How’s my driving?

Looks like this car is driving down the wrong side of the road right? Nope. It’s parked! I spotted this last Friday and just had to take a photo… Not only is the car not pulled to the side of the road, but it’s facing the oncoming traffic (on a busy B-road). some of the worst parking I’ve seen in a while.

MS Word 2010 and the UK date format

Why oh why do Microsoft make things more and more obscure with each iteration of their Office products? Today I had to battle with a new issue. After creating a letter using one of the default templates, I selected the date from a drop-down box only to find that it was in the US format (mm/dd/yyyy) with no apparent way of changing it to the UK format (dd/mm/yyyy).

After much searching in the less-than-helpful help files, and doing some googling, I came across a solution that somebody had posted for MS Word 2007.

This was helpful, but I found in Word 2010 I was missing something vital that they had described - a "Developer" tab! So, I found how to enable this and thought I would share the knowledge...

First you need to click on the File tab, then select Options from the Help sub-menu. Once in the options screen, select Customize Ribbon from the options on the left. Under the Main Tabs on the right, you should see that Developer is unchecked. Check the box and click OK.

Now select the Developer tab and click on the date in order to select it. In the Controls section of the “ribbon” you should see a button labelled Properties.

Click this while you have the date selected and you should be presented with the following window where you can adjust the date format to match what you expect to see here in the UK. To do this, change the “Locale” from “English (U.S.)” to “English (U.K.)”

I hope this saves somebody from the searching that I had to do in order to solve what should be a very simple problem.

MS Word and its little quirks

So today I spent a while messing around trying to understand why, when I split a cell in a table in Word, the shading doesn't fit the whole of the new cell. This seemed like there should be a simple solution, but as it turns out, it was down the margin of the new cell being a different size to the margin of the old cell that I split...

Is it me, or would the logical way for this to operate be that the new "column" (in this case) has the same attributes as the one that it was "split" from? Perhaps there's some technical reason why not, but whatever the case, it's all sorted now thanks to this very helpful page:

MS Word Table Cell Shading - whitespace - troubleshooting

Welcome

This is one of those pointless "welcome" posts that people always like to do when they start something new! It usually comes to nothing and maybe this will be a first and last post... It wouldn't be the first time. That's the trouble with having your fingers in too many pies I guess! LOL!