Tuesday, July 3, 2012

It's just a devil program...

...with evil on its mind...

So. If anybody out there reading this actually uses Word (as opposed to used by it), and is comfortable with it to the point of being able to make it do what you want even when what you want it to do is outside what the original programmers assumed you'd want - where should I look in Microsoft Word 2010 in order to figure out how to enable bookmarking the .doc I'm editing in compatibility mode? Because I can go to the screen where you create bookmarks, and it'll let me type stuff in, but it won't give me any options except "close."

I'm not asking you to solve my problem. I'll never master this hellspawn if other people solve my problems and in any case you can't see what I did. Just point me in the right direction, that's all I ask.

A friend of mine, when I was running around trying to figure out what format I should use for scanning, said she envisioned me typing it all in and revising and having it ready in about ten years. And it's true that as long as I'm going through it taking out all the line breaks in the middles of lines and the places where the text got rearranged or the scanner read a capital I as a 1, I'm tweaking it a bit.

Who wouldn't?

4 comments:

  1. Once you have typed in the bookmark and clicked Add, that bookmark is saved. It's all set. When you go back into the list of bookmarks, you'll see it there.

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    1. You didn't read the problem carefully. I don't get an option to add. Only "Close," which doesn't save anything. Somewhere, somehow, I've turned off the option to use bookmarks. I need to find the place where it happened and reverse it.

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  2. I use OpenOffice in place of Microsoft Word these days, especially since the only copy of Word that I have is a Win95 version that a friend gave to me. OpenOffice is also free and far less evil-empire.

    May I ask what sort of scanner and program you used for the documents? I'd love to convert my family's printed-out geneology records into a text file without having to type everything out. (Some of the names are just fantastic. For example, I've got an ancestor whose parents gave up on giving their many children actual middle names and just went with numbers instead.)

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  3. We've got an HP OfficeJet Pro L7600 three-in-one printer/scanner/copier - a little big for a printer, but compact for three pieces of equipment, and with a towel on top it's a perfect cat bed - the option that sees by far the most use. The scanning program came pre-loaded and appears to be Microsoft XPS Document Writer - in which case it's odd that it doesn't give us (or try to force on us) the option to scan them straight into .doc format; but if it did, it'd probably be a version of .doc format that isn't compatible with most versions of Word, so I don't mind.

    You can hire scanning done, which is what a lot of people were suggesting I do with my books, ignoring or not comprehending the fact that if I paid other people to do it I'd still need to know what format I should tell them to scan to. Text documents would seem to be the best bet for your genealogy, too - everything can read it, you'll be able to proofread and do searches, and there won't be a lot of special formatting, except for actual family trees, for which you'll probably wind up getting family tree software and inputting everybody by hand anyway. Family trees could be scanned as .jpg or .pdf, but then you couldn't proofread them.

    Gee, I'd never have guessed that you had any quirky ancestors.

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