More snippets of info from the last few weeks… this time with a focus on Word…

Refreshing all the fields in a Word 2013 document

I was writing a pretty sizable document recently, with many tens of tables, a few figures and lots of cross references so I wanted to be able to easily update all the fields in one fell swoop. Well, it turns out to be remarkable easy to do, if not immediately obvious, in Word 2013 (and it seems it works for older versions too). Just go to Print Preview and the fields will be updated!  You’ll still need to manually update tables of contents, etc. if you’ve added/removed sections, but all the other fields in the document will be taken care of.

Fixing the spacing after a table in Word

Another challenge I had with my document was that it included a lot of tables, and after each table the following line was too close.  If I included a blank line, it was too big (and anyway, that’s not the right answer); and if I edited the Normal style then it would affect the rest of the document.

I found some suggestions in a post from Allen Wyatt. The first was to amend the table positioning and set top and bottom spacing but that involves letting text flow around the table (and potentially tables floating off around the document in the same way as so many pictures do…). The simpler approach was to create a new style, based on Normal, called After Table, which has the appropriate paragraph spacing set. No more ghastly gaps and dodgy new lines – instead I just use the After Table style on the paragraph immediately after each table.