peter@aucs.UUCP (Peter Steele) (05/26/88)
I should qualify this as Little Known To Me (and everyone I've
spoken to here that uses Word), but just in case there are some
others out there that missed this bit of info in the Word manual,
I thought I'd pass it along (I read the Word manual and missed it).
When you paste a graphic into a Word document and try to resize it
with the little handles on the corners and edges, all that you get
is a cropping effect. This has annoyed me many times; I write manuals
and quite often need screen dumps and so on scaled to make them fit
better. I used to use SuperPaint to scale an object before pasting
it into Word, but was never entirely pleased with this solution.
(Especially since many word processors allow you to scale a graphic
directly, including [if I remember correctly] Word 1.0.)
I found out the other day that if you hold down the Shift key when
you drag one of the handles on a graphic, instead of cropping the
image, it scales it, just like I want. And if it's a PICT object
(as opposed to a bitmap), it uniformly scales any fonts as well,
even if you only stretch an object along one axis. As the scaling
is being done, it displays in the little page # window the amount
the object is being scaled (e.g., 150%).
This is not exactly an intuitive feature. A better approach would be
to have a menu item which is normally grayed out until you select
a graphic; it then becomes available and allows you to enter the
amount you want to scale the selected graphic by. FullWrite does
it in a manner similar to this and was one of the first things I
discovered in playing around with the editor.
Granted, Word does describe this in the manual. However, as I said
above I did miss it, primarily because there's no exciting picture
along with the explanation to catch your eye. Oh well. I hope this
information will be of use to someone else out there in netland.
Does anyone else have any tidbits about equally obscure Word features
they'd like to pass on?
--
Peter Steele, Microcomputer Applications Analyst
Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, Canada B0P1X0 (902)542-2201x121
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