Carol Bratt

In addition to sending vCards as e-mail attachments, Outlook allows you to save a contact entry to a file as a vCard. You might do this if you want to link to vCards on a web site so that others can download the vCards directly rather than receiving ... a message with the vCards attached. You might want to save a large number of contacts as vCards and send them to someone via a Zip disk or other removable media rather than through e-mail. Follow these steps to save a contact item as a vCard file: In Outlook, open the contact item you want to save as a vCard. Choose File, Export To vCard File. ... (view more)

Create a keyboard shortcut and apply your most-wanted Word fonts wherever and whenever you want. You like to use the Courier New font in your Word publications, but you'd rather not navigate the long list of fonts in the Formatting toolbar every ... time you need to use it. Rather than clicking through the toolbars and menus to find your favorite font, you can create a keyboard shortcut -- and never have to search for the font again. Follow the steps below to create your shortcut: Go to Tools | Customize. On the Commands tab, click the Keyboard button. Under Categories, click Fonts. Under Fonts, ... (view more)

A reader recently asked me how make page numbers appear in the footer of her document as text, rather than as numerals. It took some research, but I found an answer. So, if you ever need to have your page numbers appear as text, follow the steps ... below. View | Headers and Footers. Once you are in either the Header or Footer: Press CTRL | F9 to insert field braces {} (don't type the braces yourself). Type page \*cardtext between the field braces. Press F9 to hide the field code and to update the field. The word "card" in cardtext is an abbreviation of cardinal. Cardinal numbers are ... (view more)

When an object does not appear to be going in the right direction in MS Word, you can flip or rotate it to your preference. When you want to pivot the object to that it is at a different angle, you can change its rotation. If you want a mirror image ... of the object, you can flip it. To rotate follow the steps below: Select the object so that sizing handles surround it. Click the Free Rotate button on the Drawing toolbar. This changes the sizing handles to green circles and changes the mouse pointer as well. Drag any of the green handles to pivot the object. When you are finished, click away ... (view more)

When you first draw a shape, it appears empty, with a thin black border. You can add color, shading and fill effects to a selected shape by using the Fill Color button. Click the Fill Color button to see the menu. Here you can click a color to fill ... the shape, or click More Fill Colors to get a dialog box offering even more colors. After you've selected a color, you can add fill effects. Click the Fill Effects button on the Fill Color menu to see the Fill Effects dialog box. On the Gradient tab, you can choose to shade from one color to another. The Texture tab offers a selection of realistic ... (view more)

The buttons on the Drawing toolbar have useful tools for -- what else? -- drawing objects, such as shapes and lines. Not only can you make simple squares, circles, ovals, and lines, but MS Word provides AutoShapes, a gallery of typical shapes such ... as stars, pentagons, block arrows, etc. A special type of AutoShape, a callout, combines a text box and indicator line and is used to attach explanatory text to a specific part of the document, much as a speech balloon in a comic strip attaches to a character, or a label points to part of a cell or organism in a biology diagram. Other buttons on the ... (view more)

Some of you may have noticed that there have been no articles from Carol's Corner Office in the last three or four editions of Infopackets. I have been very, very busy and wasn't able to submit material for those editions. The reason I have been so ... busy is that I was putting the finishing touches on my first eBook, which, I'm excited to say, will be available very shortly! The eBook features articles based on MS Office (including: MS Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint), and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) I receive from readers. It's a compilation of every article I have written during ... (view more)

Text boxes are similar to pictures, but some methods of modifying them are unique. To move the text box, drag it's border. To resize the text box, drag the sizing handles. To delete a text box, click its border so that the insertion point is no ... longer blinking inside it. Then press Delete or Backspace or right-click on it and select Cut. To change the wrapping style and other properties of the box, use one of these methods to access the Format Text Box dialog box: Choose Format | Text box, double-click the border, or right-click the corner and choose Format Text Box from the shortcut menu. ... (view more)

There may be times in MS Word when you want to position a block of text independently or wrap text around it, similar to what you have done with pictures. To do this, you would use a text box. Adding a text box is just one of the features found on ... the Drawing toolbar. You might want to add text, such as a caption, to a picture or to create a pull quote, an interesting bit of text with a contrasting format that is used in newsletters to draw in the reader. You can also use text boxes for articles in a newsletter that aren't a part of the main article, independent from the snaking columns you' ... (view more)

After you've changed a picture into a floating object, you can further control how the text flows in relation to the picture. You can edit the wrap points to control how close the text wraps next to the picture. To do so: Click to select the ... picture. Click the Text Wrapping button and choose Edit Wrap Points. The picture is then surrounded with a red dashed outline with small black handles at each angle. To move the wrap point, click and drag it. To add a new wrap point, click anywhere on the red dashed line and drag. The text wrapping changes immediately. Click outside the picture to get rid ... (view more)