New and Helpful Word Processing Features

By David Stutzman, RA, CSI, CCS

Corel WordPerfect® 10 and Microsoft Word® XP have been available for about one year. Both programs introduced many upgrades from the their previous edition. The most dramatic changes appeared in Word XP, in an attempt to offer features that have been available to WordPerfect users for years. This article addresses some features that may be helpful for construction specifiers. Specifiers are in front of a computer most of the day, so any time saving advantage, no matter how small, can be a real benefit.
 

Word XP

Task Panes: (View/Task Panes) This is a new feature that allows users to see the formatting for the current paragraph or selected text. The task bar is displayed to the right of your document and has eight different display options. Each option can be selected by a drop down menu or by previous/next buttons to scroll through each display. The Reveal Formatting display shows the font, paragraph, bullets and numbering, and section formatting settings. Each setting can be modified from the task pane by a hyperlink to the formatting dialog box. Changes made with Reveal Formatting are applied to the current selected text.

Task Panes also includes a panel for Styles and Formatting. This panel displays the available styles and formatting. A drop down window allows users to limit the display to the styles and formatting in use in the current document. This feature provides a simple display of all the formatting that is also available on the formatting tool bar. The Clear Formatting selection (also available from File/Clear/Formats) is helpful to remove all formatting before applying new or corrected formatting. Task Panes provides a simple way to format new text, especially when text is imported to Word from another program or an unformatted document.

TIP: To remove only font formatting select the paragraph or text and use Ctrl-Space. This is an undocumented feature that is a real time saver.

Markup: (View/Markup) This is a powerful new feature in Word XP. If you use the compare feature at all, this improvement is worth the price of the upgrade. The Markup view and associated toolbar allow users to control what revisions are displayed so the review can be completed more quickly. The Reviewing Pane displayed at the bottom of the screen shows the author for each change and the text and formatting revisions for each change. The toolbar allows users to select the view of the file including the original, original with markups, final, or final with markups. Being able to switch views helps speed reviews, especially complicated changes. Users can choose what type of changes are displayed by using the Show drop down menu. There is also a choice to display changes, selected by author.

File Windows: (Windows) Word XP now shows all the open documents through the drop down menu bar. The individual icons still appear on the Task Bar. But when you have multiple documents open, the drop down menu allows the full document name to be displayed even when the Task Bar Icon names are truncated. This will make moving between open documents easier, because it will be easier to select the right document.

Protect Document: (Tools/Protect Document) This feature allows users to set a level of protection so changes to the documents are tracked, only comments are allowed, or only form fields may be changed. This can be helpful when distributing documents for review or to collect comments to ensure that all changes are identified.

Outline View: (View/Outline) Not a new feature, but a real time saver for specifiers. Outline view combined with Document Map (View/Document Map) will allow specifiers to move through a document quickly to delete text that does not apply to a specific project. The document map can be expanded or collapsed to show any level of detail desired. Selecting text in the document map moves the cursor to the text location in the document. The Outline view allows entire outline branches to be selected by double-clicking to the left of the outline text. Entire articles, or paragraphs and subparagraphs can be selected and deleted with two clicks and a single keystroke. Dragging and scrolling to select large groups of text are completely eliminated.

WordPerfect 10

Undo/Redo: (Edit/Undo/Redo History/Options) WordPerfect allows users to set the Undo levels to more than 200 and you can save the Undo/Redo history with your document. This allows you to reverse corrections even after saving and closing the document. This feature allows users to revert to the status of last saved version of the document and beyond.

Variable: (Insert/Variable) Users can define variables that can be inserted into the documents to mark text that will change. For construction specs, variables that could be used are names for the Architect, Owner, and Project, dates for bidding, and project location for example. Variables are stored with individual files. If the same variable is used in multiple files it will need to be created for each file. After variables are created and inserted into the documents, the text can be changed for every occurrence by simply editing the variable.

QuickMark: (Tools/Bookmark) This new feature allows WordPerfect files to open to the cursor location when the file was last closed. This is a feature I have missed ever since I gave up my Mac for a PC. Now WordPerfect has a way to help users remember where they left off in editing a document. This feature, alone, could make upgrading to version 10 worth the cost because of the time it will save finding the place to begin editing when opening the document.

Publish to PDF: (File/Publish to PDF) Not a new feature, but worth mentioning because the feature now supports hyperlinks and watermarks. This feature allows WP users to publish documents as PDF files without spending additional hundreds of dollars to buy Adobe Acrobat. The time it takes to publish each document is only 2-3 seconds. Even though WordPerfect has other excellent translators built-in, they are not flawless. Publish to PDF allows WordPerfect users to distribute perfect documents to any other computer user without relying on translations. Often our Word user clients complain that they cannot open WordPerfect documents. In Word, translators are installed only if users select Custom Install and select the translators for installation. Publish to PDF eliminates this complaint.

Select Text: (Not a menu item) You can select All, Sentence, Paragraph, Page or Section (new) simply by right-clicking outside the left margin and making the appropriate selection in the contextual menu. Or you can select a Sentence or Paragraph by left-clicking once or twice outside the left margin. Selecting text quickly by clicking is more accurate and saves time compared to selecting by dragging.

Browse by Feature: (Not a menu item) This feature is displayed on the vertical scroll bar. The feature can be selected by clicking on the browse icon between the set of double headed arrow buttons. WordPerfect offers a variety of browse features settings including, page, redline text, and strikethrough text.

Both products have made some significant improvements. Most of the new features in Word seem to be an attempt to duplicate features that have been available in WordPerfect for years - perhaps a recognition by Microsoft that Corel understands what word processing users require to make their job easier. There is still one distinct difference between the programs. WordPerfect applies formatting in a streaming fashion. Formats affect all text after the format insertion point so the format only needs to be applied once. Word applies formatting to individual paragraphs. To change the formatting, the text must be selected and then the formatting applied. Understand this distinction, then use the program with the features to match your needs.

About the author: David Stutzman, RA, CSI. CCS is President of Focus Collaborative, Inc., a specifications consulting firm with offices in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Focus Collaborative coordinates the input from members of the CSRF SPECTEXT® Review Committee.

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©  Copyright 2007, The Construction Sciences Research Foundation, Inc.  Updated January 12, 2007.