Tuesday, July 22, 2003

More on Word
One more thing which my friend(Dr. Nitin Paranjpe) taught me was to pay attention to what I type in word.
Whenever you type anything in word. Click anywhere in the text don't select anything then choose the "Tools" menu and in it "Spelling and Grammar". A dialog box called Readability Statistics pops up. In it check the readability section. The reading ease number indicates how easy it is to read this document and the grade level tells you how high a person in terms of grade is easily able to read this document. The higher the reading ease figure(highest is 100) and lower the grade level, the more readable is your document. Now is this a wow feature or what ? I was quite amazed at the little nuggets the word developers have put into word. Btw these features are supposedly there in MS Word since Word 97. It's just most of us don't event know about it. Sad but true.
Word the wonder tool

I was speaking to a friend of mine, a prominent expert(Dr. Nitin Paranjpe) on various tech topics, he'd come down home to down a few drinks and it was amazing, the number of tricks he showed me. One could teach an old dog like me :-)

One of them I just couldn't forget. Type the following statement and hit enter at the end of it in word.

=rand()

You get a statement which is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
The default is you will get 3 paragraphs of 5 sentances each. Incidentally these cover all the letters in the english alphabet
play around with the numbers

=rand(1) gives you one paragraph of 5 sentances.
=rand(1,4) gives you one paragraph of 4 sentances.

now who would want a function like this is what you're thinking, well in the old days you wanted to test if you old printer is capable of printing all characters then this was a quick way of testing all the alphabets see if they are working fine.
Also for instructors they could get a page full for demo purposes right away to showcase formatting etc. etc. basically to enable them to teach better... I'm sure there are many more such gems lying around not just in word but in each and every tool which one uses.