I have a document that is 145 pages long and it was formatted to have indents for every paragraph. To my chagrin, as you wil soon see, this doc happend to have lots of very short paragraphs.
So I open it today and 90% of the indents are gone. Gone. Everything is left justified. So now I have to go back and put in the indents, Except I can’t just mouse to each line and hit the tab key, On, no, that makes the whole document do the whole Indent Right thing. I have to go to a line, use the Left arrow key to move to the end of the previous line, then hit Enter then delete (I’m lucky it knows to indent on Enter.)
I’m only on page 40 and I wish to the Microsoft Godz that there was a keystroke thingy I could do but I’m not hopeful.
It’s Word 2000, on a Win2000 machine. I just got the machine and just transfereed the file to it and I suspect it has something to dfo with that. But Word is a mystery to me past anything other than the basic stuff.
Word has a lot of seriously irritating features. Most have to do with formatting and various ways Word wants to do things automatically that you don’t want done. Some of these can be switched off.
I use Word less often all the time, in favor of Google Docs and AbiWord.
I feel your pain. I can’t help you. I use block formatting to keep things simple. I am the person in our program who creates and updates all the forms we use. I ask Word lots of questions. Sometimes Word can answer me. There are on-line tutorials that help. I would like to find the person who writes the how-to manuals for Word and how-to them upside the head.
(And then I have to explain these forms to co-workers over the phone, who although they have had computers for over 10 years, still ask, “Should I left click or right click?”)
Yes but this issue happened on it’s own despite the global commands I input, and it won’t undo. I’ve tried.
It’s like at some I clicked a button and made it do something and I don’t know which button I clicked. But every few pages there will be a few paragraphs that are still indented. I even had a slightly earlier version on a jump drive and took it to another computer and it was corrupted, which means it happened and I didn’t notice and I must have saved it.
Mine is a novel and it needs to be formatted correctly. My bane is that this novel has tons of dialog and I’m having to reformat well over half the lines on every page. If only I wrote large blocks of narrative it’d be much easier.
I will make one suggestion. Once you get through doing what you’re doing, make a copy of this document and when you rename the new document, add today’s date to the name. Every time you get closer to completion, make a copy and rename it with that date. That way if something goes wrong with your master copy, you’ll have back-up copies that may be correct. use this format to name the copies: master.copy.2009.12.27 if you use this format for writing the date, they’ll all be organized in chronological order.
It’s difficult to make suggestions without seeing the actual document.
You could try:
Select the entire document. Go to Format > Paragraph > Indents and Spacing
In the Indentation box, you have first the option to set Left and Right indentation. Make sure the values are set to 0.
The next option is Special.
Select First line. Set that value to the desire indent and apply the changes to the document.
Hopefully that will work!
And just in case there are some manual indentations made with the tab key: Do a global find & replace for ^t and replace it with nothing.
