All the help sites and Word tips say the same thing: to return to the last place you edited in a document, simply hit Shift+F5.
Except that it doesn’t work for me. Tried different documents. Nothing.
I’m using Word 2003. Any suggestions?
Tools > Customize > Commands tab > Keyboard button.
In the “Categories” pane, scroll down to “All Commands” and select.
In the “Commands” pane, scroll down to GoBack and select.
Put the insertion point in the “Press new shortcut key:” box and hit Shift + F5.
Click the Assign button. Close, Close.
You should be good to go.
First, how the heck would you ever find that?
Second, the shift+F5 command was already listed there.
Third, I entered it again in the new command box and now it works.
I don’t claim to be a Word expect, but I don’t get it.
But thank you for the help.
You can find all sorts of things if you poke around. Me, I’m hooked up to an extensive network of electronic editors who play with this stuff all the time. A lot of us have extensively customized Word to improve our productivity. A lot of it happens in Tools > Customize. You can make custom toolbars, menus, just about everything. (But be careful about assigning commands to Alt + [letter], because that will often disable your regular menu hotkeys (Alt + E for the Edit menu, etc.)
We have a saying: “Sometimes Word happens.” A common problem is corruption of the Normal.dot template, which is where most people’s keyboard shortcuts are stored. When Normal.dot goes south, Word acts funky, and that may well be what happened to you.
Luckily, there’s an easy fix, if you don’t mind resetting Word back to its out-of-the-box state.
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Find where your Word templates are stored (Tools > Options > File Locations tab > User templates). Make a note of the path.
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Close Word.
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Go to the templates folder you just noted and rename Normal.dot to NormalOLD.dot. (This is your backup copy, just in case.)
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Open Word. It will generate a shiny new copy of Normal.dot. All of your menus, keyboard shortcuts, etc., will be reset to their defaults.
You also could have simply done Tools > Customize > Keyboard > Reset All . . . to reset Word’s keyboard assignments to the defaults. But I didn’t know how customized you were, so I just gave instructions to fix the one setting.
However, if you’re fond of customizing your Word workspace by futzing with settings, you’ll need to either make regular backups of Normal.dot (“Normal03-04-09.dot”, etc.) OR (as I do) ignore Normal.dot altogether and create your own customized global template; mine’s called Trix.dot, because I keep all of my tricks (macros, keyboard shortcuts, etc.) in it. (Basically, create a blank template and keep it in the Startup folder in your Templates folder. Go to Tools > Templates and Add-Ins, add it to the “Global templates and add-ins” list, and make sure it’s checked. Then, whenever you make a customization change, make sure you’ve opened your personal custom template, and choose it in the “Save changes in” box that lists your global templates, instead of letting the changes save to Normal.dot.) Custom templates are much less susceptible to corruption than Normal.dot is.
Then, when Word acts funky, you either go to one of your non-corrupt Normal.dot copies and restore it as Normal.dot, or, if you have your own Trix.dot, just kill Normal.dot as described above, restoring Word to normal, and keep trucking along with your customizations intact in your global Trix.dot.
Probably way more than you wanted to know, but that’s basically how it works, at least in my world.
I salute you, Scarlett67, one of the few people to have ever made me feel like the lesser geek.
:worship:
I call this “having a Bill Gates Moment”.
Oh, go on. 
But really, I worship at the feet of people who know tons more about this stuff than I do. Like the people on the Word-PC list who write complicated VBA macros that are way over my head. Or the people who run the Word MVPs site. Or the three members of Copyediting-L who wrote my three most-thumbed references on electronic editing.
I’ve always been a geek in general, but I guess you’re right: This is where I’m the most geeky. I used to hate Word because I was a WordPerfect woman, but since I quit WP cold turkey and forced myself to learn Word, I think I’ve managed to make it (mostly) bend to my will, at least in the ways I need it to bend. And I know where to go for help when I’m stuck.
Wow, I never knew there was an official way to do this.
My workaround was always to, just before closing a file, type “xxx” at the point I left off editing. Then when I opened the file again, I could just do a ctrl-F and search for XXX, and it would take me straight there. (Naturally, if you’re writing about XXX movies or something, you’d pick “YYY” instead.)
The reason they removed essentially all the UI customizability in Office 2007 was that the vast unwashed masses had no ability to operate the very powerful customization faciliites in 2003 & prior.
If you live in Word and are using the standard menus & toolbars & keystrokes you’re like the idiot lumberjack who returned a new chainsaw claiming it didn’t help him saw any better than his old saw. When the saleman fired it up, he shouted “What’s that noise???!”
Heh, I actually do it this way (my marker is &&&, and I’ve never bothered with making a macro for it). I prefer having a “hard” marker of where I left off. Also, sometimes I want to mark my spot, go somewhere else in the file and do a few things, and go back. Shift-F5 won’t help you there. (I think it will actually go back to your last 3 edits, but again, I don’t use it, so I can’t swear to that.)
What an awesome analogy!
I’ve been hanging on to Word 2003 like grim death for the very reasons you state about Word 2007. I’m hoping Microsoft restores some semblance of the old layout in the next version. They’ve already been slapped twice by users: once over Vista, and once over removing VBA in Word 2008 for the Mac. So many of us have an army of VBA macros, and for Mac users, Word 2008 rendered them useless. “Oh, but you can use AppleScript!” Yeah, and recreate a few hundred macros, many of them complex, while learning a new scripting language? No thanks. Put it back!!! And they did; VBA will be back in the next Mac version of Word. (Fortunately I’m a PC girl.)
What’s a good site to download Word macros? There are a few things I have to do repeatedly for which I’d like to find a macro.
I like the “official way” better now that I know there is one. But instead of typing in some funky text, I set a bookmark. I wrote a macro to do this and added a custom button to set the bookmark, and another to go to it. This doesn’t leave any visible garbage in case you send it to someone with your xxx in it. I also use the buttons for going back and forth to some reference point during the same edit session, like repeatedly going back to the table of contents.
Most of mine are homegrown or based on snippets of code that other editors shared. But hmmm, let’s see. Off the top of my head, the following should be easily Googlable:
Electric Editors has a macro library, I believe.
Ditto the Word MVPs site
The Editorium newsletter archives (Jack Lyon is my GOD; get his book for a GREAT resource)
What sort of tasks do you need macros for?
Actually, the early rumors from Redmond are the Ribbon will finish taking over Office in the next version. Project, Outlook, etc., will all be ribbonated.
But there will be some enhancements to the customizablility.
<scarlett67 worship>
I have a quote from you up in my cube at work and frequently use it to explain to my customers why they need my services. “We’re paid to misunderstand text in every way possible - and then fix it.” Thank you very, very much!
I’m on Word-PC, too. Aren’t they wonderful?
</scarlett67 worship>
Mostly just editing text. Like if I paste something into Word with paragraph breaks at the end of each line and two at the end of each paragraph, I want to eliminate the hard line breaks. Or to remove the double space after each period.
(Crap, I forgot where I was and wrote the second macro first, so I had to paste it below. See there for full instructions.)
Not sure what you’re going for here. Are you talking about the line returns (little arrows) that show up when text is pasted from the Web? Those are ^l in word. Paragraph breaks are ^p. So to change line breaks to paragraph breaks, replace ^l with ^p. Then to eliminate double paragraph breaks, replace ^p^p with ^p.
Let me know if I’ve interpreted this wrong.
You can record this yourself.
- Put the cursor at the beginning of your doc.
- Tools > Macro > Record New Macro . . .
- Name the macro (Let’s say “TwoSpacesToOne”). If you want to assign it to a key combo, hit the Keyboard button and assign one as described above. (Watch the “Currently assigned to” line so you don’t overwrite a combo you want to keep.) Write a description if you wish. Click OK.
- YOU ARE NOW RECORDING! Note the little box with the pause and stop buttons.
- Edit > Replace.
- Find what: [period][space][space] (type the actual characters)
- Replace with: [period][space]
- Click the Replace All button.
- Close the Find box. Click the Stop button.
You now have a macro called TwoSpacesToOne in your Normal template, which you can run either by using your key combo you assigned to it, or by doing Alt + F8 and selecting it from the list and clicking (I think) Run.
(But be vewwy, vewwy careful with Replace All! Global Find and Replace can be tricky. You don’t want to do like a recent cookbook author did; he replaced “pear” with “apple” globally, so I had to fix things like “apappleance” throughout. I won’t talk about the fiction author who globally changed a character’s name from “Will” to something else, and didn’t restrict the search with Match Case and Whole Words Only.)
You can learn a lot about this stuff just by taking a test doc and fooling around. A lot of people have never played with all the wonderful stuff under the “More” button in the Find and Replace box. You can replace font formats, styles, special characters, and more. If you learn about wildcards, a whole bunch more crap comes flying out.
Or, if you want to stimulate the economy, hie thee over to the Editorium and check out Jack’s fabulous tools. FileCleaner does both of these tasks and many more; choose the fixes you want to make and FC does them to the whole document with one click. I own and use several of Jack’s programs (I use Editor’s ToolKit Plus every day), and they are worth their weight in gold. His newsletter archives and book are also a treasure trove of info. All programs come with a 45-day trial period (and there are even a few freebies). Jack also gives awesome tech support. Usual disclaimers apply; I’m just a happy, happy customer.
OK, I’ve plugged Jack, I might as well plug my other two favorite resources:
“Making Word Work for You: An Editor’s Intro to the Tool of the Trade” by Hilary Powers. Available as both spiral-bound and PDF through Lulu. This is a tiny (73 pages) but extremely to-the-point guide to taming Word for editors. I have about a zillion flags sticking out of my copy.
“Effective Onscreen Editing: New Tools for an Old Profession” by Geoff Hart. Available as perfect-bound or PDF, either directly from Geoff or through Lulu. This one’s a little heftier, at 560 pages, but broader in scope.
JustThinkin’: Glad to help! Though the main idea came from Geoff Hart; several years ago he came up with the phrase “professional idiots” to characterize what we do. I don’t think anyone’s been brave enough to put it on their business card, though. And you’re right, those people over at Word-PC are geniuses. I just about fall over whenever I find that I can contribute help instead of asking for it.
Hell, if I tried to tell my clients that I’m a professional idiot, they’d never give me the time of day. It’s taken me a lot of time and work to get any trust or respect from them as it is (they’re way too caught up in their professional jargon). That quote seems to do the trick though. I say it comes from you – that’s my story and I’m sticking with it! 