Eliminate white space in Word with automatic hyphenation
Thursday, October 26, 2006 09:38 AM
If there are too many ragged lines in your document, Word's automatic hyphenation feature can help align your paragraphs, tables, or entire text. Mary Ann Richardson explains how to line it all up.
Microsoft Word
Eliminate white space in Word documents with automatic hyphenation
Do your Word documents have too much white space? Word's automatic hyphenation feature can help reduce white spaces within justified paragraphs or even out the ragged edges of left-aligned paragraphs. You can use the automatic hyphenation feature to ensure a minimum of space, such as 0.1," lies between the end of the last word in a line and the right margin. You don't want too much of a good thing, so Word also lets you limit the number of consecutive lines that end with a hyphen. To activate this feature, follow these steps:
- Go to Tools | Language | Hyphenation.
- Click the Automatically Hyphenate Document check box.
- In the Hyphenation Zone box, click the down arrow until it displays 0.1."
- Enter 2 in the Limit Consecutive Hyphens To box.
- Click OK.
Word will hyphenate the existing text in the document according to your instructions, allowing only two consecutive hyphenated lines. Once set, Word will continue to hyphenate the document automatically as you type.
There may be times when you would like to use hyphenation to reduce ragged edges in only certain parts of your document, such as tables. To have Word hyphenate only those parts of a document, follow these steps:
- Select the areas of your document you do not want hyphenated. (If the areas are not contiguous, press [Ctrl] while you select them.)
- Go to Format | Paragraph and click on the Line And Page Breaks tab.
- Click the Don't Hyphenate check box, and then click OK.
You can now follow steps 1 through 5 above to activate automatic hyphenation for the rest of the document.
Microsoft Excel
Adjust row heights to make Excel spreadsheets easier to read
Excel automatically adjusts rows to the size of your font. If you don't want to increase the font and prefer to add white space between the rows to make your worksheets easier to read, you can insert an empty row between two lines of data. This works to a point--it could invalidate formulas that refer to values, which may change any time you insert a row. Rather than changing all the formulas' relative references to absolute values, a better alternative is to adjust row height; simply click and drag a row's boundary beneath the row's number until there is enough white space to easily read the data.
You can also change the height of more than one row. To do so, select the desired rows and then click and drag one of the selected row's boundaries until you reach the desired height. If you need to change the height of all the rows in a worksheet to make it more readable, click the Select All button in the upper left hand corner of the spreadsheet, then click and drag one of the selected row's boundaries to the desired height.
Microsoft Access
Increase your Access options with nonexclusive option groups
Access forms can provide customers a choice of one option from among a set of alternatives. For example, you can add an Option group control to your form from which the customer can choose among three possible shipping methods: overnight, two-day, or standard. The Option group control only allows the customer one choice because Option group controls are, by default, exclusive.
If you want to allow a choice of more than one option from a group, you need to create a nonexclusive option group. For example, say you are conducting a survey of your company's computing equipment, and you want the department managers to indicate the operating systems installed at their sites. You have created four yes/no fields in your survey database for each of the following operating systems: Windows, Linux, Mac, and UNIX. To create a nonexclusive option group, follow these steps:
- Open the survey form in design view.
- Click the check box tool in the form's toolbox.
- If necessary, click the Field List button in the form's toolbar to display the fields from your survey database table.
- Click and drag the Windows field to your form.
- Click and drag the Linux field to your form.
- Click and drag the Mac field to your form.
- Click and drag the UNIX field to your form.
- Click the rectangle control in the Form design toolbox.
- Click and drag to form a box around the four check box controls.
- Click and drag a Label control above the rectangle.
- Click inside the Label control and enter the following text: Which of the following operating systems do you have installed at your site? Check all that apply.
By grouping the check box controls within a rectangle, you've created a nonexclusive option group for your form.
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