Microsoft Word has lots of powerful features that unless you have taken a class on Microsoft Word (or have obtained equivalent training or experience through other means) you probably have never used. Today I got to play with a fun one called “No-Width Optional Break”.
<lj-cut>(Menu) <EM>Insert -> Symbol</EM> brings up a Symbol Dialog. And it has this big table of fancy special characters–and this isn’t too strange, a lot of people have used this to insert Wingdings symbols into their document. But there’s a second tab in this dialog that is much more under-utilized–the “Special Characters” tab. This is where it has the curly quotes and a bunch of other more obscure symbols.
But I think some of my favorites are the special characters for telling word where to split words–because having words wrap at a random character is kind of lame, but having words wrap at spaces only can sometimes lead to random funky whitespace. I’ve seen a lot of people “fix” the columns to be neat (especially when you do justified alignment where both the right and the left line up neatly) by manually hyphenating words by putting “- ” where it should split. In and of itself that is well and good and does the trick, but there’s something else that often happens–you realize a word near the beginning is misspelled or you forgot some key word and suddenly, all your “fixes” to the hyphenation are off and suddenly you have “over- view” in the middle of one line and it just looks like you didn’t proof-read because you couldn’t find all the places you needed to go back and fix *again*. But if instead of inserting minus and a space you insert a “optional hyphen” (either by using the special characters dialog or using the shortcut key ctrl-minus) word will automatically remove the hyphen if the word no longer spans a line break.
But there’s some cases where the proper way to split text is not with a hyphen. For example, urls, code, or file directory paths. in any of those cases (lets ignore the exceptions for now) you would not use a hyphen to mark the continuation as it would be confusing and ambiguous as to whether the hyphen is a literal character that is part of the url/path/or code or whether the hyphen is an indicator of “this didn’t all fit on one line” so they modified the convention slightly to say you just leave out the word-continuation symbol (hyphen) and continue the URL/path/etc on the next line. So in that case, optional hyphen doesn’t quite cut it and you need an even more fun symbol, the “no width optional break” which will tell word where you want to split a really long word if it doesn’t all fit on one line.
For example: C:\mydocuments\jessica\work\foo is a nice (semi-)long path without spaces. However, if it doesn’t all fit on one line, the default way of wrapping is ugly and will probably look something like
C:\mydocuments\jess
ica\work\foo
But by inserting a no-width optional break it will display as:
C:\mydocuments\jessica\work\foo
if it appears on one line and as:
C:\mydocuments\
jessica\work\foo
if it must be split across multiple lines.
By using optional breaks it makes word automatically remember to take those out if you change the width of your table cells or change the page from portrait to landscape or change the number of columns or something else that severely changes where your line-breaks are.
This concludes a lesson in microsoft word. was this of any interest? useful? did you already know how to use this feature?