Office 2008 for Mac All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter II.6. Saving Time in Word

In This Chapter

• Using AutoText to make Word remember stuff

• Using mail merge the easy way

• Saving time with long document automation

• Formatting the background layer

• Using Word's new citations feature

Vital ingredients in the Word casserole can make your word processing faster and easier. You'll have more time to keep fit, cook, eat, and generally live life better!

An intelligence of a sort exists in Word, and yes, we're dead serious. Word can figure out how to finish typing words and phrases for you. You can give Word standard document tasks, such as captioning pictures and other objects in a long document, creating a table of contents, and generating an index. Word also has secret layers that you can use to format the background. Just don't expect Word to pay your bills. Not yet, anyway.

Automating with AutoText

Note

Word's AutoText feature is so simple, yet so powerful; you might wonder how you got along without it. You teach Word to remember text that you use often and don't feel like typing over and over. Word can then type that text for you. If we had to choose one feature in all of Word that we think everyone should know, AutoText is the one! We start with a simple example.

Teaching Word a lesson

As we drive through this section, we use five Autos:

• AutoText: When certain text is typed, this feature instantly inserts an AutoText entry.

• AutoText name: The name ...