Tom’s Tech Tip: Time for Certified Legal Nurse Consultants to Take a Microsoft Word Painting Lesson
One of the most handy Microsoft® Word tools I’ve found is the often-underutilized Painter tool. If you’ve ever written a legal nurse consulting case report you’ll find yourself moving text from page to page as you draft that document. Often, as you move the text, the formatting will shift and not match the format of the new paragraph or page where you’ve placed it.
When that happens, your first step is to remove any formatting and try to hand-match the paragraph above or below but if you’re pasting bullet points or a numbered list you’ll have to match the hanging paragraph indentation settings and any other number of time-consuming settings.
But there is an easier way than to do it by hand. And that’s to utilize that little paintbrush and Format Painter command in the top of your Word ribbon.
Simply use your mouse to highlight the paragraph or text whose formatting you want to apply to the newly moved text. Then click on Format Painter. You’ve just copied the formatting into the Painter tool. Next, simply highlight the text you want to format and then, when you lift your finger off the mouse or touchpad the formatting will be magically applied!
As simple and useful as this is, Painter does still occasionally have issues, such as bold-facing an entire bullet-point where only the first sentence was bold in the original paragraph. But believe me, removing extraneous bold or italics is a whole lot easier than reformatting.
Practice with the Painter on your next legal nurse consultant job and you’ll wonder why you haven’t used it before.
LegalNurse.com is accredited as a provider of nursing continuing professional development by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation.
The National Alliance of Certified Legal Nurse Consultants (NACLNC®) is the largest and oldest association of legal nurse consultants.
Need tuition assistance? We've partnered with Sallie Mae to provide financing options.
*The opinions and statements made by Vickie Milazzo, the founder of Medical-Legal Consulting Institute, Inc. are based on her experiences and expertise, should not be applied beyond the specific context provided, and do not guaranty or project actual results. Vickie Milazzo is no longer involved in the operations or management of the business, but is involved as an independent education consultant.
Keep on Techin’,
