Here it is, December 2017, and if you haven’t already moved your law firm to Microsoft Office 2016, then you’re probably adding it to your 2018 “Must-Have” budget! Truly, if you’re still trying to function on an older version of Office, your competitors already have an edge over you and your clients are likely growing impatient with you.

Why migrate to Microsoft Office 2016 now?

• If you don’t, you will soon lose not only the tech support you desperately need because the world will pass you by, but many of the cloud-based technologies that you would like to add to your workflow processes (LMS, DMS) won’t work with your old operating systems.
• The law firms that have already migrated have a huge advantage over you in sheer productivity levels.
• Your clients are likely already using Office 365 and Office 2016.

Need more evidence that now is the time? Consider this: Office 2016 was built for teamwork! It brings your productivity to a higher level with sharing, co-authoring, mobility and more.

Training to Support your Migration to Office 2016

Now, of course, it’s not like you install this and people automatically know how to use all the new features. That’s why you need training support. From pre-launch to launch-day to ongoing help, a good training program will assure that your law firm stays productive and then maximizes the new resources you’ve provided to them.

Here are the training steps that you should add to your migration plan:

• Pre-Launch Training: Using in-person and web-based delivery methods, prepare your team for the changes they’ll see so that they don’t flip their computers on one day and say, “Wait a minute? What IS this?!” From the first time they use Office 2016, they’ll have a working knowledge of how to access their work and keep it moving forward.
• Launch-Day/Week/Month Training: Once you launch the new software, your team will require transition assistance. Seek a training partner who can deliver in-class, in-person, web-based and “roving training” (walking the halls to answer questions on the fly) throughout your office and in every branch so that productivity doesn’t dip. (Check out the innovative DMS rollout we did with Moye White.)
• Ongoing Training: Once your team is up-to-speed and working well on MS Office 2016, offer ongoing training support through monthly classes, webinars, virtual help desk assistance and more.

With Microsoft Office 2016 (and the training to use it properly), your law firm could take a giant productivity leap! If you need training help to launch Microsoft Office 2016 into your firm, contact Savvy today: 303-800-5408, info@SavvyTraining.com

And, because I’m a swell guy (and humble!?), I thought I’d include some of the tips and tricks that I recently sent out in my monthly newsletter. If you like these, sign up for the newsletter!

Savvy Tips & Tricks for “In the Weeds” Help!

Jumping Back in a Long Document

If you are editing a long document and you need to temporarily refer to another place in the document, you can use this tip to make yourself more productive. There are two ways you can jump back and forth in your document.

1. First, you can use the scroll bars to view the other parts of the document. The insertion point is still at your old editing position, even though it is off screen. When you are through viewing the part of the document you needed to refer to, press one of the arrow keys or any printable character (including the Space Bar). You will be taken back to the exact place you were editing. Of course, if you pressed a printable character, you will need to delete it.

2. The other method is to use Shift+F5. This key combination is used to jump to the last three places in the document where you made edits. (Actually, it is four locations if you count the one where you first pressed Shift+F5). You can press it once and you will return to where you were most recently editing.

Pasting Text with Track Changes

One of the Word features commonly used by editors is the Track Changes feature. You may have need, from time to time, to copy text from one document to another and retain the change marks in the text being copied. For instance, if the text in the source document has some words struck through and some others highlighted as inserts, you may want the text to appear the same way in the target document.

Getting the desired results is not a matter of simply cutting and pasting. Here are the explicit steps you should follow to get the desired results:

1. In the source document, select the text you want to copy.

2. Make sure that Track Changes is turned off in the source document. (If you don’t do this, Word assumes you want to copy the text as if all the changes in the selection were accepted.)

3. Press Ctrl+C to copy the text to the Clipboard, or Ctrl+X to cut the text.

4. In the target document, place the insertion point where you want the text inserted.

5. Make sure that Track Changes is turned off in the target document.

6. Press Ctrl+V to paste the text from the Clipboard.

Another handy way to copy the text is to use the spike. Word users are so familiar with using the Clipboard to cut, copy, and paste information that we often forget about the spike. This is an area of Word that acts like a secondary Clipboard, with some significant differences. To use the spike to copy and paste text with Track Changes markings intact, follow these steps:

1. In the source document, select the text you want to copy.

2. Press Ctrl+F3. The text is cut from the document and placed on the spike. (If you wanted to copy, not cut, then immediately press Ctrl+Z to undo the cut. The selected text still remains on the spike.)

3. In the target document, place the insertion point where you want the text inserted.

4. Make sure that Track Changes is turned off in the target document.

5. Press Shift+Ctrl+F3 to clear the spike and insert the spike’s text into your document.

Saving Styles as a Template

You often use (or should use!) Styles in your document(s). Below is a nifty way to copy styles from one document to another.

1. Make a copy of your source document. (You do this because you don’t want to take the chance of messing up your original.)

2. Open the copy of the source document in Word. (You should have no other documents open at this time.)

3. Press Ctrl+A to select everything in the document.

4. Press the Delete key to remove everything you selected. (You don’t need the text; you only care about the styles. The styles remain in the document even after you delete the text that may use those styles.)

5. Press F12. Word displays the Save As dialog box.

6. Using the Save As Type list, choose Word Template or Word Macro-Enabled Template, depending on whether your source file contains macros or not.

7. In the File Name field, enter a name for your template. You’ll probably want this to be different than the original name of your source document.

8. Click the Save button. You’ve now created your template.

9. Open the target document.

10. Display the Developer tab of the ribbon.

11. Click the Document Template tool, in the Templates group. Word displays the Templates and Add-Ins dialogue box.

12. Use the controls in the dialog box to locate and select the template you created earlier, in step 8.

13. Click on Open. The Attach Template dialogue box disappears, and the name of the template you selected appears in the Document Template box.

14. Select the Automatically Update Document Styles check box to make sure that the styles in the template are applied to your document.

15. Click on OK.

At this point the target document is essentially using all of the same styles that were in your source document. Further, any styles that were in the source document but are not used in the target document are available for future use in the target document.

This approach may actually seem a bit extreme to some, but if you have a need to use styles from your source document with a lot of different target documents, it can be a great way to proceed. (If this is the case, you’ll only need to repeat steps 9 through 16 for each of your target documents.)