequence alt+h, Esc, Esc) to make the Home icons visible once again.

My (early) overall impression is that the Office 2007 Ribbon is a nice step forward in UI design for novice/intermediate users (who will normally be activating commands by using the mouse, as opposed to the keyboard) and for the activation of seldom-used commands, but it is in some ways a step backwards for "power users" who prefer to activate frequently-used commands via the keyboard.

Broken Word 2003 Shortcut for "Normal" View in Word 2007

At lunch today, I installed the Office 2007 release (obtained through my company's MSDN subscription), replacing my previous Office 2003 installation.

Per the online documentation and also a nice Jensen Harris (Microsoft) blog post, Office 2003 menu shortcut keys (e.g. Alt+F, S for File menu | Save) are supposed to work in Office 2007 as well.

When I fired up Word 2007 and opened a document, it put me in the "Print Layout" view. I'm accustomed to working in what was called "Normal" view in Word 2003, so I did Alt+V, N to try to switch to Normal view.

So far so good after the Alt+V -- Word 2007 even put up a nice little tooltip letting me know I had started typing a Word 2003 shortcut -- but subsequently pressing the N key had no effect.

I opened up the new "View" ribbon, and saw in the "Document Views" section that "Normal" was no longer present, but a new "Draft" view was available. I clicked that, and it put me in the equivalent of what "Normal" view was in Word 2003.

So "Normal" is apparently renamed to "Draft" in 2007... I switched back to "Print Layout" view (Alt+V, P did work), and then tried Alt+V, D to switch to "Draft" view -- it worked.

I fired up Word 2003 on my test machine to verify that Alt+V, D didn't work on that version. I expected it to have no effect... but Alt+V, D actually has a different function in Word 2003: hide/show the Document Map!

Consequently, the Alt+V, D shortcut for "hide/show Document Map" in Word 2003 is essentially broken in Word 2007 as well (since it now has a different function than before). I couldn't find any alternative "Alt+V" shortcut in Word 2007 for Document Map, although the "new" Alt+W (View ribbon), V, M shortcut does work for "hide/show Document Map" in Word 2007.