Word Up: Using Microsoft Word Like a Pro

Episode Notes

Transcript

New Solo

Word Up: Using Microsoft Word Like a Pro

09/21/2017

[Music]

Intro: So you are an attorney and you have decided to go out on your own, now what? You need a plan and you are not alone. Join expert host Adriana Linares and her distinguished guests on New Solo. Tune into the lively conversation as they share insights and information about how to successfully run your law firm, here on Legal Talk Network.

[Music]

Adriana Linares: Welcome back to another episode of New Solo on Legal Talk Network. I am Adriana Linares. I am your host. With me today is my fabulous partner, dear friend, and training genius Allan Mackenzie. But before we get started and I let him introduce himself, I am going to make sure and take a couple of minutes to thank our sponsors here. Make sure you check out their websites, we want to support them so that they keep supporting us.

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All right. Hey Allan, are you there?

Allan Mackenzie: I am here.

Adriana Linares: It’s nice to get you on my podcast again. Thanks for taking the time. I know you are very busy because I know what your schedule is like so I really appreciate the time.

Allan Mackenzie: I just wish we had facial recognition on these audio podcasts. I am grinning from ear to ear.

Adriana Linares: Well, good. We are going to do a kind of different episode today. I have had a lot of lawyers come on and talk to us about how they started their practices and have gotten really some great feedback. And I know that our listeners love hearing from other lawyers about their failures and their successes, and most of them are indeed successes.

And then every once in a while we will have a technology vendor; I had Ben Schorr come on and we talked about Microsoft Office, subscriptions and stuff like that. And then I decided that it might be fun and interesting and practical to do some regular training. So this episode we are going to have everyone listen to this in front of your Microsoft Word.

So we are going to be using Microsoft Word for the PC today. If we get enough feedback that you would like to see an episode like this on Microsoft for the Mac, make sure you let me know. You can either email me or hit me up on Twitter. All of the ways that you can contact me are on  HYPERLINK “http://www.legaltalknetwork.com/newsolo” legaltalknetwork.com/newsolo or shoot me an email,  HYPERLINK “mailto:[email protected]” [email protected] with feedback about this show. If you are interested in us doing one on the Mac, we just want to know that there’s people who are interested in that, we would love to do that.

So what I am going to do, Allan and I are going to — what we are going to do is walk through our favorite and best tips. So that if you are listening to this and in front of your Microsoft Word, you can follow along, and we do a lot of special and interesting settings for Word.

And the other thing we are going to do is we are actually going to record this. And the video, if it works, which is an experiment and it certainly should, the video will be available in the Show Notes or on the New Solo page on  HYPERLINK “http://www.legaltalknetwork.com” legaltalknetwork.com, so if you are interested in actually watching along and listening, you can always check that out afterwards too.

But we are going to do this in a fashion where even if you are just following along, it would be as if we were sort of standing over your shoulder, walking you through the steps of how to do some of these tips and tricks.

So Allan, while I load up our Word document and go silence those dogs real quick, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself.

Allan Mackenzie: Excellent. Well, for those who know me, I have been doing this for almost 30 years. I actually started off life as a legal secretary back in the days of the IBM Model D typewriter and wound up in technical support for Wang; for those of us who are old enough to remember. And then went to work for this upstart company called Microsoft, who took me on an amazing journey, almost as amazing as working with you all over the world, where I trained the telephone support engineers on various products including Word, Excel and developed the first training materials on Outlook.

(00:05:05)

After that time I had a consulting business that did outsource IT for law firms across the US and then decided to go rogue and prove that those who teach can actually do as well. So I went back into the legal profession and managed a Wall Street boutique litigation firm and lived that wonderful life until I hit my 30 millionth document in discovery and review and decided that it was a lot more fun to teach people how to do things rather than doing it myself.

So here we are and we are back in the business again. And one of the things that still amazes me, all this great and wonderful conversation about things like case management and accounting and being able to press a single button on your iPhone and turn something into an invoice, is all fantastic. But we all learn to drive at some point and the amount of time and frustration that people have with a Word processing system is something we still just keep going back to over and over again; because it really is best to have driver education, don’t you think?

Adriana Linares: Truly. And you are right Allan, you and I get a lot of responses about Microsoft Word and Outlook training. Oh, I have been using Word for 20 years, I don’t need training. And every time we hear that or visit a law firm, I know that your hopes are as high as mine every time. We really hope that’s true. Like we want to walk into a law firm and everyone truly be experts in Word, but that rarely happens.

So that’s why I think an occasional session like this is important. Plus, there are so many great hidden gems in Word that makes the lives of legal professionals easier that a little training can go a long way.

Allan Mackenzie: A really long way, because a lot of what we talk about is available in basically everything. Since Microsoft is the de facto base for everything that happens, the idea of copy being Ctrl + C as the shortcut, if you are that kind of person, is something that’s really universal. I mean it’s across most of the applications. And jumping up and down to the top and the bottom of thing doesn’t have to throw your index finger out of joint with scrolling the mouse wheel.

Adriana Linares: And that’s even just a great tip to give right there because I am often surprised at how many people don’t know the keyboard shortcuts for cut, copy, and paste, so we can say very quickly. If you look down on your keyboard, you are going to see that the X, the C, and the V are all right next to each other on the keyboard. So that’s cut, copy, and paste; that’s why the paste is a V. Well, plus the P is generally reserved for print, but cut, copy, and paste are all right next to each other on the keyboard.

And I find that I am pretty good with keyboard shortcuts as much as I am with the mouse, because if my hand is already on the keyboard, I want to leave it there. So if I can use my hands to cut, copy or paste, so it’s Ctrl + C, Ctrl + X or Ctrl + V, to cut, copy, paste in that order, then I am going to do that instead of wasting time, which sounds silly, but it is a waste of time to pick my hands up off the keyboard and then go use the mouse.

Allan Mackenzie: There are all kinds of fun things that go along with that, because just like the Shift button, we all know it makes the capital letters, we didn’t learn to type 26 letters and then 26 small, Shift means capital; well, Control (Ctrl) means bigger. So if I were to take my mouse and simply point at something, hold down the Control (Ctrl) key and click, well, it’s going to grab a sentence, and that’s something that most people don’t realize is that, yeah, it can work and think the way your mind does.

And just like getting to the top of a page, there’s the Home button which means go to the beginning, Control (Ctrl) means bigger. So to get at the top of the page, it’s Ctrl + Home and Ctrl + End will go to the bottom of the page.

Adriana Linares: And you are saying End, like end of story, not N, the letter, you are saying Ctrl + End takes you to the end of a document.

And by the way, we should also mention that many of these keyboard shortcuts are universal. So you can use these not just in Word, but really in anything. So, Ctrl + Home to go home, top of the screen or top of your document. Ctrl + End to go to the bottom.

And then Allan, I do want to go back to your great tip, which is one of my favorites, that Ctrl + Click inside of any sentence selects the entire sentence from the capital letter to the period.

So a lot of times we see people starting at the capital letter and then scrolling painfully across the sentence and then trying to capture that period and then sometimes it gets the space, and it’s frustrating, but if you simply hold the Control (Ctrl) key down on your keyboard and click anywhere inside of a sentence, it’s going to highlight that sentence and then you are able to cut, copy, paste or drag anywhere you like.

(00:09:50)

Allan Mackenzie: Imagine being — a lot of people go, I know how to select all, it’s Ctrl + A, well, great. But what if you are in the middle of a 30 page document and you want to copy from the middle to the end, well, Ctrl + End would go to the bottom, now we add another Shift, because Shift means select.

So you’re sitting in the middle of a Westlaw document online and you want to grab from where you are to the end, we know that end, E-N-D goes to the bottom, we know that Ctrl will select to the end of the bottom and then we go to the end the bottom and we know that Shift will block. So Ctrl+Shift+End, and suddenly copy paste, you’re done, and how many seconds of scrolling and starting over is that.

So in a combination of things getting your keystrokes down and we don’t have time to go into it today, and we’re not showing it, yet we’re recording this, but the similar idea is if you’re a mouse person, there are equivalent ways of doing all of those things. So core training can really, one hour of your life can save you 30 over the course of a year.

Adriana Linares: Oh yeah. So let’s top off just a couple more keyboard, or excuse me, my mouse tips and then we’ll move on to our bigger tips that we had in mind which is — and again, these are universal. You double-click to select one word, so click-click selects a single word, triple click, one, two, three, selects an entire paragraph and then Ctrl+Click will select the sentence that you are in.

Allan Mackenzie: Assuming that your mouse is between your nose and the text. If you take your mouse in the margin and do exactly those same things it will do bigger things. So whereas one click would put your cursor in a certain place, and two clicks would select word, if you – with the mouse is in the margin, one click will select a line, two clicks will select a paragraph, and three clicks will select the entire document.

Adriana Linares: Right. Very good. I use those all day long when I’m working in Word documents.

So I’m going to give my first favorite tip, and then, Allan, I’m going to give you the opportunity to do that. So if you’re sitting in front of your Microsoft Word, we are working and talking from Microsoft Word 2016, but even if you have 2014 or 2010 Windows version of Word, all of these tips and everywhere we are sort of guiding you through audibly if you’re only listening are going to be the same.

If you happened to have Word 2007, then instead of the word “File” up in the left-hand corner where in the old days we would always go to File>Print, File>Open, that’s what we’re going to be doing as we talk today because 2010, 14, and 16 all actually have the word “File” up in the top left-hand corner.

If you happen to see a Microsoft button, a big bubble, then you have Word 2007 and when we say “File” you click on that bubble, everyone else will probably be clicking on the word “File” and then if you are still clicking on that bubble, Word 2007, we’re going to suggest you upgrade, because you’re like three or four versions behind, and if you can’t have — if you don’t know why you should upgrade, you should go back and listen to the episode where I had been sure talking to us about Office 365 and keeping your Microsoft Office versions updated and upgraded to the latest and greatest, so make sure you do that.

So I am going to take the mouse over and if you happen to be watching the recording or looking for it, then you will be able to see what we’re doing, but if you’re just sitting at your desk and listening, this should work as well.

What we’re going to do now is I am going to talk to you about the Quick Access Toolbar. So the Quick Access Toolbar, if you look right above the word “File” and “Home” and “Insert”, so those are the tabs, if you look above that Toolbar you’re going to see three or four little buttons that Microsoft has put there for you. That little button is called — or that section is called the Quick Access Toolbar, and it’s your dream come true.

You have always wanted a toolbar that you could customize with the buttons, features and functions that you love and use the most, and that’s what that is there for you to be able to do.

If you look to the far right of the Quick Access Toolbar and if you haven’t customized it, there is only going to be a couple little buttons there, but there is a drop-down arrow at the end. If you click on that drop-down arrow, you’re going to see that some things are checked and some are not. The ones that are checked, means that there’s little buttons already on the Quick Access Toolbar for you to quickly access those functions, but for some weird reason they didn’t for us put New or Open on there.

So you have been likely going to File>New or File>Open and having to get out of your document and sort of back out onto that screen which they call the “Backstage View”, when you hit File.

(00:14:54)

Well, if I go ahead and sort of click on the word “New”, it’s going add a new button to my Quick Access Toolbar, which means that from now on I can just click on it. I am going to go back to that little drop-down, I am going to add Open, and then you can go through and decide, do you want the email button, do you want the Quick Print button there, do you want Spelling and Grammar; there’s a bunch of options for you to decide if you want them there.

So I am going to just add Quick Print, and maybe I am going to add Print Preview and Print.

Now, couple things are going to happen. Number one, if you hover over any of those buttons, so I am going to hover directly over the new button that I just added, if you hover on just about any button, universally, in any program, it will often show you a pop-up for what the keyboard shortcut is.

So if you are a person who is trying to learn keyboard shortcuts, oftentimes you can hover over the button you normally click to execute a function and it will tell you the keyboard shortcut. If you want to remove any of these buttons on the Quick Access Toolbar, you’re going to right-click on any one of them and choose to remove it from the Quick Access Toolbar.

I am going to take this opportunity to always remind you that the right-click is a pretty important function in almost any program. So if you’re not a big right-clicker you should be. Even on a Mac if you’re a Mac user, you think there is not a right-click there, but there is, just that little mouse, sort of click on the right side, the right-click often gives you menu — a menu of options, of things that you can do.

So couple more tips with the Quick Access Toolbar. After you have added the most commonly added from that customized drop-down that I told you about, you can also do two other things in this window.

So I am going to go back to that little drop-down arrow, I am going to scroll to the bottom part of it, you’ll see a divider on that window, and I am going to click on the very last option, which gives me the option to show my Quick Access Toolbar below the ribbon. Click on that and see if you like it, what it does is just moves it into what I would consider a more handy location for getting to those buttons, so you might like that. If you decide you don’t like that, you can always go back to that drop-down arrow and move the Quick Access Toolbar up above.

Then, the other thing you can do, is you can click on More Commands, and then what this does is it takes you into some Word options, and you’ll see that what you’re looking at, and especially if you’re watching the video on this what I’m looking at, so over on the right-hand side, so my screen is divided into two halves as yours should be as well, over on the right-hand side you’re going to see a list of all the buttons I already have on my Quick Access Toolbar.

But on the left, there is this giant list of all the buttons that I can add to my Quick Access Toolbar. What I encourage most people to do is change where it says Choose Commands from Popular to All Commands, and this is going to give you this enormous crazy list of commands that you can add to the Quick Access Toolbar. There is probably 2000 of them on here.

But the ones that we always encourage people to add is you’re going to go down to the Es and find the Email as a PDF Attachment, and add it to my Quick Access Toolbar. Because right now, if you want to email this document as a PDF, you have to go to File>Share>Email as a PDF, that’s four clicks; who wants to take four clicks to do anything?

So instead, I am going to move that button from the left-hand panel over to the right and add Email as a PDF Attachment to my list.

The other one I always like to remind people to add is all the way down to the bottom and it’s in the S’s and then I’m going to ask Allan to — if Allan start thinking of the ones that you always tell people to add. If you go down to the Sh’s you’re going to see one that says, Shrink One Page, let me find it here. Now, this is an awesome button because what it does is if you’ve got like one or two lines dangling like maybe it’s the BCC from a letter or just one sentence that just doesn’t seem to want to fit on that last page of your document, Shrink One Page will do its best to shrink that document one page.

Now don’t expect it to take a four-and-a-half page document and make it four pages, that’s never going to work, and don’t use this button if you’re filing a document that has very specific margin or font or spacing requirements. So just be careful with that button.

Allan, do you have any from this list that you would like to add?

Allan Mackenzie: There is one in this particular list it’s in Send To, and if you find under Send you are going to see Send to PowerPoint.

Adriana Linares: Okay.

Allan Mackenzie: And so, if you are getting ready to do a PowerPoint presentation and rather than struggling with the editor in PowerPoint, you can put your outline in Microsoft Word, and especially if you use headings, Heading1, Heading2, Heading3, you can write your outline, move it around, drag and drop, and in one click, with Send to Microsoft PowerPoint, you can create your whole PowerPoint presentation in a single click.

(00:20:00)

Allan Mackenzie: Okay, the second thing is I like adding Insert Table, because that’s just — I am always doing that.

Adriana Linares: Okay, so we are going to go to Insert. So anyway, through here you can sort of scroll around — oh, you know the other one I like to add, Insert Symbol. So if you are constantly going after symbols, you can add the button to take you directly to the Symbols page and then Auto Text, creating auto text entries. Let me go back up here and find that one.

Okay, so we could sit here all day long and give you suggestions for this, but we definitely want to make sure you pick AutoCorrect. Now, when you go into the AutoCorrect settings, you are going to find that there are a bunch of AutoCorrect options in this little list, not into AutoCorrect settings, but when you are looking at this All Commands list, there are a lot of them. Pick the one that has the little lightning bolt to the left, that’s going to get us where we need to be for a tip a little bit later and you will really appreciate having that button there.

So I am going to go ahead and add it. And then, Allan, why don’t you tell us real quick the tip that you were going to give, which was a way to quickly add some of your favorite buttons from buttons that already exist somewhere on the toolbar.

Allan Mackenzie: Exactly. The deal with the change the idea of ribbons is that everything that you use most often is on the Home Ribbon, which is all well and good, but what if you have a button that you need all the time; for instance, I need to turn the paragraph mark, so show the Show/Hide button to show the dots and the tabs. I need to turn that on and off at will, but if I happen to be in another ribbon, like the View Ribbon, suddenly that button is gone and that just drives me batty. I need that button all the time.

So any button that you do find that was hard for you to find and you never want to have to deal with it again, you can right click on any button on the ribbons and you can — there’s a simple choice right there, Add to Quick Access Toolbar, which means that button is now available to you at all times whenever you are in any other ribbon or any other view.

Adriana Linares: And I think Allan if you want to go over to Mailings, a lot of people will add, especially legal assistants, are going to add — they are going to right-click on Envelopes, add it to the Quick Access Toolbar and they are going to right-click on Labels and add it to the Quick Access Toolbar.

And then of course for lawyers who are very regularly adding footnotes, under References on the ribbon and then going over to the footnote section of the ribbon; if you right-click directly on the big button that says, Insert Footnote, you can add that one to the Quick Access Toolbar.

So the tip here is really putting the Buttons features and functions that you are constantly reaching for or even occasionally reaching for and you can’t remember where they are and putting them on the Quick Access Toolbar.

Allan Mackenzie: Excellent. Excellent.

Adriana Linares: So I am going to do a quick break Allan before we move on to the rest of our tips. So before we move on, we are just going to take a quick break, hear a couple of messages and then come right back with some more tips.

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Okay, we are back. Thanks to our sponsors of course. Allan, do you have another tip that you can give our listeners and our viewers possibly?

Allan Mackenzie: I do. Shall we discuss a little bit of magical automation. One of the deals is if you have worked for bigger law firms, you have seen all the mass document assembly and all the fun things you can have. But if you have things that you need in documents over and over again, rather than using another document, going and copying and pasting from, you can simply memorize it and turn yourself into a programmer.

If you can select something, you can turn it into memorized information which has a whole bunch of different words thrown at it through the years, but all you have to do is block. Anything that you can block at all, whether it be a single letter, multiple paragraphs or multiple pages, can be saved and used in the future.

So if you are watching the video, I have just selected several paragraphs, because this is a sequence of words that I use very often.

(00:24:53)

Adriana Linares: So if you are just listening to this, we want you to have maybe your signature block or a case caption or perhaps there’s some Ada language that you use over and over again or a clause that you are constantly going to another document to go find, so just highlight any paragraph as an example on your current document and then follow along.

Allan Mackenzie: Exactly. So what we have done is we have done a highlight or select, and I am going to go to the Insert Ribbon, which is where this place is buried, and as long as you are in a full screen mode, all the parts of the ribbon are there, there is a little portion here called Quick Parts, which is sort of mysterious, and if you hover your mouse over, it will say Explore Quick Parts, but there’s also a little down arrow.

And if I choose down arrow, I can choose to save this information as what has been known through the years as AutoText. So if I were to select this and make this an AutoText, it might show existing AutoText that’s been memorized for you, but at the bottom it has saved the selection to an AutoText Gallery.

Now, there is a more modern version of that and the reason I am showing the old one is because if you have upgraded from previous versions, your AutoText will be there. There is also something called the Quick Parts Gallery, which is a little more complex but basically the same thing. And if you are starting out new and this is your newest version of Word or your first version of Word, then all you need to do is say save a selection to the Quick Parts Gallery.

Adriana Linares: So Allan, to be clear, you can choose either one of those options. So under Insert, back to Quick Parts, which we know it’s not very intuitive to go to Insert to create the Quick Part, but that’s where you are going to come back later to insert it. But you are saying we can choose either AutoText or Save Selection to Quick Parts Gallery, it’s going to take us, end result to this Create New Building Block window.

Allan Mackenzie: That is correct. And furthermore, the Quick Parts AutoText menu is old school and left from libraries of things that you have done in the past. So you might want to add them too.

But there are categorizations which we won’t get into for this quick demonstration, but the text that I have given myself here that I have selected, it can now be given a name and it can be stored and it’s going to be stored universally for myself, not for other people in the firm, but for myself.

And so I can give it a set of code words, if I will. It says Main Title here, that’s what it suggests, because that’s what’s highlighted. It suggests that automatically. And if the word Main Title is what I want to use to recall this text semi-automatically in the future, I could leave it as Main Title or I could simply put in a code word that meant something to me, like yabadabadoo.

Adriana Linares: The key is you have to — or you don’t have to, but you want to create these code words that you will remember so that you can quickly recall the text. And these are like macros from the old days. Remember in the old days you would hit like Shift + F3 and then it would expand into an entire case caption.

Allan Mackenzie: But you don’t need to know the language anymore to do that. You can memorize anything that’s on the screen. And so the idea now is if I were to hit Enter a couple of times in this document and begin typing Yaba, it’s going to pop itself up and allow me to insert it. If you want to though, you can also maintain your library of AutoText entries from the button that we put on the toolbar just moments ago, and I just need to find it.

Adriana Linares: I think I did AutoCorrect actually, I didn’t do Auto — yeah, I did AutoCorrect. You can also add that one to your Quick Access Toolbar, for sure.

Allan Mackenzie: I kind of want to because then what you get is a little drop-down of all the words, including Yaba. So I am going to do that, I am going to do exactly what you said before, and I am going to go to All Commands, and again, I use the drop-down arrow, More Commands, and I am going to go to All Commands and I am going to go and I am going to choose, was that under Insert or was that Auto?

Adriana Linares: Actually Allan, if you hit — I know if you hit Cancel, and so for anyone who might not be watching the video, if you go back to that Quick Parts button and right-click on it up there in your — if you do the right — you can add it from there.

Allan Mackenzie: There we go. Look at that. I learned something new. And so here is Yaba, that’s the first thing that I stored right there, so I now have a drop-down, which means I can place my signature line or any of the clauses that I have used in contracts anywhere I want in any document simply by clicking on Yaba and there we go.

Adriana Linares: And then too, every once in a while when you put in your code word Yaba, it won’t suggest it and it won’t fill it, but what you want to do, the way you invoke it is to immediately hit, I think it’s F9, — no F3, F3, F3, it’s F3, so Yaba + F3 invokes it.

(00:30:00)

If you can’t remember what your code word was, your shortcut, then you can always go back to the Quick Parts Gallery and it will show you a list of all of your quick parts, and that is an endless supply. You can put as many of those as you want there.

Now, couple of tips; these do not automatically get backed up, they don’t move from one computer to another. If you are working at your office and then go to your home, they will likely not be there. You can copy the file that stores them, from one computer to another, so what I’m going to suggest you do rather than us getting into some big detailed explanation is Google the words, copy Microsoft Word Quick Parts to another computer and it will probably walk you through it. It’s as easy as finding the file which is called the building blocks, .dotx, and copying and pasting it. The thing is moving it from one computer to another is, it’s not going to synchronize.

So this is something that we hope for in a future version of Office 365 where your Quick Parts, your Auto Parts and your Auto Text travel with you, but for now just keep in mind that it’s really localized to this one computer. But you can get them off of there, you can move them to another computer, so don’t let that slow you down.

Allan Mackenzie: And furthermore as you become more sophisticated with your documents and forms you can have specific autotexts sitting in specific master forms and have that menu pop those up, so that there are clauses related to a specific real estate contract or anything else like that, you can begin creating your libraries, and actually share those with other employees through the use of a template.

Adriana Linares: Great.

Allan Mackenzie: It’s an amazing thing to be able to do.

Adriana Linares: So to learn more just Google the words “Microsoft Quick Parts” and there’s plenty of videos that can help you on YouTube and Microsoft itself has a great training video library on this sort of stuff. But long story short, Quick Parts are designed to capture chunks of text that you are constantly using and going in other documents to copy and paste from and storing them in Microsoft Word. They do also exist in Outlook by the way, I think they’re separate, but Outlook has them too so you could always Google Quick Parts in Microsoft Outlook and get those over there too.

Allan Mackenzie: With a few exceptions I want to say, one thing that Quick Parts does not do. Quick Parts remembers the formatting of the text you have selected within a document. Unless you do very specific things it does not remember the formatting of the document itself.

Adriana Linares: That it came from, you mean.

Allan Mackenzie: So in other words — that it came from, exactly. So it doesn’t remember the things like margins and other bits of information, it adapts the text to the document that you are inserting the text into.

Adriana Linares: Yeah. Keep that in mind, that might be a little frustrating at first till you learn how to format a little bit better, which of course — it’s one of the things we deal with all the time is people who are frustrated with the way Word copies and pastes, which is a great segue into my next tip which is the Clipboard.

So I love the Clipboard and I’m always aghast at how many people do not know about the Clipboard, and the Clipboard exists in Office for the PC by the way, because the Mac does not have a Clipboard built into the operating system, so if you’re a Mac user you can Google an app and just get a third-party app to help you with this.

But here’s what the Clipboard does. The Clipboard sits around in Microsoft’s operating system, copying for you up to 24 things or storing, I should say, temporarily storing up to 24 things that you’ve cut or copied.

The thing is, you have to actually turn this function on because it’s not turned on. So again, if you’re sitting in front of Microsoft Word, you’re going to make sure you are on a Home ribbon, so click on Home, and then the very first section of the ribbon, you’re going to see that if you notice the ribbon is broken off into sections on the Home ribbon; Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, Styles and Editing.

So set your eyes on the Clipboard section of Word and to the right of the word “Clipboard” there is a tiny button that I refer to as the insultingly small button. So when the ribbon first came along and everybody was complaining I can’t find anything, I don’t know where they’ve put it. They put it behind this insultingly small button that any of us with over 40 eyes can barely see, but there it is, there is a tiny button right there and you’re going to click it. And when you click it, it’s going to expand a panel on the left hand side that says, Clipboard.

You might see one little thing sitting on there, the last thing you copied or cut will be sitting there. But if you look all the way down to the bottom of that Panel, you’re going to see a button that says “Options”. You’re going to click on that button that says “Options” and you’re going to check everything, just check everything off, because by default collect without showing is off, and I forget what — that’s the main one, that one is off. Just check everything for now.

(00:34:57)

So now what happens is really cool, because you have essentially turned on this collector for copying and pasting text. So in this document that I’m in, I am going to just triple-click to select a paragraph, one, two, three. You should do the same. Then you are going to right-click and Copy. You are going to watch on that Clipboard that that text lands on that Clipboard and it’s available for you.

I am going to open up my browser and I’m just going to quickly go to Google Scholar to show you something else. So here’s another tip, for those of you who don’t know about Google Scholar, you can Google Google Scholar, and it will take you to Google Scholar, where Google has been quietly indexing case law for a really long time. Go ahead and do this if you’re following along, and if you’re looking at what I’m looking at now, you’re looking at the Google Scholar Search Bar, looks a lot like Google and there are some checked off options on the bottom, I can search for Articles or I can check the option that says Search for Case Law.

I am in Florida today so it’s letting me see and choose between Federal Courts, Florida Courts or I can go and select Courts, it’s going to give me a list of all the courts I could search in. Let’s just for now I’ll just stay in Florida, so I’m going to just hit “Cancel” to go back. And I am going to switch to Case Law, and I am going to put in here — I want to search all Federal Courts for naked ownership, find, so finding my article. Okay, we’re going to go to the first one which is Boggs v. Boggs.

By the way if you don’t know anything about Google Scholar, I strongly recommend you spend a few minutes, perhaps Googling how to use this, it’s a great way to do some free initial research.

All right, so I’m in a case now, and what I am going to do is I’m scrolling through my case much like I would as a lawyer and I’m going to highlight some paragraphs or some information that I want, so I’m just going to triple-click, one, two, three, because remember that tip works outside of Word as well. I am going to right-click Copy. If you quickly glance to your bottom right-hand corner of your screen after you have copied something, you’re going to see that it should now say 2 of 24. I’m going to go grab just a sentence this time, right-click Copy, now my little Clipboard says 3 of 24.

I could also go to any website, since I’m on the web, why don’t you go to your own law firm’s website and try this next trick. If you have a logo on your website, like we do here at LawTech Partners, I am going to right-click on that logo and I’m going to select Copy. So essentially, and look on the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, every time you copy or cut something, what should be happening, is your Clipboard in the background is collecting up these little clippings. What is so great about this, is now as a lawyer, as a researcher I don’t have to waste time copying and then running over to paste it, cutting and then running over to paste it. I can spend all the time I want in this document I was researching and just Copy, Copy, Copy, here’s I’m even going to select a sentence here, I’m going to go back to my document and you should try this too and find a sentence that actually has a link in it, a hyperlink, and I’m going to copy it.

So the point here is, you collect on the Clipboard all of the components and parts you might need for a document or an email, because by the way the Clipboard is universal across all Microsoft products, and I’m going to come back to my document now.

I am going to put my cursor wherever it is that I want to paste one of my clippings and then I’m going to come over to my left hand side where that Clipboard is, and remember, if you accidentally closed your Clipboard or you don’t see it, you’re just going to hit that insultingly small button in the right-hand side to expose it again. And you simply click to insert pick and click, pick and click, pick and click to insert all those components from the left-hand side into your document.

In a second I am going to ask Allan to talk to you about pasting because what happens, when you copy something that is in Arial font and it’s 12 and you paste into the Word document which is Times New Roman 11, you get very frustrated because sometimes the font comes in as the Arial and you want it to come in as Times. But before I let Allan take over with paste options I’m just going to answer a couple of the most frequently asked questions I get about the Clipboard, and that is, no, you can’t store them as soon as you logout Microsoft Word is going to or actually the operating system is going to erase your clippings.

If for some reason you want to save them you can either not logout or you could have a document that you keep on your desktop called Yesterday’s Clipping and every day you could Paste All, which is an option you’ll see on the Clipboard, and temporarily paste those into a new document. But it’s a tool that’s ephemeral, it’s not meant to last forever, it’s just sort of your session that you’re working in now.

You can clear all to get rid of your Clipboard if you want to start over and you can paste them all at the same time which I’ve used that if you cut or copy strategically and think about the order, you could actually hit Paste All and Paste Everything into a document at once.

(00:40:04)

So I hope that encourages you to learn more about the Clipboard. I think it is one of the most efficiency creating awesome tools available in Microsoft Office for Windows.

Allan, why don’t you tell us real quick about the Paste options and then we will go on to another break.

Allan Mackenzie: Indeed. A lot of people don’t notice that right on the screen that we are looking at right now, immediately after a paste is done and before any other function is done, whether you hit the Spacebar or anything, there’s this little pop-up box that’s floating and it says Control (Ctrl).

Adriana Linares: I know why people have never clicked on it Allan.

Allan Mackenzie: Why is that?

Adriana Linares: Well, one time a guy clicked on it and it ejected him out of his seat and through the roof and nobody has ever clicked on it again. That’s what I taught people. I go, go ahead and click it, and they are afraid. I am like, go click it, it’s not going to eject you, click it.

Allan Mackenzie: Yes. So there are our little Paste options. Now, they are kind of graphic, in that you have to pause your mouse over them and it says some very, very disturbing or misunderstood words. Keep Source Formatting, all that means is paste it exactly the way we found it, which is what happens when you paste by default, unless you do something about that.

Now, the second one is, as you put your mouse over it, the second one is going to say something on the order of Merge Formatting, and to the extent that your document is set up properly and has the correct default font, then what happens when you choose Merge Formatting is it will, as Adriana suggested, adopt the master font of the document, which we will discuss in just a little bit of time.

And the other final one is both good and bad. It says Keep Text Only. Now, that means it will use whatever font that is on the paragraph that you are sitting in, but it will also remove extraneous formatting such as you will notice, you don’t see in the preview that’s shown right here, you don’t see the lovely blue for the underline highlight of the hyperlink, and it might indeed also get rid of italics and bolding and things that you may or may not want to keep when you paste from your source location.

So if keeping the formatting is important, but matching the formatting of the document, usually the middle one will get you pretty close to where you need to be. Now, that being said, which comes first, the chicken or the egg, do you paste and then re-decide what you want to do, or do you paste properly in the first place? And the answer is either or, whichever grabs your fancy.

If you are afraid of ejection, then don’t click, don’t wait till afterwards. When you choose to paste, you will notice there’s been, next to each one of these things collected in the Clipboard, there has been a down arrow next to it, which allows you to paste or delete it. So that doesn’t go quite where we want to go, but if we go up to the Paste button, the–

Adriana Linares: So all the way up in the Clipboard, back to the very first button, which has pull position.

Allan Mackenzie: Yes, indeed. And it has another obnoxiously small button, the little tiny arrow that gives us other options and look, there they are, the same three buttons; Keep Source Formatting or Merge Formatting or strip it of all formatting and leave it as plain text.

Now, you and I Adriana know that the Ctrl + V, we talked about at the very beginning of the class, which is Paste, is going to paste in a specific way and guess which one it’s going to do.

Adriana Linares: The one that we least want in legal, which is with formatting. So this is an important tip and I just want to clarify a couple of things in case we have people who are just listening. So if you are listening to this in the car or in your commute, every single time you have pasted into Word, Outlook, Excel or PowerPoint, for the past 20 years there’s been a little pop-up after your pasting. So just look, go test it when you get back to your office. There’s a little pop up there.

Sometimes it’s just the Clipboard depending on what version you have, it’s a little itty-bitty picture of a Clipboard, and sometimes it will have the word Control (Ctrl) in parenthesis, which just means if you tapped the Control (Ctrl) key on your keyboard, you would invoke this toolbar that we are talking about. And that toolbar is going to show you your Paste options, which many of you might remember or have learned over the years that you would go to Edit>Paste Special Text Only; that was three clicks.

So what they did was they added this functionality of being able to paste with text only, meaning it loses all the formatting, into this cool little drop-down button. We have also explained that it’s available under the Paste button on your Home toolbar, if you want to do it ahead of time, but I think it’s just as easy, as soon as you right-click, paste, you are going to see that pop up, click on it, and then hover, as Allan suggested, you sort of pause over each of those to start to learn what the three different options look like.

(00:45:07)

And then the next thing Allan is going to show us is that what Word does disturbingly for us in legal is the default setting is that Word will paste with formatting, which means if you are copying from the Internet, where they have used Arial 12 and you are pasting into Times New Roman 11, your default in Word is set to paste with formatting; that means bring over the formatting from the source, which in this example is the Internet.

And most of the time we don’t want that, that’s why you get so frustrated that your fonts don’t match. So this is the fix. You choose one of the other two options on the pop-up, sometimes the Merge Formatting actually works really well because it will pick up your font, but it will leave the hyperlink, which sometimes you actually want. So the final setting is that you can change that default.

Allan Mackenzie: And this is just what’s so exciting, because I am a keyboard guy. I mean when I was at Wang and somebody gave me a mouse, I said I will never touch that. So I am not a visionary.

So when I click Default Paste, Set Default Paste, it’s because I want to use Ctrl + V all the time, because that’s what I do, Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V, if I am doing single unit pasting, one at a time. But I don’t want it to come in with the formatting. I want it to merge the formatting. So in the same little button where I hit the down arrow below the yellow Paste button on the Home Ribbon, the very first button in the Home Ribbon, the down arrow there is Set Default Paste and it brings up a very complex menu that allows you to set what the default paste is depending upon its location.

Adriana Linares: So you are going to scroll down to the section of this window that’s titled Cut, Copy and Paste.

Allan Mackenzie: And so when you are pasting within the same document, what is your default and there are the three choices; Keep Source Formatting or Merge Formatting or Keep Text Only. And if you are pasting between documents, what do you want Ctrl + V to do or right-click Paste. And if you are pasting between documents when style definitions conflict, don’t worry about that, or pasting from other programs, and what to do when I paste a picture, does it float around or does it sit in the middle of a sentence.

Adriana Linares: Essentially, you are just going to set everything to Keep Text Only. And remember all you are doing here is setting the default, but you can always click on that little pop-up, which does come up, don’t think it doesn’t, it does, you have just blinded yourself from noticing it, and you can always choose one of the other options, but here you really just want to set your default paste to Keep Text Only, and it’s going to help you a little bit when you are bringing up that text in from another source.

Allan Mackenzie: It’s amazing what your mind blocks out. I only learned a couple of years ago that in every rental car I have ever had on the gas stage, there’s been an arrow that says which side to fill on.

Adriana Linares: I know, that’s so funny, I love that tip. Well, we are going to take a quick break and hear a message from a couple of more sponsors and come back with our finishing up tips.

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All right, welcome back to New Solo. Hey Allan.

Allan Mackenzie: Hey.

Adriana Linares: I hope this has been useful so far and I hope we are explaining it in a way where someone who is just listening can follow along, I think so. If you are just following along audibly, just remember you can always Google these things, because all these tips are already out there. Of course if you need some clarification you can email us and we are happy to help. And then hopefully if this experiment works, we will have a video up on the New Solo page where you could also follow along as well. But I think we have explained things in a way that if you are sitting in front of Word, you should be able to follow along.

(00:49:46)

The last couple of tips that I want to get into Allan, I think we should really cover those settings that we often cover. No, no, actually let’s start with — let’s open up a brand new blank document, Ctrl + N for New.

Adriana Linares: All right everyone, following along, you are going to go to File>New or you are going to hit your New button on the Quick Access Toolbar or the keyboard shortcut for starting a brand-new document is Ctrl+N for new.

So we know that the default font that Microsoft gave us a couple years ago is not necessarily everyone’s favorite so it was — it’s a nice font, it’s called Calibri. We wish you liked it, but many of you — old habits are hard to break so you want to switch to Times or maybe you want to switch to Arial, but the default is Calibri and the default now is also to always give you a space, after you hit a hard return.

Now, Allan and I could spend a lot of time talking about styles and teaching you about styles, we don’t have time in this podcast. So we’re going to show you very quickly how to change your default font and that paragraph spacing once and for all. Before I let Allan do that, I’m going to give you a couple of warnings.

One, you must do this in a brand-new blank document. Your changes are not retro, they’re only for your future documents, and if you get a new computer or move to again a computer at your home, you’ve got to set this same settings as well.

Allan Mackenzie: So like everything in Microsoft, there are a couple of ways of going about it and the most logical to me without jumping into the discussion of the styles is your favorite insultingly small but —

Adriana Linares: They are so small.

Allan Mackenzie: They are indeed. It’s actually called the Flyaway which is another word for giving you the old menu. And it’s again one of those things that people miss. If your default font is to be Times New Roman, I’ve gone to the font section in the home ribbon, that’s right after the Clipboard and I’ve used that little Flyaway button that’s insultingly small button, and I got the old-fashioned format font menu.

Now, you probably have figured out that you can scroll through things or you could type ahead, but let’s just say that Arial is going to be the default font for my document because I can get to that fairly quickly; Arial and it’s going to be not bolded by default or regular and it’s going be 12, okay.

What most folks haven’t known is in the lower left-hand corner of this same very, very easy window is Set as Default and that is about as simple as it gets. Now, you’re going to get a pop-up, are you setting the default for this document only or all documents based on the normal template. Now this is as I mentioned I used to work at Microsoft and this is a question I never answered in the first version of Word, did the normal template exist or not? Which came first, the template or the document?

Every document that you make is made from a template or a boilerplate file, and what I’m saying is my blank document, boilerplate file if I choose all documents based on the normal .dotm template, means that every time I do from this point forward, the Ctrl+N or the File>New or the New button on the Quick Access Toolbar, the default font is going to be Arial 12 and I have fixed that one small problem.

Adriana Linares: You know what I do, Allan, I tell everyone, whenever you see the word Normal in Microsoft Word it means default. So just remember that because it’ll come in handy as you become a better Word user and again in a moment when Allan shows us how to change our paragraph spacing, whenever we see the word Normal, it means default.

Allan Mackenzie: And that being said I think I can say with impunity and with Ben’s blessing, there is no one at Microsoft.

Adriana Linares: I always joke around that they should have called that freaking thing “the abnormal” because with all the problems that people often have which by the way most of the problems with Microsoft Word are training issues, we should defend Word’s honor — I can say that; so hopefully this helps.

Allan Mackenzie: But I was a WordPerfect user and I too — it took me a while to drink the Kool-Aid because I was a left-hand-drive person and I didn’t want to go and drive the car on the right-hand side. So here we have — I’ve thrown in some text, I did a silly little command that fills in with some text in here, and you will see that if I turn on the paragraph marks by default, the paragraph mark that I was sitting in when I started typing, when I hit Enter there is that hard return Adriana was talking about.

Adriana Linares: Right and hold on Allan, let me just catch up our only listeners. So if you’re only listening just type a paragraph, hit Enter, and then start typing another paragraph. If you get an unwanted space between your two sentences, this is how you can fix that permanently. So this is permanently getting rid of what they call the space after.

Now, Allan and I wish that you would leave this and learn how to use styles and control space after because it’s actually a more efficient way to create documents, but we can’t have everything the way we want in a training world. So we’re just going to give you the solution that we all know you really want which is how do we get rid of that darn space.

(00:55:00)

Allan Mackenzie: Exactly. So what we’re going to do in this case if I hadn’t typed the information in, this would still work for all future documents. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to undo that typing so it goes back to being just the way it was. I do have my paragraph mark so we can turn it on and see that, but basically the setting for the paragraph is sitting in that paragraph mark and just like I gave the document and the master document or the normal template a default font, I’m going to decide to mess around with the paragraph settings.

Adriana Linares: So you’re going to go to the insultingly small button in the Paragraph section of the ribbon; so, so far in this podcast we have hit on the home ribbon, the insultingly small button next to the Clipboard section, the insultingly small button next to the Font section and now we’re tapping on that itty-bitty button just to the right of the word “paragraph” in the Paragraph section of the ribbon, and that Flyaway that you mentioned, Allan, opens up. So now we’re looking at default settings for paragraphs; not font, but paragraphs.

Allan Mackenzie: And this is where it gets confusing. Well, I want that single space, and yeah, you can do, you want that single space especially if you’re doing any of the legal documents with requirements that the courts have. And in the middle section, there’s the alignment, it’s left.

Adriana Linares: Oh wait, let’s say something else, Allan. I know that many of you are going to see this alignment option. Allan, while you’re there, just go ahead and drop-down that an arrow next to alignment. And I know many of you are going to think to set your default to justified. Do not do that. Your default alignment should be left and I know that you’re saying that almost all of my documents are justified because I create briefs.

We know. The thing is, if you set that to Justify you’re going to be telling Microsoft Word that dates, headings, addresses, and signature blocks, so other components of your document should be justified and oftentimes when you get those weird crazy spaces at the end of a sentence, it’s because of that Justification setting and some other setting that messes with it.

But the point here is, do not change that alignment to justified, that stays it at left. The only thing you’re going to change here is in the spacing section. So look down to where it says “Spacing”. Go ahead Allan.

Allan Mackenzie: And just for our future class, Adriana, there’s a brand-new option in Word, that says don’t do that when you hit Return, it’s a very exciting thing. Don’t space it out if it’s a short line. But, what we’re talking about now is dropping down the paragraph automatically whenever hit Return, leave a blank space, sort of as if I had hit two Returns.

That has to do with the Spacing section of the document. There’s before and after, and you’ll see values in here that don’t make sense for you. The first value I’m going to change is, I don’t want it at Multiple, I want the Line Spacing at Single, now that’s within the paragraph itself. When the paragraph wraps, is there a little bit of extra space between each line or not? But when I hit Enter to make a new paragraph, that’s a hard Return, it then says After, and this is the part that gets us. It’s saying drop-down 8 points before the next paragraph begins.

Now again, Adriana has said, this is part of document automation, but if we’re using it and we’re thinking like a typewriter, which is not bad in short documents, we simply want to change this back to 0.

Adriana Linares: So in the Spacing section on the Paragraph dialog box, you should have Spacing Before at 0, After at 0, Line Spacing should be Single, and then you’re going to see a little section that says At, just leave it blank.

Allan Mackenzie: Yes, and just leave it blank. Single is a good thing at this point because it adapts to font changes, and that’s what we want. So a single line space but again the magical button that nobody’s ever —

Adriana Linares: They don’t see it. It says it right there, Set as Default, just click that button.

Allan Mackenzie: And then it says this document only, once again or do we want the master document for all documents that every time I hit Ctrl+N, makes a new document, do I want that in that new document. And now, we have cleared up most of the mystery about the defaults for all new documents, blank documents.

Adriana Linares: Yeah, that’s right. Well, Allan, we have gone a little bit long on this podcast, but I think that’s okay and hopefully this has been helpful. I do want to make sure that we cover a couple of those settings that you and I always encourage people to set. So why don’t you just close this off before we get to say goodbye with a couple of those settings that we love to demystify for people.

Allan Mackenzie: So the first thing I want to tell everybody is that Word does things automatically in your first line of defense when you type left parenthesis, say right parenthesis and it auto corrects it to a copyright or whatever. Your first line of a defense is not backspacing over, it’s undo, and that will take care of it for the moment.

(00:59:56)

But deep dark, there are so many wonderful options you can explore. And what I have done is I have gone to the File Menu, which is the backstage, or the bubble if you are on Word 2007 and if we go into down here, Options.

Adriana Linares: So File>Options, make sure you click on File>Options and you are going to go under the Word Options dialog box.

Allan Mackenzie: Which then has its own menu down the left-hand side and there are many things we can talk about, but one of the first things I want to talk about is proofing.

Adriana Linares: So click on Proofing.

Allan Mackenzie: I have clicked on Proofing, and to the right of that I see Options that are turned on or turned off, and one of the first options in there when dealing with the Spell Checker is that turned on by default is something called Ignore Words in Uppercase.

Now, when you think of the legal profession you think of titles, you think of captions, they are all in uppercase, which means that for most of the law firms that have installed Word, unless you knew about this, you weren’t spell checking them.

Adriana Linares: You are not spell checking things in all caps, isn’t that crazy? And then people would say — Allan, how many times have we been in a law firm and somebody says my spell check is broken, and an unknowing IT person, poor thing, it’s not their fault, because this is buried so in there, reinstalls Word assuming that the spell check is broken. Well, it’s just a setting in Word Options>Proofing by default, isn’t this dumb, that it will not spell check things in all caps. So you definitely want to uncheck that.

Allan Mackenzie: Now, if there are things that bug you permanently, like the copyright or numbering, there is in that same box, AutoCorrect Options, Proofing is the main box and we talked about Ignore Words in Uppercase, which you had turned off. I am now going to go into AutoCorrect Options, which suddenly lists a plethora of things that we can deal with, such as down in the first tab, AutoCorrect, there’s that left parenthesis, right parenthesis. If I don’t want to do that, if I am typing in a letter and I am quoting subparagraph C, I don’t want it automatically turning into a copyright symbol, I could leave it in and undo it, or I could edit this list and pull those things out of there.

But there are also so many things you can explore and I invite you to go do that, because in the checkboxes above, Correct TWo INitial CApitals, well, what if you are working for Ethnic Corporation that doesn’t work and capitalize the first letters of sentences, and the first things and tables, on and on, and on.

Adriana Linares: And here for the most part I encourage people to leave most of AutoCorrect. So again, to remind everybody, again, if you are just listening, we went to File>Word Options>Proofing and you are going to see a button that says AutoCorrect Options.

So on the AutoCorrect tab Allan just showed us how to delete the Text Expander that turns a C and parentheses into the copyright symbol, you are just going to highlight that option and delete it. You can do the same with E, like you said Allan.

Under AutoFormat, as you type, I will tell you which is — another tab, if you are looking at this dialog box. If you click over on AutoFormat as you type, I often will unclick Internet and Network Paths with Hyperlinks. So if you are putting someone’s email address in there, you know how in your Word document or maybe you are addressing a letter and you are including the email address, it turns it into a hyperlink. If you just don’t want it to do that for you automatically, I tend to turn that off.

And then too, right above that, so I am in AutoFormat As You Type tab and I am in the section called Replace As You Type, a lot of times in real estate and legal, they don’t want the fractions to become superscript, so you can uncheck the box that says Fractions with a Superscript Character.

I am also going to ask you and many of you want to do this, you are going to go into this dialog box, you are going to start unclicking a bunch of stuff. You hate when Word automatically creates a bulleted list for you, we know that. You hate when Word automatically creates a numbered list for you. You are going to want to uncheck those.

Allan and I are going to encourage you to please not do that, but learn how to deal with Word’s automation, because it’s designed to help you save time. So maybe you just need a little training.

But to go back to your original question Allan, I would definitely uncheck Fractions, if that’s something that bothers you, Internet and Network Paths and then on AutoCorrect, those few that we listed, but I wouldn’t go crazy turning stuff off in here. I would really encourage people to just get some Word training.

Allan Mackenzie: And then along with that just remember if something happens automatically and you are just barreling through with an idea, Undo or Ctrl + Z, which is the shortcut will — if it suddenly turned on an automatically numbered list because you typed 1., a sentence and it entered, it doesn’t instantly — and when that happens, Undo.

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At the same point you can also create a little bit more automation by adding things to AutoCorrect. So when I type in new entries, Replace AOM with Allan Olson Mackenzie and every time I type AOM and hit the Spacebar, it turns it into my name, so I don’t have to do that. There’s lots of fun we can have with that.

Adriana Linares: There really is. So Allan, I just want to explain that just a little bit better because it’s such a good tip. Back on the AutoCorrect tab where we had you delete the copyright symbol, you are going to see that this is really a table of Word’s most frequently mistyped, misspelled and then their suggestions for text expanding or text replacement. So you will see a list that says Replace on the left, With on the right. So LawTech Partners is the name of our company. Every time I type LTP, it expands it to LawTech Partners is what Allan is talking about.

So you can create as many of your own little shortcuts in here for terms, phrases, a one sentence at a time I would say. If you are trying to save text that’s longer than a sentence, I would go to our earlier tip of using Quick Parts, but in that Replace With I could put LTP replace with LawTech Partners.

Now Allan is interesting because Allan’s initials are AM. So if Allan wasn’t thinking he would put in replace AM with Allan McKenzie, but what’s that going to do, every time you type the word am, it’s going to spit out Allan McKenzie. So what Allan could do is either use AOM, which is his initials and it would always put in the O. or you could put a dot or some other character in front of all your shortcuts, so you could put .AM makes it Allan McKenzie, .AL, which are my initials and whenever I type et al, which is rare, but when I do it actually spells out at Adriana Linares, so it’s better for me to use this little hack as a .AL.

And of course, you can do these same sort of keyboard expansion shortcuts on your iPhone and on your Android, and so these little things are really handy for things that you type all the time.

So Allan, we have gone really long, but I think we covered a lot of tips and we would love your feedback on whether this was helpful or not, we could always do another one with some more. We only got through half of our tips I think Allan.

Allan Mackenzie: Yeah.

Adriana Linares: But I think we did a pretty good job. So before I let you go Allan, I want to make sure and give you an opportunity to tell everyone how they can find, friend, or follow you on the Internet.

Allan Mackenzie: Okay. So on Twitter I am @EfficientAllan, that’s A-L-L-A-N, or you can find me at  HYPERLINK “mailto:[email protected]” [email protected].

Adriana Linares: Great. Well, for all you listeners who want to learn more, and hopefully if we did this right and we are able to capture a good video of all these tips and tricks, make sure you visit  HYPERLINK “http://www.legaltalknetwork.com” legaltalknetwork.com and hit the New Solo page.

We want to make sure and encourage you to subscribe on your favorite podcast listening service. And if you are sitting out there on iTunes and have nothing better to do and you think that this podcast is helpful, we would love a Five Star rating from you. That’s always very, very helpful.

So that’s it for us today. I really appreciate your time and listening. We hope this was helpful and certainly hope to see you again at another episode of New Solo, and remember, you are not alone, you are New Solo.

Outro: Thanks for listening to New Solo with host Adriana Linares. Tune in again to learn more about how to successfully run your new practice, solo, here on Legal Talk Network.

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The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of, nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer.

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