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THE OFFICE LETTER
STANDARD EDITION
Tips, Tricks, Tools, and Techniques for Microsoft Office
Volume 4, Number 26 December 13, 2004
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IN THIS ISSUE
1) Reader Feedback: Removing Duplicates in Word
2) Outlook: Print Labels from Your Contacts
3) Review: Capture the Impossible with Kleptomania
4) Microsoft Document Imaging and the Future of the Office Suite
5) Reminder: WordToys Pro Drawing This Week
Premium Edition Extra:
6) PowerPoint: Control Text/Bullet Spacing
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1) READER FEEDBACK: REMOVING DUPLICATES IN WORD
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Bill Coan, the brains behind one of our favorite utilities
(DataPrompter), wrote with this enhancement to a previous reader
tip about deleting duplicate entries in a Word list.
- - -
Claudio Faria offered a great tip on removing duplicates in Word.
As you'll recall, she suggested using Word's Edit>>Replace command
and then placing a checkmark next to Use Wildcards.
With wildcards enabled, Claudio recommended entering the following
values into the Replace dialog box:
Find What:
([!^13]@)^13\1^13
Replace With:
\1^p
The only drawback to this approach is that you have to click
Replace repeatedly until Word has found and deleted all duplicate
paragraphs.
I'd like to offer a small refinement to Claudio's technique, which
makes it possible to find and delete all duplicate paragraphs with
a single click. As with Claudio's technique, you start by sorting
your document so that identical paragraphs are situated
contiguously. Then you choose Edit>>Replace and place a checkmark
next to Use Wildcards. Finally, you enter the following values into
the Replace dialog box:
Find What:
([!^13]@)^13(\1^13)@
Replace With:
\2
When you click Replace, Word finds and deletes all duplicate
paragraphs.
For a full explanation of the wildcard search terms, please review
Claudio's excellent summary in the last issue. What follows is a
condensed explanation of why this works:
Find What:
([!^13]@)^13
The above expression means: "Find one or more non-paragraph-marks
followed by a paragraph mark" (i.e., find a complete paragraph).
Find What:
([!^13]@)^13(\1^13)
The above expression means: "Find one or more non-paragraph-marks
followed by a paragraph mark followed by an identical series of
non-paragraph-marks followed by a paragraph mark" (i.e., find a
complete paragraph followed by an identical complete paragraph).
Find What:
([!^13]@)^13(\1^13)@
The above expression means: "Find one or more non-paragraph-marks
followed by a paragraph mark followed by one or more identical
series of non-paragraph-marks followed by a paragraph mark" (i.e.,
find a complete paragraph followed by one or more identical
complete paragraphs).
Replace With:
\2
The above expression means: "Replace the found text with the second
parenthetical expression in the Find What text" (i.e., Replace the
found text with a single copy of the complete paragraph".
Bill Coan
www.wordsite.com
- - -
Editor's note: Don't miss our review of DataPrompter at
http://www.officeletter.com/blink/dataprompter2003.html.
Thanks for your insight, Bill.
If you have a tip to share with our readers, please send it to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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2) OUTLOOK: PRINT LABELS FROM YOUR CONTACTS
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I've written about mail merge in the past, but I haven't covered
printing labels from Outlook in any detail. Whether you're looking
at printing your greeting card list or want to send out a
promotional piece to your clients, Outlook is a great way to
generate the label list.
As I've explained in previous tips on Outlook-based mail merge, the
key to success is to create a view that shows only those contacts
you want to include in the list. Perhaps the easiest way to
generate the view is to rely on categories to the contacts to be
included:
1. If you haven't set the Holiday Cards category, open the Contacts
folder and select all of the contacts to which you want cards sent
(hold down the Shift or Ctrl key while clicking the mouse to select
multiple contacts).
2. With the contacts selected, right-click one of the contacts and
choose Categories. Place a check beside Holiday Cards and click OK.
3. Choose View/Arrange By/Current View/Customize Current View.
4. Click Filter in the Customize View dialog box, and then click
the More Choices tab.
5. Click Categories, choose the Holiday Cards category, and click
OK.
6. Click OK to close the Filter dialog box, and then click OK to
close the Customize View dialog box.
At this point the view should include only those contacts that have
the Holiday Cards category assigned. Now you're ready to start the
mailing list:
1. Choose Tools/Mail Merge.
2. In the Mail Merge Contacts dialog box, select Mailing Labels
from the Document Type drop-down list and click OK.
3. When the Mail Merge Helper dialog box appears, click Setup.
Choose the type of labels you're using and click OK.
Here the procedure diverges depending on the version of Outlook
you're using. Follow these steps for Outlook 2000 (or skip to the
next section for Outlook 2002 or 2003):
4. Outlook 2000 automatically shows the Create Labels dialog box.
Click Insert Merge Field and add First_Name. Type a space and click
Insert Merge Field, then add Last_Name. Press Enter to start a new
line and click Insert Merge Field, then add the appropriate address
fields using either Business_Address or Home_Address, depending on
where the information is stored in the contact. When you've
finished building the address block, click OK. Click Close to close
the Mail Merge Helper.
5. In the Mail Merge toolbar, click the Merge button, then click
Merge in the Merge dialog box. You should now see a new document
containing the labels.
If you are using Outlook 2002 or 2003, follow these steps:
4. Click Close to close the Mail Merge Helper dialog box.
5. On the Mail Merge toolbar, click the Insert Address Block
button.
6. On the Insert Address Block dialog box, configure the way you
want the address to appear and click OK.
7. On the Mail Merge Toolbar, click View Merged Data to check out
the label.
8. If everything looks OK, click Merge to New Document, choose All,
and click OK.
In Outlook 2003, you can also use the Mail Merge pane to step
through the process of creating the labels. To open the Mail Merge
pane, choose Tools/Letters and Mailings/Mail Merge.
-- Jim Boyce
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3) REVIEW: CAPTURE THE IMPOSSIBLE WITH KLEPTOMANIA
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Have you ever wanted to capture an area of the screen that seems
resistant to being captured? Many times I've wanted to capture the
text in a pop-up message box, only to find that Windows won't let
me. I have to stop and write down the text exactly then type it
into Word or Notepad or take a screen capture and send the image to
tech support. What a hassle.
Kleptomania ($29.95) can pick up anything. The utility is part
"copy" and part optical character recognition -- it applies "Direct
Klepting" technology based on an OCR engine. The program detects
characters in the raster image of Windows to figure out the
location of text, its font size and style, and so on, then passes
the information to an OCR engine which uses a font pattern database
to perform its recognition. The font database is built from the
fonts its finds on your system at installation (if you install or
remove fonts, you'll need to rebuild the database -- it took just
20 seconds to process the 81 fonts on my system).
After installation, Kleptomania adds a small icon to the system
tray. Left-click on the icon, or use the hot key you assigned
during setup, and the program turns your mouse icon into a small
cross.
You can make a selection using one of several modes. "Native Text"
captures the text portion of your selection. A "Text/Graphics
Rectangle" mode selects both text and graphics from the rectangular
area you define by dragging your mouse; a similar mode works on the
entire window. The "Graphics Rectangle" mode selects only graphics
in the region you choose. If you switch back and forth between
different modes, you might want to use the "Smart Selection"
option, in which different mouse actions help determine the
selection mode.
Once you've made your choice, Kleptomania pops up a menu showing
the number of lines, words, and characters selected (in case you
need to make sure you've got everything you intended). It also
asks what you want to do with your selection. For instance, you
can paste the selection into your destination application as
"default" (which means decisions about what's best will be made
automatically), save just plain text, as RTF (to preserve fonts and
formatting), or as graphics (as a bitmap). You can also append
your selection to the clipboard.
There are some other, specific options, too. If you've selected a
URL, you can ask Kleptomania to browse to that site. If you've
selected an e-mail address, you can launch your e-mail editor and
have Kleptomania insert the selected e-mail address in the "To"
field. If your selection includes numbers, Kleptomania will also
automatically sum them and display a total for you.
There are few limitations to Kleptomania's power, but one you
should be aware of is that the program cannot capture from Adobe
Acrobat's PDF or PostScript documents because the utility supports
only Windows raster and True Type fonts. As the Help file explains,
PostScript and PDF readers (such as Adobe Acrobat Reader) use other
non-standard fonts.
A 21-day free trial will show you how useful Kleptomania truly is:
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-- James E. Powell
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4) MICROSOFT DOCUMENT IMAGING AND THE FUTURE OF THE OFFICE SUITE
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Document imaging is a business technology that converts paper
documents into electronic images that can be stored and viewed on a
computer. It is most often used in businesses where documents
contain hand-written information (such as signatures) or where a
significant number of the documents originate outside the business
and are not otherwise available in electronic form. Imaging allows
documents to be shared across the office or around the world
without the need for photocopies or faxes.
In May 2001, Microsoft subtly slipped a new component called
Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MSDI) into the Office
Professional suite. There was very little publicity or fanfare
about this new offering, but as a document imaging professional, I
was shocked. Was Microsoft about to enter the lucrative world of
document imaging and take on the likes of FileNet, Laserfiche, and
Liberty IMS? Since most modern document imaging products are
Windows-based applications that use an SQL database to store the
image metadata, all Microsoft needed was a good GUI front-end
connected to a SQL Server back-end and they would become a force to
be reckoned with.
I conducted some limited experiments with MSDI, and it was obvious
that a substantial amount of thought and development time had gone
into this initial release. The viewer application and the separate
scanning application (see screenshots in our online edition) were
well-developed products. Optical character recognition (the
conversion of scanned images into ASCII text) was licensed from
ScanSoft, Inc., a recognized leader in the field OCR processing.
Document annotation tools included pens and highlighters of various
thicknesses and colors, text boxes, and pictures. There were also
tools for rotating and magnifying images.
Unfortunately, there was no database back-end. MSDI was a single-
user product designed to help the knowledge worker manage a limited
number of documents on a local or mapped hard drive. The images
couldn't be "indexed" in the traditional document imaging sense of
the word, and it was up to the user to manage the location(s) of
the TIFF or WDI files that made up the document repository.
Disappointed, I soon went back to my "real" document imaging
products and wrote MSDI off as a Microsoft experiment that didn't
pan out.
When Office 2003 was released, I was surprised to find that MSDI
had not only survived, but its user interface had been improved and
the OCR engine had been updated. There's still no database back-
end, but the fact that MSDI is still around probably means that
Microsoft has some long-range plans for it.
With new Office servers and services on the way, one can only
wonder if Microsoft Office Document Imaging will soon interface
with SharePoint Portal Server, Content Management Server, or some
new Office-related product to complete the document imaging product
and make it commercially viable in the small- to medium-sized
business (SMB) market.
Recent comments by Chris Capossele, corporate vice president of
Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group (see
http://www.smallbizpipeline.com/news/52200099) and an announcement
that Office 12 will include links to ADP's online payroll services
(see http://www.smallbizpipeline.com/news/52500212) make it clear
that something much more robust than the current Office Small
Business Edition is just around the corner. It will no doubt be
geared -- and priced -- for small businesses, so let's hope
Microsoft doesn't forget the millions of us who have helped make
Office one of the most profitable products in the company's
history.
If you own the Professional version of Office, check out MSDI by
clicking Start/All Programs/Microsoft Office/Microsoft
Tools/Microsoft Office Document Imaging/. You'll need to locate a
TIF file first, though, because Microsoft doesn't provide any
sample documents with MSDI.
If you're a business owner or manager, you can learn more about
document imaging at a Web site I run
(http://www.digitalbusinessdocuments.com) or from any of the
vendors mentioned earlier: FileNet (http://www.filenet.com),
Laserfiche (http://www.laserfiche.com), or Liberty IMS
(http://libertyims.com).
-- Dick Archer
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5) REMINDER: WORDTOYS PRO DRAWING THIS WEEK
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No add-in we've seen offers as many Word shortcuts as WordToys.
The standard version is free, and the Pro version is $20. This
Thursday, December 16, The Office Letter will give away a copy of
the Professional version of WordToys to three lucky Premium Edition
subscribers.
If you've been thinking about subscribing to the Premium edition -
- no ads, extra content, HTML delivery, and access to all back
issues -- do so before Thursday!
To subscribe, Visit http://www.officeletter.com/subscribe.html.
Remember, Premium subscriptions also make excellent holiday gifts
for your friends and colleagues.
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6) PREMIUM EDITION EXTRAS THIS WEEK
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----------- THE OFFICE LETTER ----- www.officeletter.com ----------
Tips and Tricks for Microsoft Office - Published Weekly
Copyright 2004 Masterware, Inc. All rights reserved
Now In Our Fourth Year - ISSN: 1543-5768
Editor in Chief: James E. Powell
Contributing Editors: Jim Boyce (www.boyce.us)
Dick Archer (www.diseno.com)
