Word 2007 formatting question
December 17, 2009 10:20 AM   Subscribe

How do I keep a particular tab in Word2007 from automatically disappearing? And other Word2007 and Excel 2007 questions inside.

Really, I HATE Office 2007. It now takes me multiple steps to do what used to take one click of the mouse. Below are a list of items that I'm hoping folks have answers to.

1) Keeping a particular tab open in Word. Let's say that I want to change the font and change line spacing. I click the home tab, then change the font. Instead of the home tab remaining, it disappears, so I have to click the home tab again before I can change the line spacing. How to leave the tab visible until I click on the body of the document?

2) Permanently change style setting. Whenever I open a new Word document, I want a specific setting (e..g, specific font, size, header style, etc.) to be in effect. Currently, I have to save the setting I want as a "style" option, then click on it every time I open a new document.

3) In Excel 2007, how to single space my cell formatting? Some of my cells are text heavy, and I want them to appear single spaced. The default is double, and can't change it.

Thanks!!
posted by jujube to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)
 
Best answer: 1) I assume the whole ribbon is disappearing on you? Double click the "home" button (or anywhere on that line) and the ribbon should just stay showing.

2) On that home tab is the styles. The default is "Normal". Right click on normal and choose either "modify" or "update normal to match selection" if you currently have selected the style you want.

3) I'm better at word than excel... give me a minute to see if I can figure this one out.
posted by brainmouse at 10:29 AM on December 17, 2009


(as a continuation of #2, if you change Header 1, Header 2 etc in the same way, those will be the default Header 1 & Header 2).

I can't even find double spacing in Excel -- where are you changing this to single manually? maybe I can figure it out from there.
posted by brainmouse at 10:34 AM on December 17, 2009


Response by poster: Either manually, or set it as default. I was looking under the format cell menu option, and it has font style and size, but not line spacing.
posted by jujube at 10:40 AM on December 17, 2009


What does it look like as double spaced? Do you mean it's not wrapping text so starting at the bottom of the cell if the cell is 2 rows thick? Double spacing doesn't seem to be an option in excel.
posted by brainmouse at 10:42 AM on December 17, 2009


2. You need to create a new template with your styles in it, save it as a template in your Templates folder, and then open that rather than the normal.dot template when you start a new document. That will be one extra step when you open Word, but it should solve your problem
posted by urbanlenny at 10:50 AM on December 17, 2009


CTRL+F1 in any Office 2007/2010 program will show or hide the ribbon. This should get rid of (1)

If you right open up the "Font" properties window (by clicking in the small box in the bottom right corner of the Home/Font tab in the ribbon) you can make whatever changes you want then hit "Default" in the bottom left corner of that dialog box, and that will be the default for all future documents.

As for Excel, there is no such thing as "double spacing" that I know of. You may just have an extra line break in between your lines? Not sure what you mean with (3).
posted by jckll at 10:55 AM on December 17, 2009


Response by poster: Thanks all for answers to 1 & 2!

As for 3, what I am saying is that double spacing is the default, and I can't find the menu option that changes this default setting. So if you go to "format cell" and click on "wrap text", it wraps the text in the cell so that the parts that don't fit in one line drop to the next line within one cell. The default here for the next line is extra space between the lines, akin to double-spacing. I want to get rid of that extra space in between the text so that all the text fits within one cell without having to make the text size ridiculously small, or the column/row size ridiculously big.

Thanks, but I understand if this is just one of those things that can't be changed in Excel.
posted by jujube at 11:11 AM on December 17, 2009


Is it possible you have vertical alignment set to distributed? See if changing vertical alignment to top (or bottom, or centered, depending on what you like) fixes the double-spacing-esque problem.
posted by brainmouse at 11:18 AM on December 17, 2009


I still don't really follow what you're asking about with double spacing. If I write a long text in a cell, then set it to word wrap, it does just that: wrap. Perhaps if you have word wrap on and remove the ACTUAL line breaks in your text you will get what you're looking for? IE only the line breaks caused by the wrapping?

But I think you may be asking for something that isn't possible:

so that all the text fits within one cell without having to make the text size ridiculously small, or the column/row size ridiculously big.

If you have a ton of text in a cell, and you want it to all fit, you either have to decrease the text size or increase the size of the cell. I don't think you're going to get around this simple fact.
posted by jckll at 11:24 AM on December 17, 2009


You can also merge a bunch of cells so that you don't change the overall row/column size, just the size of the section that that text is in.
posted by brainmouse at 11:27 AM on December 17, 2009


It looks like the "extra space" between the lines is, in fact, single spacing. If you insert a text box with single spacing it looks the same as wrapped text in a cell.

If you want to tighten up the lines, one option is to put your text in a text box and set the line spacing to "Exact" and choose what you want. The text box will move around with the cells by default if you resize/insert/delete.
posted by huckit at 12:36 PM on December 17, 2009


Right click on the icon for the command you want to have always available. Choose "Add to Quick Access Toolbar." A small version of the icon will appear in the Toolbar, which will be either above or below the ribbon. I like to keep it below the ribbon.

Unfortunately, Word's former library of keyboard shortcuts has gone away, unless you do them as macros and assign them to the keyboard, which is a pain in the a**.
posted by KRS at 1:18 PM on December 17, 2009


seconding the thought that you have the vertical alignment set to distribute: that's the only thing that explains why making the cell height smaller fixes the spacing problem. You need to change the vertical alignment to either top, center, or bottom.
posted by Eicats at 2:35 PM on December 17, 2009


Chiming in to say that if you're in Excel and your doc is so text-heavy, maybe it's better suited for Word? Perhaps formatted in a table? Excel is not really a word processor... trying to do a lot of detailed text formatting in Excel can be frustrating.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 5:58 PM on December 17, 2009


KRS: Really? I'm mostly an Excel user, but all my "old" hotkeys from 2003 work in 2007 with a very small number of exceptions (like maybe 2). There are lots of NEW hotkeys to do new commands.

Furthermore, some commands have retained their 2003 hotkeys while ADDING new hotkeys that conform to the 2007 hotkey scheme. But I have found that most of my old hotkeys work fine. I'm surprised to hear that Word is much different in this regard.
posted by jckll at 7:36 AM on December 18, 2009


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