Extracting Acronyms

Have you ever needed to find all the acronyms in a document and pull them into a single list? Of course you have. Here’s a great way to speed up the process of finding all the acronyms using Microsoft Word’s Find feature and a few wildcards:

Copy the following "wildcard" string:

<[A-Z]{2,}>

1. Press Ctrl+F to launch the Find dialog box
2. Paste the wildcard string into the Find field
3. Click the "More" button at the lower left of the window to expand the dialog box
4. Make sure "Use wildcards" is selected
5. Click on the "Find in" button and choose "Main document

This will select all the acronyms in your document, as long as the acronyms are capitalized. Now you simply need to close the Find dialog box and copy (Ctrl+C) the selected acronyms and paste (Ctrl+P) them into a new document or an area in the current document where you would like your list of acronyms to be seen.

NOTE: This wildcard selection will pick up anything set in all-caps. So if you are setting any text to all capitals, that text will end up in your acronym list.

Footnote trouble-shooting

One of my colleagues had a great question about something I have encountered numerous times in MS Word 2007:

How do you change footnote spacing in a document? I noticed the spacing between the border and the actual text in the footer takes up a lot of space and I have no idea how to change or know if it’s a Word Standard.

HT: K. Ann Largie

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In the process of trying to make Word work well for everyone, some of the folks at Microsoft must have gotten terribly distracted, because this problem happens on its own, persists in future documents, and is almost impossible to figure out how to fix.

Fortunately, it has caused me enough problem that I finally figured out how to correct the problem.

In case you have not seen this problem for yourself, I’ll try to create an example of it here on the blog.

A footnote in Word is supposed to look like this.

At the end of this statement, I would like to force you to skip to the bottom of the page to read more useless drivel¹.¶

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¹ Here is a bunch of text to show you what the footnote would look like. I’m sure you’re intensely excited about this. As you should be.¶

But sometimes it ends up looking like this:

At the end of this statement, I would like to force you to skip to the bottom of the page to read more useless drivel¹.¶

 ¶

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¹ Here is a bunch of text to show you what the footnote would look like. I’m sure you’re intensely excited about this. As you should be.¶

Obviously, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work. But, try as you might, it seems impossible to remove the extra paragraph returns under the line. Word won’t even let you click into those extra paragraph returns.

But there is a way around it.

• Click on the View tab on Word’s Ribbon
• In the Document Views group, choose Draft
• Click on the References view in the Ribbon
• In the Footnotes group, choose Show Notes
• You may now access those pesky extra paragraph returns and delete them to remove that excess space

Now, switch back to normal Print View mode because the only thing the draft mode is good for is getting rid of those extra paragraph returns in the footnote area.

I received a link to this delightful (albeit accurate) list of typographic sins from Laura Caldwell via Abraham Piper’s 22 words blog. Thank you to both. Following is an excerpt, but you can find the full original 34 sins here.

Ten

Typographic Sins

1. Two spaces between sentences.
   Repent of this sin by using only one space.
2. Dumb quotes instead of smart quotes.
   Evil: "Thou shalt not misuse type"
   Good: “Thou shalt not misuse type”
3. Dumb apostrophe instead of a smart apostrophe.
   Profane: Don't use prime marks
   Sacred: Don’t use prime marks
   By the way, apostrophes always face this way: Pot o’ gold.
   They never face this way: Pot ‘o gold.
4. Failing to tuck punctuation inside quotes.
   Immoral: “I love type so much”, she confessed.
   Chaste: “I love type so much,” she confessed.
5. Failing to kern display type.
   Unseemly gaps can impede readability and be distracting to the reader. Adjusting the spacing between letters will assuage your guilt.
6. Using a hyphen instead of an en dash.
   Use an en dash to indicate a duration of time instead of the word “to”:
   the 8–10 commandments, not 8-10 commandments.
7. Using two hphens instead of an em dash.
   An em dash signifies a change in thought—or a parenthetical phrase—within a sentence.
8. Too many consecutive hyphens.
   It is sinfult to have more than two hyphens on consecutive lines of type, and even that should be avoided.
9. Large amounts of bodytext in uppercase letters.
   IT BECOMES REALLY DIFFICULT TO READ.
10. Large amounts of reversed type
      ARE HARDER TO READ.   Type on a busy background is also unreadable.