missing commands in MS Word 2008 for Mac

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I hope the following will be of help to other puzzled newcomers to Mac. I have just joined the Forums; I am sure it has been covered before ad nauseum, but a search by me couldn't find it, so here goes:

I switched two weeks ago and love the MacBook Pro 15 but I had a hard time finding the equivalents of some commands in MS Office Word 2008 for Mac.

I write articles and books and I need these commands in Word. The answers were not so obvious.

For example the Home and End keys are missing on my MacBook Pro 15.

And the Shift F5 key no longer takes me to the previous place in a Word document.

Zooming in a document eluded me for a while.

Worst of all, the Toolbar disappeared and five Word experts couldn't find it. I have 5 books on the MacBook and on switching, and none of them listed a Show/Hide Toolbar function. I had to Google for the answer. Much later I discovered that two of the five books indicated the answer without listing it in the index.

Here are the answers I came up with after quite a series of searches:

MS Word 2008 for Mac commands:

Up arrow goes to top of document
Down arrow goes to end of document
These replace the missing Home and End keys and were created by Tools, to Customize Keyboard, to All Commands, to Start of Document and End of Document, whereupon I entered the up and down arrows as commands to do this.

Option up arrow and Option down arrow still go up one page and down one page, but to go down a line, use the mouse or trackpad.

Shift F5 doesn’t work as the GoBack (to previous place in document) command but in All Commands I found that GoBack can also be done by holding down Command and Option simultaneously and then hitting Z while still holding down Command and Option. A more elaborate way to do this is cmd G and put in page 1 or page 100.

Forward delete is Fn + Delete

Go back or forward one or more spaces is left or right arrow

Go up or down one or more lines use cursor to get where you want, then click

To zoom in or out with Word, hold down ctrl and cmd and scroll with your mouse

In other programs, zoom in or out with cmd + or cmd -


And last but not least, a tiny pale oblong in the upper right hand corner of a Word document toggles the Toolbar on and off. This turns out to be a Mac function, not a Word function, and it applies also to Excel, Mail, Finder, and probably others.

Ciao,
auriga
 
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And last but not least, a tiny pale oblong in the upper right hand corner of a Word document toggles the Toolbar on and off. This turns out to be a Mac function, not a Word function, and it applies also to Excel, Mail, Finger, and probably others.

Yeah, the Sidebar in Finder Windows, for one.
 
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Likewise I do a lot of writing (6 hours plus per day) as an anthropologist currently writing a book, and have just switched to a Macbook Pro since my last laptop died. There are a number of very useful functions for writing in Office, Word 2007 that I can't figure out in Mac Word 2008 and would greatly appreciate any help of advice as it is currently driving me nuts.

First, I managed to set up scrapbook so that it works somewhat like clipboard but it seems much less efficient, and also when it stores pasted snippets of text (clipboard would store up to 24) the snippets are very large icons rather than simply being the text and so it is only possible to see 3 snippets at a time rather than 10 or so on clipboard. In Office I have the clipboard open at all times to the side of the main text: it is sort of possible to do this in scrapbook but it also contains other functions i never use that get in the way. Again it is difficult to reduce the size so it fits neatly and tends to run over the writing page.

Second, I have tried to customise the toolbar so as to only have the options I use and tried to minimise its size, so that the screen is a large as possible for writing. However, I haven't managed to do neither successfully. On Office it is possible to arrange the exact buttons that you use a lot (eg undo/redo etc) in the order you want and delete the rest. It is also possible to make the toolbar physically narrower.

If anyone has any tips whatsoever on these I would be extremely grateful as given the amount of writing I am currently required to do, it would be very useful and much, much less distracting if there is a way of customising the page beyond the fairly minimal options that currently seem possible in my limited knowledge and new foray into Macworld.

Thanks!
Viscount
 

chscag

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If anyone has any tips whatsoever on these I would be extremely grateful as given the amount of writing I am currently required to do, it would be very useful and much, much less distracting if there is a way of customising the page beyond the fairly minimal options that currently seem possible in my limited knowledge and new foray into Macworld.

You're going to have to get used to doing things differently on your Mac versus the PC you were used to. But you already know that...

I use MS Office 2008 (Mac) and also MS Office 2010 (PC), and while Office 2010 seems to be more configurable, I do the majority of our work while in OS X. The key is finding your way around in Office Mac and learning where everything is and how to configure those options you use most.

Once you learn and get used to Mac Office, I think you'll find that you can customize it to your liking the same as you did with Office for the PC. The one thing that is missing in Mac Office 2008 is VB which means no macros.
However, that is due to return later this year when MS releases Mac Office 2011.

If you have any other questions regarding Office or any other OS X application feel free to post your question in the Applications forum.

Regards.
 
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I recommend picking up the Missing Manual for Office for Mac, whatever version you'll be using. You can find it at many national bookstores in the U.S.
 
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Second, I have tried to customise the toolbar so as to only have the options I use and tried to minimise its size, so that the screen is a large as possible for writing. However, I haven't managed to do neither successfully. On Office it is possible to arrange the exact buttons that you use a lot (eg undo/redo etc) in the order you want and delete the rest. It is also possible to make the toolbar physically narrower.

Have you used this Menu: Tools > Customize... Toolbars/Menus ?
You can have as many or as few buttons in your toolbar as you like, mixing and matching from the various "packaged" choices.

As far as making more room for your document, that might depend on the size of your monitor. But, you can grab the lower right corner of the Toolbar and drag it to the left until it appears in three columns instead of one row. If you have a wide screen, this allows the full height to be used for your document, and the "extra" width is put to good use for the buttons.

Hope this helps. I wanted to look at mine so I wouldn't give out incorrect directions.
 
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...thanks for the advice...i found a free programme called clyppan Clyppan that is useful, and which is worth a try if anyone else is in a similar situation. Lots of things seem to work better on a Mac but as far as word processing goes neither Mac Word nor Pages seem as good or flexible as regular Word. At least in my fairly brief experience of them thus far.
 
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Yeah, if you need all the "bells and whistles" Word has 'em. I don't need even a tenth of what it can do... on a Mac!
 
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I'm thinking of switching to Mac, and my main work is done on the Office suite of PPT, Excel, Word and Outlook.

I use the shortcuts on Word extensively, are there other missing commands I should know about, or is there a resource for navigating Word 2008?

The Up/Down key one sounds particularly annoying, because I wouldn't want to use the touchpad to move up and down one line.

Does anyone here know how the Word in Office 2011 would differ? (Deciding whether to buy 08 and use it for 3 months then upgrade, or just suck it up)

Thanks.
 

chscag

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If I were you, I would wait until Office 2011 is released. MS has stated that Office 2011 will closely resemble the layout in the Windows version. Office 2011 will have the ribbon interface (like it or not), macros, and Outlook instead of Entourage.

I'm currently using Office 2008 on my Mac and we just started using Office 2010 on our PCs. I have thus far been impressed with Office 2010 and the new configurable ribbon interface. Much more user friendly than previous versions. Hopefully the Mac version will be the same.

Regards.
 

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