formatting woes...lol

I'm not on Vista, by design, but I've had a similar issue with transferring lengthy documents from one word processing program to another.

In my cases, each time the text I pasted into the new document, on which I'd carefully set my margins, tabs, and such, was bringing with it its own margins and tabs, included in the paste.

So try an experiment. Paste a chunk of it into a new document where you've set your margins and such, and use Word for Vista's equivant of (Word 2003's) Paste Special, and selecting Unformatted Text. This brings in only the text, no margins or tabs, no fonts, nothing. It puts the text in the font, margins, etc. of the receiving document.

Let me know how it goes. I'm curious.

Maryn, also nosy

CACTUSWENDY said:

Thanks for the insight. Will give it a try.

Click to expand...

I use Paste Special, Unformatted Text regularly as the way to avoid screwing up my formatting. It can require putting back in some wanted formatting, but that is usually MUCH less work than correcting the damage done by a simple paste.

BTW, I have been doing that for years, since long before the latest version of MS Office (and before Vista, which I don't think has anything to do with the issue).

--Ken

I'm a computer idiot, or so our kids insist, but I got one of them to make me a macro that pastes unformatted text in one click. I use it, oh, maybe a bazillion times a day.

Geez, I'm also a dope. I had a serious formatting problem on a play, and I didn't think to ask here. I bet there was a better way than the one I ended up doing, one action paragraph at a time...

Maryn, nice but not terribly bright

Dearling, you have to say what version of Word you are using, not what version of Windwoes, because you could have Vista but still be an old Word 2003 fogey for all we know. Howver, if you have Word 2007, look down at the bottom of of the window, toward the right side. There is a row of handy little eye-cons there for changing your view of a page. The one at the left end of the row is called "Print layout". It shows how the page will look printed. The one at the right end is ye olde "Draft" button, which makes the text wrap to the window and totally disregard all layout formatting. Also lets one set a comfortable working font to use while writing instead of the printing font....

It's easy enough to accidentally click on something, I do it all the time. And obvious things are the most invisiblest!