Making small cards with text in them.

[David Young]

I need to find an easier way to put text into small boxes. I use them as
language-teaching aids and so end up making hundreds of them. The two
methods I have used are rather slow and laborious.

The first is to draw boxes of identical sizes on a Word document and then
type or paste the text into them. Although I can save time by having a
master document which I put together over a year ago, if I want to reformat
the text I have to go through every box again one by one to do it.

The second is to use the label function. The disadvantage is that I cannot
put a border around the text as the box function puts one around all cells in
the table, meaning that I cannot draw a box without a line joining it from
the side.

Using a combination of both, I can print the boxes on a sheet of paper and
then run it through the printer again with the text formatted as labels. The
problem is customising the labels precisely as what usually happens is the
row at the bottom starts to move away from the text. Fixing it requires
repeated trial-and-error correction of less than one tenth of a millimetre.

Speaking of which, I cannot find a way to get the measurements to stay
metric, even though I set metric measurements as default on Control Panel.

If anyone can help, I would be extremely grateful. The goal is simply to be
able to get boxes, with borders around them, with the text in them which I
can reformat en masse if necessary.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If you use the label setup (which is just a table), are you aware that you
can apply a border to the text itself rather than to the table cell?

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi Davie,

You didn't mention the version of Word you're using
but there are a couple of ways you could do this.

When you create a 'box' (autoshape) in Word you can
create duplicates of it by selecting it and use
Ctrl+D, then move it into the position you want.

When you create labels and use the 'new document'
option you create a Word table. In Tables,
when you're using Format=>Borders and
Shading choice you can select 'cell' or 'paragraph' or 'text'

If you create a Style (Format=>Style) and use that
on the text in your boxes you can then change the
appearance of the text by changing the style.

If the cards are always the same size then you may
wish to consider creating your table/boxes one time
to get the print positioning the way you want it then
then create a separate Word document or Excel sheet
that has a listing of your words and combine the two
at print time by setting up your cards table to include
inserted Mailmerge Fields (Tools=>Letters and Mailings)
to pull in your Words in your predefined layout.

For the units of measure check in Tools=>Options=>General
in Word.

=======
I need to find an easier way to put text into small boxes. I use them as
language-teaching aids and so end up making hundreds of them. The two
methods I have used are rather slow and laborious.

The first is to draw boxes of identical sizes on a Word document and then
type or paste the text into them. Although I can save time by having a
master document which I put together over a year ago, if I want to reformat
the text I have to go through every box again one by one to do it.

The second is to use the label function. The disadvantage is that I cannot
put a border around the text as the box function puts one around all cells in
the table, meaning that I cannot draw a box without a line joining it from
the side.

Using a combination of both, I can print the boxes on a sheet of paper and
then run it through the printer again with the text formatted as labels. The
problem is customising the labels precisely as what usually happens is the
row at the bottom starts to move away from the text. Fixing it requires
repeated trial-and-error correction of less than one tenth of a millimetre.

Speaking of which, I cannot find a way to get the measurements to stay
metric, even though I set metric measurements as default on Control Panel.

If anyone can help, I would be extremely grateful. The goal is simply to be
able to get boxes, with borders around them, with the text in them which I
can reformat en masse if necessary.>>
--
Let us know if this helped you,

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*

Office 2003 Editions explained
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/office/editions.mspx

 

[David Young]

Aha! That seems to be exactly what I need to do. Could you tell me exactly
how I would go about doing it? The path of the menu options would also be
useful as mine is in a different language (Polish) and my grasp of it is not
up to the level of specialist word-processing terms.

By the way, I am using Word 2000 with Windows XP (although I had previously
been using Windows ME).

Many thanks.

 

[David Young]

Thanks Bob.

I'm using Word 2000 (with XP, having been using ME previously).

The CTRL+D method was used for the original template but the problem I had
was that as every box has different text in it, if I want to change the font
of 24 of them at once I cannot find a way to do it. I have to go through all
the boxes one by one. Is there in fact a way to do this automatically? If
there is, it would be a better solution than using labels as I can just alter
copies of my template.

Thanks for the information about the measurements. You have saved me a
tremendous amount of time and energy.

David Young

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Select the text in the cell, go to Format | Borders and Shading, and apply
your border, making sure that "Apply to" is set to "Paragraph" (which it
should be by default). Note that if any of your paragraphs have indents,
you'll get individual borders around the differently formatted paragraphs.

You'll need to experiment with this. The default "Distance from text"
setting for paragraphs appears to be (though I find this hard to believe)
larger than the default 0.08" cell padding, with the result that the top and
bottom borders display, but the side ones don't. To correct that, you'll
have to apply left and right indents to the cell contents (as little as
0.05" suffices). The whole operation will probably require some trial and
error, but once you've got it all figured out, you can save the whole thing
(border and all) as a style (and an entire table as an AutoText entry).