A MS Word formatting question

Hi all, I had a quick question.

To those of you who use Word to write, I'm having a formatting problem in some cases. Let me try to explain, because I know my way around the program for the most part, but I have a few specific issues I hope you can help with.

First, I do a lot of cutting and pasting. Sometimes it's just around one document, but more often, I'll take things from an old document and then paste them into a revision because it makes editing easier to start with "something" and edit from there. When I do that, I sometimes have different formatting that comes along with the pasted portion. Even if I select "match destination formatting" which confuses me. Is there any way to simply change a section to match the formatting of another section without reformatting the whole document with Select All and then selecting everything specific? As in, I'd like to format every section to match, but I don't want to have to redo all the formatting I've chosen that doesn't match the body of the text. Things like centered type, italics, extra spaces between chapters, etc..

The next issue is with the last lines of pages. I don't know what it's called (I thought it was widows and orphans, but now I'm not sure), but basically, when I get to the bottom of a page, if the line I'm typing is more than a single line (all that'll fit), it moves both lines to the next page. The program will only allow me to keep text on the first page if it fits within the page boundaries, and if it doesn't, it'll take sometimes two or three lines and move them all to the next page. Which is seriously annoying if you're counting pages because agents request 30 for a query or whatever.

Is that a widows and orphans problem, or do I need to look elsewhere? And if it is a widows and orphans issue, which selection do I have to click to just let each line fall where it may on my pages, because this sucks and I'd like the pages to all look uniform, even if it means that only the last three words of a sentence ends up on the next page. The reason why is because I do cutting in stages and things move frequently, especially when I cut a few paragraphs here or there, or whatever.

THANKS!

 

Yeah, I'll have to try that. I have Word for mac, but it's from about 2010, so not sure which version it is or whether that matters. Some of this was written on the mac and some on a PC laptop, so I'm sure there were conflicts when I pasted, depending on original formatting. I'll give theses a try and see what happens. I'm tired of each chapter being formatted differently, depending on where I pasted things. IN the original text I was using double spaces after periods and five spaces to begin new paragraphs, and I've been able to find/ replace those fine, but then I can't get a new paragraph to begin with a tab after, i have to actually hit Tab.I know it's a small thing, but it gets distracting, and then when some pages are creating orphans and not others...aak, I just want it all to be the same!

 

Yeah, I don't have a "Format Painter" button, and I've just tried pasting as RTF and non-formatted text, and the same stupid thing happens. Some lines are indented with a tab (maybe because I had to press "tab" on those lines0 and others go all the way back to right justified lines with no indent.

This is stupid. I just can't seem to figure out how to take out the tabs and then indent every paragraph again with a formatted indent. I think this was easier on the PC version of Word I was using up until last summer, when I bought this Mac.

My biggest concern is that when i paste this story into say, a nano excerpt, some lines indent with a tab and others don't have an indent (same as i'm having happen now), and I can't seem to find any way to overcome the lack of formatting in those areas, or the converse, remove the tabs. I might be able to simply find/replace the tabs out, but then how do I get the indents to go in the right places?

 

Okay, so let's say for the current conversation that I have a Frankenstein document. AND that i'm frustrated because in some chapters I don't have to press tab to indent and in others I do. I'm going to try the things you guys suggested, and if it doesn't work, would one of you smart people format my thing for me? AAK! On the PC I never had this problem, because the tools were all easy to use and find. On this version I'm really ready to punch my screen.

Oh, and document storage caused me a lot of sweat and a few tears when I got this Mac. Now, I just do everything in Finder and it's easy. Sometimes I still forget, though and try to save things places and miss, and then you know have to go in and find things and move them in Finder because Word doesn't let me move docs around from where they're sitting.

Just a question, I have a blank Word doc that I set up for critters.org and it's blank and anything pasted into it is in text only. Do you think that might be an option? To just paste it into that doc and match style with no formatting? I've gotten a lot of weird results messing with this today, but I don't want to screw up my document and then have a bigger mess I thought I could fix.

 

You guys are my heroes.

 

Thanks, Penpilot, I followed your instructions and have formatted the original document from 2008 (originally written on a notebook, then on a Mac, then on a PC, and now back on a Mac...HA!) and it looks great! Well, you know...the formatting looks great, the story not so nice, but at least I can continue my rewrite, now that i"m no longer freaking out over having to hit Tab in some sections and not others. And Geo, thanks for your help. Im' totally going to work with Show Formatting, I never knew that existed, only having used it in Compare Documents.