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.

Increase your monitor real estate

Have you projected Word onto a screen for a team meeting? Have you projected Word using a low resolution projector? Have you noticed that almost nothing fits onto the screen?

Yeah, me too. And I desperately needed more screen size to show more of the document to the team.

Word 2007 introduced “The Ribbon,” a useful but large part of the Word window. Although removing the ribbon will not double the size of the screen real estate, it will provide a tremendous increase.

There are three different ways that you can hide the Word Ribbon:

1. Click the down arrow to the right of the Quick Access toolbar and select Minimize the Ribbon
2. Press CTRL + F1
3. Double click the current tab above the Ribbon

This is a simple but effective way to show more on screen. I hope you find it helpful.

The importance of design theory

I’ve heard it again and again: Proposal development does not need attention to design. You just need to be able to cram 15 pounds of text into a 1-pound box. Although there is some truth in there, I believe the stringent requirements of proposal development require a greater understanding of design principals and their application than those projects that offer more creative license.

Although the RFP typically does not request an aesthetic page design, proposals that are easier to read are more likely to rise to the top of the consideration pile than the ones that make the reviewers work more difficult. Appropriate and creative application of design principles can result in a far better looking and easier-to-read proposal. And the better looking and easier-to-read proposal is more likely to win the award.

Figure/Ground

When we process visual information—for example, the elements that have been placed on a page—our minds subconsciously look for horizons, lines, structure, and other common visual elements in our physical world. A single horizontal line on a page implies ground. A vertical line implies an object in front of that horizon. This object, in our minds, has weight and would be affected by gravity. As page designers, we are able to cause an unsettled feeling in the reader’s subconscious by haphazard placement of the page elements. If the page is off-balance, the reader will sense the imbalance and will subconsciously sense that something in this proposal is off-kilter.

Positive space (text, callouts, graphics, etc.) must be “aired out” with negative space (white space, areas of the page that contain nothing). Due to the page limitations in most proposals, this is a particularly difficult thing to accomplish in proposal design. But an understanding of this concept will help the designer to prioritize the ways in which he or she will attempt to fit the maximum amount of text onto the page.

The designer who is aware of the visual design aspect on the page will seek to balance the page through careful positioning of text, callouts, and graphics in an effort to provide visual relief from the potential sea of gray text. Well positioned graphics will break up the text, giving the reader’s eyes a break as he scans the page. This, in turn, provides an subconscious impression that there is air (white space), even when that white space is at a minimum due to the page limitations.

Some tools to keep in mind

• Work on visual symmetry in each proposal page. When creativity is constrained and textual real estate is at a premium, visual symmetry is one of the best ways to bring balance and airiness to the page.
• Try to place larger, margin-to-margin graphics low on the page. This provides a visual foundation to the page so the reader is not unsettled by what appears to be a heavy object floating in mid-air, against the forces of gravity.
• Carefully choose the color and style of callouts in a way that help to balance the weight of the elements on the page. Remember: darker elements give an impression of greater weight than lighter elements. So a large light-colored elements may be balanced by a smaller dark-colored element.
• Maintain acceptable spacing. Don’t give into the temptation to remove all cell padding from tables and all spacing between paragraphs. If leading and paragraph spacing become too tight, the document becomes difficult to read. At the least, the reviewer will sense that this proposal is causing him extra work. But the more astute reviewer may realize that the submitting contractor is trying to cram way more onto the page than they should. This will raise a red flag in the reviewer’s mind and may be used as a mark against the company who submitted that proposal.

Many of these suggestions require some interpretation and a balance against the needs of the proposal writers. That’s the reason you’re the designer. You get to make those life-shattering decisions.

Have fun. Be creative. This is a great job!

Word’s Trust Center

Every now and then I receive a question about Word that is a bit hard to answer—primarily because I don’t know the answer and secondarily because I have difficulty finding an answer in one of my Word books. Here are a couple of questions that fit into this category:

When making comments, each comment shows the person's name who made the comment, i.e., JD1: Comment. After saving the document, however, it changes to A1: Comment. What’s going on here?

and...

Our reviewers used track changes to make edits to the document and whenever they save the document their comment initials are replaced with an “A.”

Here’s the answer (which required a bit of searching on Internet forums and desktop publishing help groups):

Word’s Trust Center
Removing personal information from the file properties on Save

1. Click on the Office Button in the upper left corner of the Word window
2. Click on the Word Options button at the bottom of the drop down window
3. Click on “Trust Center” in the left navigation menu
4. Click on the Trust Center Settings button in the lower right corner of the window
5. Click on “Privacy Options” in the left navigation menu
6. Under “Document-Specific settings,” uncheck the box next to “Remove personal information from the file preoperties on save”
7. Click Ok to close this window and Ok again to close the final window

You’re likely to not notice the problem until you save a document, at which point all the initials (from multiple reviewers) will switch to the generic “A.” Don”t worry—you can recover those reviewer initials if you don’t go too much further.

Before adjusting the settings as laid out in the above list, reverse the change to the initials by pressing Ctrl+Z. This will undo the last thing Word did, which was to change those initials. Now that you have returned the initials to the comments, follow the procedure laid out in this post to make sure it doesn’t happen again the next time you save the document.

The Golden Proportion

Pythagorus, circa 500 BC

A man living in Samos, Greece, about 2,500 years ago had an amazing ability to recognize mathematical equations in nature and architecture. He formed some principles of aesthetics that have stood the test of time and are still used today. According to Wikipedia, this man “was the first man to call himself a philosopher, or lover of wisdom,[his] ideas exercised a marked influence on Plato, and through him, all of Western philosophy.” His name was Pythagorus, you probably know him by his Pythagorean theorem regarding the three sides of a right triangle (a² + b² = c²). That’s him in the picture to the right. And we’re going to talk about how his ideas impact page layout.

When setting up a page layout architecture, many people set a grid to help them align various elements on the page. A derivative of the Golden Proportion or Golden Ratio, the Rule of Thirds forms the basis for many page layout designs. To accomplish the rule of thirds simply draw two vertical lines on the page separating the page into three equidistant parts. If that sounds a little too &lduo;mathy” for you, just split the page into three equal columns. Then place elements in the page based on those column widths. That’s the rule of thirds.

The Golden Proportion is a little more complicated to calculate but is more pleasing to the eye of the reader. In fact, it actually makes the information on the page easier to read.

Of course, you’d probably now like to know what the golden proportion is. This is so powerful that I really thought you needed to know the history behind it. A little knowledge can be dangerous. But now that you know the history:

The Golden Proportion Equation

Divide the width of your page by φ.

See, that wasn’t that hard, was it? Don’t remember that symbol from high school math class? That symbol, if you don’t remember it (as I did not when I first read about the golden proportion), is the symbol for phi, or the symbol for the number 1.6180339.... And that’s a tough one to remember, especially since the numbers after the decimal never end. So let’s simply round it off to 1.62.

Divide the width of your page (that would be the remaining width of the page after you lop off the margins where you won’t be printing) by 1.62. If you’re using a standard 8.5 x 11-inch page with 1-inch margins all around, that leaves you with 6.5 inches of page real estate.

6.5 inches ÷ 1.62 = 4.01

We’ve already rounded our numbers once, so we probably shouldn’t do it again—but I’m going to. I’m going to say four inches instead of 4.01. If we subtract 4" from 6.5" we have a remainder of 2.5", which gives us our golden proportion. Anything that does not fill the full column width of 6.5 inches would be best set to either 4 inches or 2.5 inches. A 2.5-inch callout would be wrapped by a 4-inch wide swath of text.

And that’s how Pythagorus’ architectural principle may be applied to page layout.

I know this was a long a potentially dull topic. But try it in your page designs and see how much it improves the overall look and readability. I think you’re going to be happy with the results.

P.S. – That picture of Pythagorus up in the top right corner is proportioned using this technique. So that’s an example of how it will look on the page.