Tips and tricks for Corel Perfect Office 2002 - Part 1

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Suppressing splash screens

If you work all day in WordPerfect, you'll soon find yourself getting tired of the screen that pops up every time you open the application. Here's how you can kill it for good. First locate the shortcut you use to start WordPerfect. Right-click the shortcut and choose Properties from the menu. Place your cursor at the very end of the filename in the Target text box. Tap the space bar once, then type a colon (:). Click OK to apply the change. The next time you launch WordPerfect, you'll see a slightly faster start-up. It could be just a few seconds that you gain, but when you're in a hurry, every second counts.

Placing your toolbars right

If working in WordPerfect is part of your job, it's better that you customise the looks of the working area of the document by placing the toolbars at locations where they come in handy and don't occupy much space. Instead of placing all the toolbars row by row, put one on the right panel and one on the left panel so that you have more space to work. For example, you could place the Print Preview toolbar on the left edge and the page toolbar on the right, leaving the default toolbar at the top, below the menus. This way you could regain valuable screen space and be better organised.

Changing default font

When WordPerfect is installed, it chooses Times New Roman as the default font for all the documents that you create.
1. Click File > Document> Default font.
2 Choose a font from the Face list.
3 Choose a font size from the Size list box.
If you want to change the default font and font size for all new documents, click Settings, and click Set as default for all documents.

<img src="http://www.hashdot.com/corel_chnge.jpg" width="510" height="383" border="0" alt="" />

Smart way to use Quick Correct

Typing something that's repetitive is plain boring. It becomes even more painful when the phrase happens to be a long one and has some special symbols. WordPerfect's Quick Correct feature lets you create and add 'shortcut' entries. Click Tools > QuickCorrect. Click Add Entry, and click OK.

<img src="http://www.hashdot.com/corel_quickcorrect.jpg" width="510" height="383" border="0" alt="" />

Switching documents

There are three basic ways to switch between open documents. One way is to click Window, then click on the document you want to switch to. The second way is to add a button to your toolbar that lets you cycle through open documents. Next Window switches you to the next lower document in the Window list. Previous Window switches to the next higher document in the Window list. The third method to cycle through documents is to use keyboard shortcuts. The default keyboard assigns [Ctrl] + [F6] to open the next document and [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [F6] to open the previous document.

Sorting files in Open Dialog

Files can be sorted in the open dialog box. When you click File > Open, the open dialog box pops up and asks you to choose a file to open. This interface is similar to Windows Explorer and hence gives you the option of sorting files and grouping them according to the file type. You could arrange the files in this open dialog box as you would do with Windows Explorer.

Using character map

Using WordPerfect's QuickFinder or Windows Find, search for a file called CHARMAP.WPD. For WP9, it's in the \program files\Corel\WordPerfect Office 2000\ programs folder. For WP8, it's in the \Corel\Suite8\Programs folder. Open it in WordPerfect, print it out and keep it handy.