Discussion on:

The first nine things I do to default settings in Word 2013

What default Word settings do you find yourself making whenever you come across a freshly installed version or installation?

... is that "default" is not the same as recommended. This is the first thing everyone should do with any new software.

The market is so broad these days, that to expect MS or any vendor to deliver their applications configured to suit you is quite ridiculous. The other point is that "we", power users for want of a better term, have different preferences to the vast majority of users and can't reasonably expect vendors to configure things the way we might want them.

That was what suppose the different VERSIONS (Home, Pro) are used for, but MS poorly or barely wants to look into it except for pricing. Now the MSO become something right in the middle, nothing like Home too far from Pro, so whether we should upgrade or just stay with what we got, at least we still have a Pro versions that looks like Pro.

There are a lot more than 2 or 3 different usage patterns and styles. Within the group "IT Professionals" there's a huge range of preferences, just read what's posted on this site.

The point is that everybody should set things up to suit their needs and not expect someone else to make their decisions/choices for them.

That would be a support nightmare if different versions of Office had different default settings.

Defaults are just that, defaults. You change them to suit your self. Just like settings in any app or OS.

Just means you have to be good to do support well. It's not an entry level position, it's a skill that takes years to develop and perfect. We've got it easy these days with remote control software, Try helping someone that has never even touched a mouse when you can't see what they are seeing.

I basically agree with all of your choices.
I too hate "smart" selection with a vengeance.

What is the benefit of Draft mode?

Draft mode is a personal preference. I find the print layout mode helpful for seeing how the document will look if printed, but I think it is distracting when editing. When editing I just want to see the words.

When I first started using word processors, what we call draft mode was the only mode - I think it is just what I am comfortable with.

Thanks Mark.

nt

As well I like to add the "Style" command to the QAT so I can always see the style applied to the current paragraph. It is helpfull when the style area is not visible. I also add the "Open Recent File ..." command.

In the General option, I change the "Office Theme" away from White!

In the Save option I like to change the "Autorecover File Location" to "My Documents" folder. That way I can see when they start to pile up and can delete them. I also change the "Default local File Location" because I've redirected all of my data files to a separate data partition. I also like to reduce the "Save AutoRecover information" if I haven't added a separate tool to do automatic times "Save As's"

In the Language Option I like to confirm which languages have been installed. When you select some locations during install they automatically add support for more than one language. I don't use the other langauges, so I like to remove them to prevent accidentally changing the language used in the document. (Same for windows, it is really freaky when you accidentally switch the keyboard to another language and don't know how or why, or even WHAT has happened!)

In the Advanced Option in the Save Section, I turn on the "always prompt before saving Normal Template" to keep track of changes being made. If I don't remember making a change that needed saving I say no.

Advanced option, Show Document Content section I like to turn on "Field Shading: Always".

Advanced option, Display section: I tweak the "Show this number of Recent Documents" to at the very least use all of the available screen space.

If I have any commonly used files I may also turn on "Quickly access this number of recent documents" to show at least a few of the most recently used files directly in the file menu. I turn on the "Show Horizontal Scroll Bar"

Advanced Option, General Section I like to turn on "Provide Feedback with sound". I know, it is a very personal choice

If you're currently using Word 2010 or other versions, export all customizations - right click on the ribbon, Customize the quick access toolbar, Import/Export, Export. After installing 2013, import all customizations. Then your current ribbon/QAT settings should be automatically installed. You should also be able to replace 2013's Normal.dot with your Normal template from 2003/7/10 and it will bring all your macros across (at least it worked between 3 and 10! [Unfortunately I don't yet have 2013 so Mark please advise if these are off the "mark".]

Also worthwhile are changing file locations so that templates are backed up automatically, and document location is in the data partition.

Hi - this is a more general 'options' question: I like to use outline mode to take & organise notes, and I also have a habit to paste (screenprint) images in some docs. Unfortunately, the .docx format with the default Word options does not display the images - when you 'downsave' to 2003 format the images do display. I remember having been able to set some option which made image viewing in 2007 possible in outline view, but 'lost' the information with system changes & upgrades. Would anyone know what option would do the trick? Thank you for any help!!

If you have any styles with "Space before" greater than 0pt, they look wrong when they are the first item on a page, as the "Space before" setting pushes them downwards and you get a strange-looking gap above them. This is especially noticeable if you use a hard page break in order to move the next Heading 1 to the top of the next page.

I go into Advanced settings, and under Layout options check "Supress extra line spacing at top of page" and "Suppress Space Before after a hard page or column break".

Now if only I could change the default settings in Outlook.
The "Normal.DOT" file for Outlook2010 is un-reachable.
This means you must live with some of the Microsoft selected defaults, like Tab Stops at 0.5inches (or 12.7mm). Microsoft admits there is no way to change it to your requirement.

It is the Apple attitude of "My way is best and you are going to use it my way or no way at all" that is infecting Microsoft. Be Different; Without change, There can be no progress.

Does anyone know if the lasso function and/or regrouping in Word is back in 2013? It went away in 2010. I think Microsoft hates geometry teachers trying to make and move diagrams.

I don't know about the lasso function - never used it, but group, ungroup, and regroup are present in 2010. However, ungroup and regroup do strange things to the objects which I haven't figured out how to fix. I just close without saving and re-open the doc.

I have to disagree with the notion that straight quotation marks are better than the curly or "smart" quotes. Furthermore, I am disheartened to see that this page uses the straight marks. The fact is that, strictly speaking, in correct usage, there is no such thing as a straight quotation mark. That double-tick symbol exists solely as an abbreviation, shorthand to represent inches or seconds. As a quotation mark, it came into use as a compromise, at best. Typewriters, machines of efficiency, allowed for only one key, one character to represent both the opening and the closing quotation marks. On the same token, there was no zero key, nor one for the number '1' on a typewriter. Today, we would never use an upper-case 'O' nor a lower-case 'l' to represent those characters. Neither should we stick to severely outmoded and entirely unnecessary replacements. We can't even use the excuse that the typesetter was lazy.
In the day of electronic typesetting and proportional fonts, those dinosaurs are truly obsolete, as arecarbon paper and two spaces after a period. We are not using Royal or Smith-Corona dactylographs, and you don't have to press hard to make three copies!

You are certainly correct that "smart" quotes are the correct symbols. Unfortunately to solve this problem is a lot harder than beating up a typesetter for his laziness. It would require coming up with a standard way of encoding the opening and closing quote symbols. Now convince all keyboard makers that they need to add these two new symbols to their keyboards somewhere. Next, contact the creators of the tens of thousands of fonts that exist and have them add the two new symbols to their font and distribute the update version to everyone that uses said font. Now have everyone that's ever developed a computer program or web site re-code their program/site to be aware of your new symbols and handle them correctly. Anyone that's ever written a keyboard filter driver will have some work to do too.

Some of these you can't do retrospectively. To do it properly you'll first need to invent a time machine and travel back and change history so that your new symbols are defined before computers come into use.

swteach says we should no longer have to use two spaces after a period.

I strongly prefer a larger space between sentences than between words. However, I can't find any way of achieving that in Word, short of using two spaces after the period. What I'd really like is some way of controlling the inter-sentence spacing specifically, rather than relying on using multiple space characters.

Note: in the grammar checker you can set it to raise an error flag if your sentences *don't* have the number of spaces you prefer (either one or two), but this isn't what I'm talking about. I'd like to type a period and a space, but have the resultant gap a bit larger than a normal space character.

Does swteach - or anyone else - know how to control the spacing between sentences?

(Note: this post is typed with two spaces after each sentence. I honestly believe it makes it easier to read than single-spaced sentences like those in swteach's post.)

You'll get typographers upset if you keep that talk up!

Part of the HTML (web programming language) specification is to remove all multiple spaces, so unfortunately the time taken to double-space your post was wasted. Does it make you wonder if double-spacing really is easier to read? Because, unless you've never read back comments you've made on the web, you've never actually noticed that your double-spaces were removed.

All professional publications use single-spacing too. Do you also find newspapers, magazines and books difficult to read?

I had to laugh when I read your reply, that my carefully crafted post had been single-spaced for me! Beautifully ironic.

To answer your question: I write quite a lot of technical material, and all I can say for sure is that I find the two-spaces sentence easier to read. Especially so when proof-reading. Of course, I can also read one-space sentences quite happily because - as you say - most published work uses that format.

In my case it has nothing to do with a hangover from typewriters and mono-spaced fonts. Simply a personal preference carefully arrived at after comparing a lot of one-space and two-space text.

There is one (rather contrived) example where the commonly accepted one-space sentence causes chaos - it's where periods are legitimately followed by a single period in the text (specifically for initials, and such like).

My question was a genuine one, but re-reading my comment it sounds very antagonistic. Sorry about that... and nicely responded.

I did actually try to answer your question. I don't know of any way to automatic auto-space in Word but I had the thought that there may exist a font with a space-width amount of whitespace included in the period character. If such a font existed every time you hit period you'd visually get a space, then when you hit the spacebar it would look like a double-space. I searched for but did not find such a font. It's not surprising really, because of the initials reason you mention.

I also had the thought that AutoComplete in Word could be the answer. Set up a new entry to auto-replace a single space with two of them as you type. You've probably tried that already I'm guessing. I gave it a go and Word won't let you do that for spaces, at least in Word 2010. Looks like you'll have to stick to tapping spacebar twice. You've probably got lots of muscle-memory that makes you do that anyway.

Thank you for going to all that trouble, gechurch. What I don't understand is why word processors and DTP programs don't have a reasonably fine-grained user-settable sentence spacing.

After all, you can set paragraph spacing to whatever you like (in 1/72 inch jumps), ditto line spacing, and even character spacing (in 0.1pt steps). All of these are "legitimate" adjustments in the publishing world. So why not sentence spacing? It makes no sense to me.

Hi, Do you know what the keyboard shortcut is for zooming in and out in Office 2013? Like on websites you can use CTRL+ or CTRL- and I think this also used to work in the previous version of Office.