Nursing Home Litigation
Creating Captions Tis is my second biggest pet peeve—trying to modify a
caption that was created with a lot of tabs and spaces of the space bar. If I need to change the name of a party, then the middle asterisk line gets all out of whack. Te solution is to build a table. Every caption needs a table with one row and three columns.
Click the Insert tab, click Table, and make a 3X1 table. Te first column contains the names of the parties. Type them in as you normally would. If you need to indent anything (for example, the word “Plaintiff ” underneath the actual name of your plaintiff), press Control and Tab at the same time. Whatever you do, don’t use the space bar (it won’t line up properly). Te second column typically contains a line of asterisks, or
parentheses, or some other symbol. Te third column usually contains the case number. Now, when you make changes to one column, it will not affect any of the formatting from other columns. As a bonus, if you want to create lines or eliminate lines around any of these boxes in the table, you can do so: Highlight the boxes you want to modify, right click, click Borders and Shading, and in the Borders tab, choose your preferences.
AutoText If you are a lawyer, you find yourself creating the same
or similar items within documents and documents over and
over again. Captions, proposed orders, certificates of service, affidavits and signature lines, for example. Word’s AutoText feature can streamline the process so you won’t have to hunt for the most recent version of whatever you are trying to recreate. Find the text that you want to automate, whether in an existing document, or just create it from scratch. Select all of the text that you want (Control-A is an easy way to do this if you want to select the entire document). On the Insert tab, click Quick Parts. Under AutoText, click Save Selection to AutoText Gallery. Give it a name, and tell the computer what to do with it—insert wherever you command it to, insert it in a new paragraph, or (as for a proposed order), insert it in a new page. Ten, when you need to access the feature, go to the Insert tab, click AutoText, and choose your new option.
Recover Unsaved Documents We’ve all done it—worked for hours on a document that
was just flowing so well. Te ideas kept coming, the diction was perfect, the syntax was extraordinary. And then, you hit the ‘x’ in the upper right hand corner. You shut the document down, and that icy cold feeling in the pit of your stomach starts to take over. I forgot to save it. Word 2010 can save us from ourselves. Click File, Recent,
Recover, Unsaved Documents, and choose the document you need to recover. Now, this will only recover the document from the time of the last autosave, which typically at ten- minute intervals. To change that (maybe make it every 3-5 minutes), go to File, Options, Save and click a time under Save Autorecover Information Every __ Minutes.
Conclusion Te best way to learn new or unused features of Word
is to take a few minutes from time to time to experiment— click on buttons you’ve never clicked, and delve into the inner workings. Microsoft Office has a decent Facebook page where they periodically offer tips and suggestions, and there are numerous books devoted to the subject. Te general rule is that if you think there should be a better way to do something, there usually is. You just have to look around to find the answer.
Biography John J. Cord (Plaxen & Adler, P.A.) graduated from
the University of Colorado School of Law. He concentrates his practice on assisting victims of automobile negligence, medical malpractice, and defective products. He is licensed to practice in Maryland, the District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Minnesota. He is a member of the American Association for Justice and is former chair of the MAJ Technology and Education & Programs Committees. Follow him on Twitter at @johnjohncord.
50 Trial Reporter / Fall 2011
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