Thursday, November 27, 2008

MS Word Tip: how to have your (c) and ©

At work, I recently lost all of my customizations to MS Word and Excel. I am slowly getting back to having the menus and icons the way I want them.

One of my customizations has always been to turn off the thing that makes (c) turn into ©. I've been a big fan of using itemized lists since I read The Princess Bride in 1979. Because an itemized list has to have at least three items, I write (c) far more often than I write the copyright symbol.

Since I got into the law business, I write (c) even more because it's always showing up in things like "s. 16(2)(c) of the Electricity Act 1998". But at the same time, when you're in the law business, you have more use for the ©.

So today, when I went to turn off the automatic ©, I realized that I could just change it so that typing (c)) makes the ©.

By the way, feel free to use this idea and to pass it on to others. I assert no intellectual property claim over it.

[Do you know the other trick for stopping an automatic correction just once after it's happened? Undo or Ctrl-Z.]

3 comments:

John MacDonald said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
John MacDonald said...

Good tip, Dave. When I process my photos I always add a copyright watermark for kicks on my photos.

Now I just click Alt-0169 to produce the symbol ©. It works on PCs and in MS Word. I don't have a Mac so a different button would have to be used I suppose. Hope all is well.

-John

Anonymous said...

ooooooohhhhh. that is a good tip.