My Word 2010 Book Has Been Published!

Updating the links as of 1/12/2012 to reflect changes in the URLs for my (newly republished) books on Amazon.

My new book, Formatting Legal Documents With Microsoft Word 2010, has been published and is available now on both Amazon.com and Lulu.com. To go to the book’s page on Amazon.com, click this link or use the “tiny URL” http://tinyurl.com/W2010Legal3. To go to the book’s page on Lulu, click this link or use the “tiny URL” http://tinyurl.com/W2010Law.

Note that there is a preview on the Lulu page that displays a few excerpts, including but not limited to the “Contents at a Glance” and the full Table of Contents. If any of the text is truncated, click the “zoom out” button at the top of the preview screen. The Amazon page still lacks some of the basic publication information (including the publication date, which is May 31, 2010; etc.). Also, there is no preview available on Amazon.

As I’ve mentioned in prior posts, the book is more than twice as long as the Word 2007 book (577 pages, not including the front matter and the index; 618 pages in all). In part that’s because I went into quite a bit of detail about some of the new and modified features of Word 2010 — including the “Backstage View” (an expanded and feature-rich File drop-down), the Navigation Pane (a combination of “Find,” the Document Map, Browse Objects, and Thumbnails), Co-authoring, an innovative option to save temporary backups of files you close without saving, Paste Preview, the Web Apps, and more. And in part it’s because I added a great deal of fresh material that wasn’t in the Word 2007 book. For instance, I wrote an entire new section about mail-related features (mail merges, labels, envelopes); a new tutorial about setting up custom templates; and a lesson about creating pleading paper from scratch. There are numerous additional tips and sidebars, too.

As I’ve also mentioned, Lulu is running a special promotion whereby most books are eligible for free shipping, as long as you specify mail rate — be forewarned: that will mean a wait of 5 to 15 days in addition to the 3 to 5 days it takes to print the book — and you ship to an address in the U.S. The offer also depends on the weight of the book(s) you buy (i.e., some shipments are too heavy to qualify).

At this point, it appears that the book does qualify for free shipping, using the slower mail rate method. If you’d rather get the book a little sooner, you can order it from Amazon. Just remember that it takes a few days to print the book, which is just a fact of life with respect to publish-on-demand books.

Please be sure to let others know that the book is available on both Lulu and Amazon.

Thanks so much, and I hope the book proves useful to you!

Lulu offers free shipping from now through the end of summer

The special offer applies to orders costing at least $19.95, sent mail rate, and shipped to an address in the U.S. See this blog post for details. Although it means a bit of a wait for delivery — beyond the normal 3-5 days it takes to print the book — it’s a welcome change that puts Lulu on a more even footing with Amazon.

Great timing, in light of the fact that my Word 2010 book should be available on Lulu within a week or so (it will be on Amazon shortly thereafter)!

Contextual spelling (Word 2007 and Word 2010)

Contextual spelling, first introduced in Word 2007, is a nifty feature, albeit one that has definite limitations.

When the “Use contextual spelling” option is enabled, Word flags not only misspelled words, but also words that are spelled correctly but aren’t appropriate in the context in which you use them. For instance, if you type “Their are many reasons…,” Word will either change “Their” to “There” automatically or mark the word with a blue squiggly underline—even if you do not have the grammar checker enabled.

Right-clicking an item that the contextual spell-checker flags will produce a pop-up menu with some suggested alternatives.

To enable or disable the option, click the Office button, Word Options, Proofing (Word 2007) / File, Options, Proofing (Word 2010), and navigate to the section labeled “When correcting spelling and grammar in Word.” Click to check (enable) or uncheck (disable) the “Use contextual spelling” option, then be sure to click “OK” to save your settings when you exit from the Word Options.

A few caveats about this feature:

• It doesn’t always catch contextual spelling errors, so you still need to proofread your documents;

• It occasionally produces false positives;

• If you have less than 1 GB of RAM on your computer, the option will be automatically disabled to save memory; and

• If your computer seems unusually slow or your system resources appear to be low, try disabling the option. According to Microsoft, the option consumes a fair amount of memory.

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This post is adapted from my book, Formatting Legal Documents With Microsoft Word 2010, which will be available on Lulu.com and on Amazon.com very soon.