The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Using Word’s "What’s This?" Feature Brett Lockwood |
| Sometimes it is useful to view in a single display the attributes applied to text in a Word document. You can do this using the What's This? feature (called Reveal Formatting on the Mac). This means that you don't have to cycle through the tabs in the Paragraph and Font dialog boxes and remember a bundle of settings in order to review the formats applied to a piece of text. |
The procedures in this
article have been checked for versions of Word up to and including |
What's This? is especially useful if you are working with styles, because it separates formatting applied via a style from formatting applied manually (Word calls the latter "direct formatting", for example selecting text and clicking the Bold button on the Formatting toolbar, or selecting text and applying a font from the Font box on this toolbar: this is the type of text formatting we apply if we are not working exclusively with styles).
What's This? can be used to check that no direct formatting has been applied to text (if this is what you require), or as a quick check of white space applied before and/or after a paragraph etc. If I am working with a document containing quotations that are block indented, I sometimes use it to check that the left and right indents are consistent, and that the text justification is consistent for all the quotes (fully justified, flush left etc.) (particularly if Word is to be the final publishing vehicle, for example if the document is to be PDFd via Acrobat directly from Word).
What's This? is used by clicking the Help menu, choosing What's This?, and clicking on the character or letter you want to examine. When What's This? is in operation, a question mark appears on the right side of the cursor. You cancel the feature by pressing the Escape key.
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Figure 1 shows What's This? in use, with the letter b on the word before being
examined. The Paragraph Formatting (top) section of the box that appears (I call
it the What's This? box) contains the paragraph attributes of the selected
character, and the Font Formatting (bottom) section contains the font attributes
of the character. Both sections contain a Paragraph Style area, which lists
paragraph (top section) and font (bottom section) attributes applied to the
selected character via the style tag applied to that character (all text in Word
is tagged with a style, whether this tag is intentionally applied by you or not;
see my article
Making Work Easier in Word in
PC Update, July 2003, for a
discussion of this). Both sections also contain a Direct area, which lists any
text attributes applied via direct (manual) formatting. The Font Formatting
section also has an area called Character Style. If the character selected for
examination has been tagged with a character style, the attributes of the style
are listed here.
Figure 1 shows that the sample text is formatted with 2.54 cm (1 inch) indents
(the text is part of a quotation), and that 6 points of white space after the
paragraph is included as part of the style formatting. The style name of the
selected text - Block Text -is displayed in the Style box (upper left) on the
Formatting toolbar. Block Text is one of Word's many ready-made built-in styles
(see my article cited above for a discussion of Word's built-in styles).
You can see that several direct formats have been applied. Full justification, 6
points of space before the paragraph, and the "keep with next" setting (which
prevents a page break between this and the next paragraph) have been manually
applied as "extra" paragraph attributes. The Book Antiqua font, a different font
size (11 point), the italic font format, and the "English (U.K.)" language
setting have been applied as additional font attributes. The document author has
also expanded the character spacing of the text by 1 point (this is done using
the Font dialog box). One or all of these "direct" attributes may not be
desired. For example, expanded character spacing is very unusual in Word
documents. Also, the "keep with next" setting may not be desirable. What's This?
lets you quickly see whether such lesser known attributes are in use and you can
then remove them if desired.
What's This? operates by selecting just one character at a time. The character
being examined is marked with a rectangular border, as Figure 1 shows. However,
as with several Word information display features involving text format and
style information, the What's This? box needs some additional explanation. With
the exception of the font name and font size of the selected character, which
are always shown in the box, style attributes are listed only if they are
different to the style attributes of the Normal style. The Normal style is
Word's fundamental paragraph style, and it automatically applies text attributes
such as single line spacing and widow/orphan control etc. (use
The What's This? box could also be called the Reveal Formats box. It probably owes its existence to Microsoft's decision to supply WordPerfect users with user-friendly features in Word. Reveal Formats or Reveal Codes was a major command in versions of WordPerfect where text formatting codes were displayed alongside text.
About The Author
Brett Lockwood has been a freelance editor since 1981 and has worked with computers since 1976. He is president of the Society of Editors (Victoria) and teaches on-screen text editing (using MS Word). Contact Brett at brett@melbpc.org.au.
Reprinted from the December 2003 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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