Appearance matters--both for documents and for people. Facing pages in a Word document that have even bottom margins make a better impression on readers. When you change font size or use Word's default widow-and-orphan controls, however, you may be left with ragged bottom margins.
Vertical justification lets you avoid this problem without leaving widows and orphans (those one- or two-word lines left at the end of a paragraph) languishing on page corners. Word adds a small amount of space between paragraphs to keep the bottom margins even--just as some books do.
Open the document and select File, Page Setup. Click the Layout tab in the Page Setup dialog box, choose Justified in the 'Vertical alignment' drop-down list, and pick Whole document in the 'Apply to' list (see Figure 1). Click OK to apply the new formatting. Word repaginates the document and adjusts the space between paragraphs to fill pages to the bottom margin.
If the last page of the document is only a partial page (as is often the case), Word spreads the text out to the bottom margin. To fix this, press Ctrl-End to jump to the end of the document, then press Ctrl-Page Up to jump to the top of the last page. Press Shift-Ctrl-End to select all the text on the page, and select File, Page Setup. Beneath the Layout tab, choose Top in the 'Vertical alignment' list, and Selected sections in the 'Apply to' list. Click OK. Word will insert an invisible section break on the previous page and will properly align the last page.
Font Display Wisdom
The handy drop-down font list on Word 2000's Formatting toolbar shows each font name in its actual font. If you have hundreds of fonts installed, though, the list may take several seconds to display. You can speed up the font-list display by setting it to show font names only in Word's default font, such as Arial or New Times Roman. Select Tools, Customize, click the Options tab, deselect List font names in their font, and then click Close.
Change the Date Format
There's a trick to changing the default date and time format in Word 97 and 2000. Select Insert, Date and Time, pick a format, and click Default and Yes in the confirmation box. Now when you insert a date in your document, press Alt-Shift-D instead of selecting 'Insert, Date and Time.' This shortcut will insert the date, using the new format. If you select the menu command, it will insert the date in Word's default format rather than the date format that you selected.
Find and Replace Invisible Items
The find and replace tools in Word 97 or 2000 aren't much help when you're working with invisible items--tabs, paragraph marks, page and section breaks, and the like. You could use Word's shortcut characters to represent these items, but they're hard to remember. To find and replace invisible items without taxing your memory, select either Edit, Find or Edit, Replace, and place your cursor in the 'Find what' or 'Replace with' field in the resulting dialog box. Click More to expand the dialog box, and then choose Special to display a list of characters representing nontext functions (See Figure 2). From the list, select the item you want to search for or replace with, and click the appropriate button to carry out your search or replace operation. To insert more than one special character in a dialog box, or to combine a special character with normal text, repeat the above process as necessary.
Experiment Safely With Documents
The formatting features in modern word-processing programs may tempt you to experiment with layouts and styles to get just the right look. If you want to return to a document's original format, simply using repeat undo (Ctrl-Z) can be ineffective. Play it safe and work on a copy of the document rather than on the original. To create a copy, select File, Save As (or press F12), and give your document a different file name. Now you can revert to the previous format by reloading the original document.
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