October/November 2006

Volume 47, Number 2

Word Hacks: Tips & Tricks for Taming Your Text

by Ron Arner

Word Hacks: Tips & Tools for Taming Your Text
Andrew Savikas. 2005. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 0-596-00493-1. 373 pages. $24.95 (paperback).
http://www.oreilly.com

Have you ever described Microsoft Word as “infinitely customizable” or “almost infinitely programmable”? These are probably not phrases heard from many technical communicators about this much-maligned and ubiquitous word processor. But such are the claims of Andrew Savikas, author of Word Hacks, an O’Reilly book that encourages Word users to “peak behind the curtain” and discover all Word has to offer.

I’ve always been impressed by O’Reilly books, so I was eager to delve into this manual, hoping that it would demystify some of the more unusable features of the program. While I didn’t come away feeling that I’d mastered the intricacies of Word, I was definitely encouraged by the possibilities this book suggested, particularly for users willing to learn a little Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

Savikas describes 100 hacks (a hack in this book is a clever solution to a problem, not a form of computer crime). Here’s a list of some I found helpful, surprising, and even downright brilliant, along with chapter titles:

Chapter 1: Word Under the Hood
Tweak the Interface, Macros 101

Chapter 2: The Word Workspace
Hack Your Shortcut Menus, Hack the Office Assistant, Sample Your System Fonts

Chapter 3: Formatting, Printing, and Table Hacks
Sample Your System Fonts, Put Footnotes in Tables, Make PDFs Without Acrobat

Chapter 4: Editing Power Tools
Crunch Numbers Quickly in Word, Find and Replace Without Find and Replace

Chapter 5: Templates and Outlines
Use an Outline to Build an Org Chart

Chapter 6: Housekeeping
Rename Built-in Styles

Chapter 7: Macro Hacks
Do Something to Every File in a Directory

Chapter 8: Forms and Fields
Use Custom Shortcut Menus to Make Frequent Selections

Chapter 9: Advanced Word Hacks
Show a Directory Structure as a Word Outline

Chapter 10: Word 2003 XML Hacks
Google Without Leaving Word

Yes, everything listed above and more really is possible with Word. I was surprised to find that Word can crunch numbers, and ecstatic to find a way to sample all my system fonts at once. For those of you who are not Word fans, this book will probably not change your mind, because you do have to spend the time and energy to customize it to your liking. However, for those of you who work with Word all the time, find it challenging, and want to make it more usable, this book would make a good addition to your tech comm library.