A US Court of Appeals has upheld a patent infringement suit brought by a Canadian software company against Microsoft, and Microsoft now has until January 11 to either issue new versions or stop settling Office 2007, and Word 2007 specifically. More »
Word wants to make it easy to format complicated lists, but having two separate approaches to creating those formats doesn’t necessarily assist with the task. More »
Adding a simple page number in a Word document is pretty straightforward, but once the formatting gets complex, so do the solutions. A stressed-out Microsoft staffer offers some solutions to common problems. More »
Over at the How-To Geek’s home away from Lifehacker, blogger Mysticgeek points out a Word 2007 tip many of us had no clue about—you can edit a document in Print Preview mode by turning off the “Magnifier” switch. More »
Lifehacker Reader Scott has to explain all the acronyms in his Word documents in an attached appendix. He’s learned to make Word search them out for him, and anyone can use the same trick. More »
Pasting text from web pages into Microsoft Word can be a serious pain—all you wanted was the text, but it copies the formatting. Reader Wille writes in with a quick tip to make it simpler. More »
Word already has some pretty neat citation and bibliography features built in, but if you don’t mind getting grubby with a little XML, you can make it even more efficient. More »
Windows only: Microsoft’s Word 2007 has lots of fancy editing options, but one it curiously lacks is a redaction tool — something that lets you permanently black out private details such as phone numbers or names before making a document public. The open source Word 2007 Redaction Tool tries to fill that gap, adding a Redact group onto the ribbon’s Review tab. While you could just try deleting or over-writing the relevant text, that’s often easy to undo with revision tools. This is definitely still in beta mode — it took me more than an hour to run the installer (I suspect the bloated, lethargic .NET was largely to blame there) and even then it refused to actually start-up within Word’s add-ons architecture. If you have more luck, share your experiences in the comments. Word 2007 Redaction is a free download for Windows only, requires the .NET Framework 3.5 release. Word 2007 Redaction Tool
Got a Word 2007-formatted file you need to convert while you’re away from your desktop? Web tool Zamzar can flip .docx files to old-format Word files, PDFs, or lots of other things. For more convert-anywhere ninja tricks, check out five email addresses that convert documents. [via Download Squad]
