Clearing the formatting for a paragraph in Word in Office 365

If you are using the Word application in Office 365/Microsoft 365, if a paragraph, or multiple paragraphs, in a document contains formatting information, such as a gray background, text coloring, etc. that you wish to remove, you can change the style of the paragraph to eliminate that styling information by highlighting the paragraph, or paragraphs, then choosing Styles from the menu that pops up, then "Clear Formatting".

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Turning off Spelling and Grammar Checking for a Document in Microsoft Word 2010

If you wish to turn off the spelling check and/or the grammar check for a document in Word in the Microsoft Office 2010 suite (version 14.0.7268.5000), you can do so by taking the following steps:

1. Click on the Review tab at the top of the Word window where the document is open.
2. On the Review tab, click on Spelling & Grammar.
3. In the Spelling and Grammar window that then opens, click on the Options button.

   

4. Under the Proofing option, you will see check boxes for "Hide spelling errors in this document only" and "Hide grammar errors in this document only". Check both boxes, if you wish to turn off checking for both, and click on the Ok button.

   

5. You can then close the Spelling and Grammar window by clicking on the "X" in the upper, right-hand corner of that window.

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Clearing the formatting of paragraphs in Microsoft Word

I edit a newsletter for the retiree organization of my former employer. Often when I receive a draft copy of the newsletter in Microsoft Word format, I find that some paragraphs have a gray background or other formatting that I need to remove. I can't remove that grey background by changing the fill for the paragraph to "none", but I can remove it by highlighting the paragraph and then clearing the formatting. The procedure for doing so with Microsoft Word version 14.0, which is part of Microsoft Office Professional 2010, and other versions on a Windows system is to right-click on the paragraph after highlighting it, then select Styles and then Clear Formatting. The font selection will also be cleared.

Alternatively, with the text in the paragraph highligthed, hit the Ctrl key and spacebar simultaneously to clear the formatting for the paragraph.

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Formatting endnotes in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style

If you are using Microsoft Word to write a paper adhering to the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) guidelines for citations that appear in the endnotes section of the paper, references to endnotes should be made in the paper using Arabic numerals at the end of sentences with the numbers put in superscript.

Example

Ludwig considered it an honor that his books were among those burned by the Nazis in 1933.¹

Endnote

1. Emil Ludwig, Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (New York: Alliance Book Corporation: 1940), 49.

You can configure Microsoft Word for CMS style citations by clicking on the References tab and then selecting a Chicago option for the Style option. Microsoft Word 2010 lists "Chicago Fifteenth Edition" as the CMS option.

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Counting the number of rows in a table in Microsoft Word

If you wish to determine the number of rows present in a table in Microsoft Word 2010 on a Microsoft Windows system, highlight all of the rows in the table by putting the mouse pointer in the top or bottom row and then dragging it downwards or upwards until all of the rows are highlighted. Then right-click and select Table Properties. Under the Row tab you should see the number of rows listed.

If you don't see the row count, click on the Table or Column tab and then go back to the Row information by selecting the Row tab again. You should then see the row count displayed.

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Extracting images from an Excel spreadsheet

I needed to extract two diagrams from a worksheet in a Microsoft Excel workbook. The diagrams appeared to have been put in the worksheet as an image through a copy and paste operation. I could right-click on an image in the sheet and choose "Copy" or "Save as Picture" and for the latter option I could choose PNG, JPEG, PDF, GIF, or BMP for the "Save as Type" value, but I wondered what type of file Excel was using for the embedded image. The file was a .xlsm file, which like a .xlsx file is an Office Open XML (OpenXML) file format that can be "unzipped" to reveal the constituent files within it by renaming the file to have a .zip filename extension or copying the file to a new file with a .zip extension - see Zipping and unzipping Excel xlsx files. So I copied the file giving the new file a .zip extension and then extracted the contents of that file by unzipping it. I then had a file named "[Content_Types].xml" and the following directories in the directory where I had extracted files from the zip file:

_rels
customXml
docProps
xl

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Viewing and Editing Defined Names in Excel 2013

To view or edit the defined names in the Microsoft Excel 2013 spreadsheet program, you can take the following steps:

1. Click on the Forumulas tab at the top of the Excel window.
2. From the Formulas menu, select Name Manager. In the Name Manager window, you can see the defined names.

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Using downloaded Visio stencils with Visio 2016

I needed to add a Juniper SRX Series Services Gateway to a network diagram created with Microsoft Visio 2016, so I downloaded the SRX Series stencils from Juniper Networks Product Icons & Visio Stencils page. The downloaded file was a ZIP file, so I extracted the contents of that file. Within the .zip file were two .VSS files: Juniper Branch SRX Series.vss and Juniper Data Center SRX Series.vss. On a Microsoft Windows system, if you wish to make shapes within a .vss file available within Visio, you can copy the .vss files to the My Shapes directory within the Documents directory for the account you are using. To then access the shapes, click on More Shapes on the left side of the Visio 2016 window, then select My Shapes. You should then see the names for the .vss files you added to the My Shapes directory listed.

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Day of the week for dates in Excel and Calc

If you wish to display the day of the week, i.e, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., that corresponds to a particular date in Microsoft Excel you can simply format the display of the date using a custom format of ddd. E.g., in Microsoft Excel 2013, if I have dates in column A displayed in mm/dd/yyyy format, but I also want the day of the week corresponding to those days to appear in column B as shown below.

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Searching for text in the subject of a message with OWA

Using Outlook on the web, aka Outlook Web App (OWA)and Outlook Web Access, to check my email on a Microsoft Exchange server using a web browser, I can use the search function to search for a string that may be part of a word in the subject of a message. But I can only search for that string if it occurs at the beginning of a word. E.g., if I'm looking for any message that has "CRQ000000473568" within the subject of a message, I can use either of the two searches below to successfully find such messages.

Subject: CRQ000000473568
Subject: CRQ*

I can use the asterisk as a wildcard character to represent one or more of any character.

But if I use either of the following search parameters, the relevant messages won't be found.

Subject: *473568
Subject: *473568*

The search function doesn’t provide a search option that will allow you to search for text in the middle or end of a word. It only find items that contain a word that begins with your search string.

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