Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

202 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

• Numbering, when it’s continuous, begins at the first line and goes all the way to

the end of the document. You can also tell Word to start over on each page, or

after each section break.

To delete line numbers, just select the text again, choose Format→Document→

Layout tab, and turn off “Add line numbering.”

Templates

This chapter may cover the most advanced features of Microsoft Word, but nothing

you’ve read so far can touch the exasperating complexity of templates, the system of

special files that Word uses to store your keystrokes, AutoText entries, styles, and

dozens of other preference settings. There are two kinds of templates—global and

document. Because you can simultaneously load more than one template, some-

times they interact in complex ways, including making all of your text switch to

radically different formatting.

When using Word as a basic word processor, you can safely ignore templates. Mil-

lions of people use Word every day, in fact, unaware that lurking behind the scenes

of every single document is one critical global template called Normal. Every setting

they change, every keystroke they redefine, every style they apply—everything gets

stored in this template file. Most people, in other words, never need step into the

piranha-infested Template River.

Learning about templates, however, can pay off for the ambitious and technically

undauntable. For example:

• If you collaborate with other people, you can send them a template you’ve cre-

ated that contains an officially sanctioned set of styles, so that all your docu-

ments will have a consistent look.

Figure 6-4:

Top right: The Line Number-

ing dialog box.

Lower left: You can tell Word

not to number specific

paragraphs by highlighting

them, choosing Format

→

Paragraph

→

Line and Page

Breaks tab, and turning on

“Suppress line numbers.”

Here, for example, that

option was turned on for the

Heading styles, so that

headings aren’t numbered

automatically.

Line Numbers

chapter 6: advanced word processing 203

• Similarly, your boss or network administrator may give you a template file, filled

with styles, so that your corporate correspondence will resemble everyone else’s.

• Or maybe you plan to use your laptop, and want to ensure that all of the custom

keystrokes, AutoText entries, and styles that you’ve carefully worked up on your

desktop Mac are in place on the laptop.

The following pages take you through this insanely challenging topic with as few

migraines as possible.

Document Templates

In any normal program, a template is simply a stationery pad, a locked icon in the

Finder that, when opened, automatically generates a blank, untitled copy of the origi-

nal. If you frequently (or even occasionally) need to create documents that incorpo-

rate certain standard elements, such as the top of your letterhead or boilerplate text

on a contract, document templates can save you a lot of time.

Word offers something like this kind of template, too. You see dozens of these tem-

plates, called document templates, whenever you choose File→Project Gallery. These

are regular Word documents—brochures, labels, newsletters, and so on—that have

been saved in a special, self-duplicating format. You can read more about the Project

Gallery at the beginning of Chapter 1.

Creating a document template

It’s very easy to create your own document template: Just prepare a Word docu-

ment. Then dress it up with graphics, font selections, dummy text, tables, forms,

whatever you like. It’s very important to understand that you can also customize

this document with Word’s more advanced features, such as:

• Styles

• AutoText entries

•Macros

• Margins and tab settings

• Customized menus and toolbars

• Page layout (columns, for example)

• Headers and footers

Then choose File→Save As. You can, if you wish, choose Document Template from

the Format pop-up menu, but it’s not technically necessary; any Word document—

even a normal one, which you save into the Applications→Microsoft Office

X→Templates folder—behaves like a template in the Project Gallery. The primary

advantage of choosing Format→Document Template is that Word jumps to that

folder (or, rather, the Applications→Microsoft Office X→Templates→My Templates

folder) automatically.

Name the file and then click Save.

Templates