Customising shapes

This post was inspired by my child's project last week.  She was listing some interesting facts about her topic - easy enough - but she wanted them to be typed into "cacao pod" shapes.  Obviously.

Now, you are probably quite comfortable with creating basic shapes in MS Office applications but did you know you can now customise those shapes to suit your exact shape requirements?

• First, you need to insert a basic shape that is reasonably similar to the ultimate shape you would like to create.
• Next, right click over the shape and choose Edit Points.
• The shape will now be highlighted in red with black markers to indicate where the points are.
• Place your mouse pointer over an edit point marker and click and drag to amend the original shape.
• Once you are satisfied with the new shape, click anywhere else to deselect the shape.

That's it - facts typed into cacao bean pod shapes ready to stick onto a cacao tree project.

As always, please share if you think someone else may find this useful and let me know if there are any other tips, tricks or tutorials you'd like to see featured on this blog.

Quickly reverse formatting in MS Word

I often come across people who say they "hate MS Word" as "it never does what I want".  And to be fair, their documents are misbehaving, but often this is caused by formatting errors.  And I'm not referring to using Bold or Italics in the wrong places.  MS Word has all sorts of format settings, (many of which can be a bit obscure if you don't know where or what to look for) which relate to paragraph spacing, or indents, or line breaks.

As you work on and edit a document you may be deleting text, or removing visible formats (colour, bold, italics etc.) but you may be leaving a footprint trail of non-visible formats.  Some of which will drive you insane when you can't figure out why that line of text won't move down, or why your automatic numbering won't indent.

  

To ensure that you have made a clean break from any formatting that may be present, use the Clear Formatting button on the Home tab

Do you face any challenges with your MS Word documents?  Leave a comment and let me know... you might be inspiration for the next installment of MissusMcK's tips