CHAPTER 12

Getting Smart with Text: Building Blocks, Quick Parts, Actions (Tags), and More

IN THIS CHAPTER

  • Creating a document faster with Building Blocks and Quick Parts
  • Creating and inserting AutoText entries
  • Backing up and sharing Building Blocks
  • Using, removing, and restoring Actions
  • Understanding objects and linking versus embedding
  • Inserting text from a file
  • Pasting, dragging, and dropping text and other content
  • Printing envelopes on the fly
  • Saving envelopes as part of a letter
  • Creating mailing labels

Certain types of written communication—such as legal passages, product warnings or disclaimers, or a company description—can or should be repeated almost verbatim whenever used. Rather than forcing you to retype such boilerplate text, Word offers you tools for storing and inserting commonly used text, as well as tools for recycling text from other sources.

Building Blocks and Quick Parts provide a gallery-like approach to creating and inserting boiler-plate content. You can take advantage of a menu of ready-to-use document parts that you can use to quickly develop a finished document. You can create your own Quick Parts, as well as AutoText entries that you may need to insert frequently in various documents. You also can insert a predesigned cover page to give a report a more polished start.

Enabling Actions—links that identify potential special text such as an address you might want to save to your contacts—similarly enables you to capture and reuse document information. ...

Get Word 2013 Bible now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.