Bev and Jerry, The Villan, Stilly River Sage, et.al.

The "show all" button, that has the "paragraph" character "¶"for its icon, selects a setting that toggles whether formatting things like paragraphs, hidden text, blank spaces at the end of a line, and a few other thing, are displayed. It essentially toggles, on or off, a checkmark in one of the setup choices in Tools – Options, on the View tab.

It is essentially a "reveal formatting" switch, and corresponds – as best I can remember – the "reveal codes" switch in WP.

I almost never use this switch, because I always view all formatting, in page layout view, in documents I'm working on. As with quite a few things in Word, the result of this switch depends somewhat on what other choices you have made in the Tools – Options setup.

A Word document can also contain REAL coding, as opposed to a few format switches like WP, in the form of "field codes" that can be viewed as "code" or as "result" using the switch "Shift-F9" for a specific single field, or Alt-F9 to show/hide code for all fields in a document. Few people use this form, since there are "dummy" methods of doing most things by clicking choices somewhere in Word; but it is a method with immense power and grace for those few things that need it. In addition to the code/result toggle, you can set up Word so that it shows field results with a "grayed" background in the normal view, or as normal text.

SRS – If your dropdown menus only show the most recent, and you really want to see everything, you can change the setting to show long menus by clicking on Tools – Customize, and on the Options Tab, put a click in "Always show full menus."

You can also "paste as unformatted text," or as several other special formats, directly into Word, using the Edit – Paste Special command, and selecting the format you want. (Quick keys – Alt-E, S, and usually one "arrow up," although the choices available – how many arrow steps - depend on the content of what's in the clipboard.) You thus have the choice, without leaving Word, of pasting, as an example, just the text or pasting directly so that you can extract links and such from a web selection.

If you have pasted something with a lot of "formatting" in it, after you've pasted it into Word, you can convert it to plain text by highlighting/selecting what you want to convert and hitting Ctl-Shift-F9 – the "unlink fields" switch. (Ctl-A, Ctl-Sh-F9 converts the whole document to "text." You do have to "save as text" to prevent it all being converted back to a word .doc, if you really want one of the several flavors of .txt file to use elsewhere.)

People have their own favorites, but often forget the "learning curve" they faced with the one they're now familiar with. Most "My program does this and Your program doesn't" are really "I know how to do this in My program and I don't know how to do this in Your program."

Word, and Office programs in general, are typically set up with "defaults" that make it easy to do simple stuff without learning anything. It can be ridiculously difficult to turn off all the "features" in Word to make it useful at a "professional level" of work (you also need to turn on some features that are "defaulted off") but experienced users I've known who have been proficient at both WP and Word would kill to avoid using WP. If it works for you, and if you don't need to conform to anyone's office practices, then it doesn't make much difference what program you use.

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Fibula Matlock – Sometimes format and layout are important, and an attached Word .doc is one of the easier ways to getting something to other users. Few people who don't have an IP department to buy it for them have a distiller version of Acrobat, or the ability and interest to assemble and learn to use one of the freeware substitutes. (We do have some notable exceptions here.) This post, down to the "****" above is 23 KB in Word, but is 47 KB as a .pdf. If you include any graphics, or moderately complex layout, a .pdf file can often be 6 times as large as the Word document from which it's made. And contrary to what Adobe tells you, even with Acrobat and a good set of plug-ins, editing a .pdf is BITCH.

It's common courtesy to send stuff in a format that the recipient can use, but the attitude that "nobody needs anything I don't like" is one of the reasons a lot of IP departments are intensely hated (or scrupulously ignored) in large organizations, by the people who have to use the systems to do their own work. Your job in IP is to keep your users happy, not just to make your own life easy. End of rant.

John