Occasionally we have to make use of subscripts or superscripts in our documents. The most common use of these is with dates, as in 20^th. There the ‘th’ is a superscript; that is, smaller text that is raised. Subscripts are most often used in technical language such as if we refer to water as H₂O. There the subscript is the ‘2′; smaller text that is lowered.

To switch to subscript mode or to change the selected text to a subscript, hold down the Control key and press the = key. This same combination will also set selected subscript text back to normal and switch out of subscript mode, as with the keyboard shortcuts for bold or italic mode.

To switch to superscript mode or to change the selected text to a superscript, hold down the Control key and the Shift key, and then press the = key. As with subscripts the same combination switches back to normal text to if presses again.

This tip applies to Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, but unfortunately not to Excel.

When using a word processor it is quite common to forget that that the CapsLock key has been left on, or you might decide that a piece of text looks better in capital letters (also known as upper case: small letters are known as lower case).

Thankfully MS Word has a keyboard shortcut that lets you cycle between different cases and formats. All you need to do is highlight a piece of text, hold down the Shift key and press F3.

Each time you press F3 the case of the letters will change (don’t release the Shift key!). So, ‘testing’ will be replaced with ‘Testing’ on the first press, and ‘TESTING’ if you press it a second time. Press F3 again and the text will return to ‘testing’.

If you type ‘tESTING’ by mistake, you can change it to ‘testing’, then ‘Testing’, and ‘TESTING’; however, it will not return to ‘tESTING’, probably because it is highly unlikely you’d ever want text to be in that format.

[Addendum]

As one commentator has pointed out, a particular word does not need to be highlighted to have its case changed by this method, all you need to do is have the cursor somewhere within the word. If you wish to change the case of several words then you have to highlight them all. Thanks to A. for this clarification.

I doubt many people do not make use the spellchecking facility in MS Word. Most people probably run a grammar check too. Nevertheless, few people will use Word’s readability statistics report.

To switch this report on, open the ‘Tools’ menu in Word and click on ‘Options’, select the ‘Spelling & Grammar’ tab, tick the ‘Show Readability Statistics’ box, and click ‘OK’.

Now, when you click on the ‘Spelling and Grammar’ button (shown left), Word will go through any errors it finds in the selected text, or the whole text if none is selected, and then it will show you the ‘Readability Statistics’ report.

This report is particularly useful to anyone who wishes to make their writing more legible. The report not only contains general information about the number of words, characters and sentences etc, but also the average number of sentences per paragraph, words per sentence and the like.

The bottom section includes three very useful measures. The first gives a percentage of the number of passive sentences in the selected text. As you may know, the active voice makes a text more readable, so it is best to avoid the passive voice when possible. There is a good tutorial about the difference between the voices here.

The second and third measures, the Flesch reading ease and the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, show how difficult a text is to comprehend according to mathematical equations. More details on these equations and an explanation of the scales are available here.

Here is the scenario, you have copied some text from somewhere and pasted it into Word; however, the text ends up looking something like this.

To see the cause of this problem, press the ‘Show/Hide ¶‘ button. As shown, the original text has carriage returns - as indicated by the ‘¶’ marks - at the end of the original lines. When this text was pasted into word the lines were no longer the same length, so, the carriage returns were in the wrong place.

The solution to this problem is to replace the carriage returns with spaces. You can do this manually, or use the replace feature in Word. To open the ‘Find and Replace’ dialog box, pull down the ‘Edit’ menu and select ‘Replace’ - you may have to click the double arrows at the bottom of the menu to display all the entries on the menu - or you could hold down the Ctrl key and press H.

Each special character has its own code associated with it. For the carriage return this is ‘^p’, for Tab it is ‘^t’ and so on (you can see them all by pressing the ‘More’ button on the ‘Find and Replace’ dialog box - this will display more options - and press the ‘Special’ button.

The text we are editing is broken into various paragraphs with an empty line between them. In order to maintain this separation of paragraphs, we need to mark all the places where one return follows another. I usually use two tildes ‘~’ to mark these, because that rarely occurs in a text. Fill in the fields as below and press the ‘Replace all’ button.

A dialog box will be shown telling you how many replacements have been made. Press OK to close it. The text will then look like this…

With the separation of paragraphs marked we can now remove all those superfluous returns. Enter ‘^p’ in the Find what: field and a space in the Replace with: field.

Press ‘Replace All’ again and OK when you are told how many replacements have been made. The text will then look like this…

We need to return the paragraphs to their original form. To do this replace all the occasions of ‘~~’ with two carriage returns, as in the following image. Again, press ‘Replace All’.

The text should now look like this. We are very close to what we want, except that there are some superfluous spaces in the quote at the bottom.

To remove these, go to the ‘Find and Replace’ dialog box again, and enter two spaces in the Find what: field and one space in the Replace with: field. Keep pressing the ‘Replace All’ button until there are no more examples to replace. The text should now look like this: nicely formatted with all the separate paragraphs maintained.

A while ago I wrote an article that suggested that rather than printing directly from web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, it is better to copy the information that you want into a word processor and print it from there. In that article I mentioned the use of the ‘Paste Special’ in Word, which enables you to remove formatting from the information that you paste. In this article I will explain how to put a button for ‘Paste Special’ onto the toolbar in word. This technique can also be used to add any of the other available buttons onto the toolbar.

Open up word and right-click on one of the toolbars, which are at the top of the screen below the menu and look something like this:

From the menu, select ‘Customize…’, which will open a dialog box. Click on the ‘Commands’ tab.

Select ‘Edit’ from the left-hand menu, because the ‘Paste Special’ tool is listed in the ‘Edit’ menu. Scroll down through the list on the right-hand until you see ‘Paste Special’ then left-click on it and hold the mouse button down. The mouse pointer should change to an arrow pointing at a rectangle with a square to the bottom right, which will have an X in it initially.

Move the pointer up to the toolbars and release the mouse button when it is in a suitable position: next to the normal paste button for example. You will notice that the mouse pointer changed appearance again when you hovered over the toolbar, with the X being replaced with a + to let you know that the new button can be placed there.

Your toolbar should now look something like this:

If you wish to remove a button from the toolbar, follow the instructions above for opening the ‘Customize’ dialog, but rather than drag from the dialog box to the toolbar, click on the button you wish to remove from the toolbar and drag it into the dialog box.

This process also works in the other Microsoft Office applications such as Excel and PowerPoint.

Eye strain is a hazard to anyone who uses their computers for any extended period. So anything that eases the pressure on the eyes is a bonus. To this end, Microsoft have developed a tool for making text more legible called ClearType Tuner.

The ClearType Tuner only works on Windows Vista and XP, and is available as a web-based tool here. You will be required to choose which is the clearer text from a variety of options a couple of times, and then - hopefully - text should be clearer on your screen. Windows XP users can also download a Control Panel version from the Microsoft XP Power Toys page.

If you are a Vista user and wish to switch off ClearType check out Diana Huggin’s instructions on the excellent Lockergnome site.