Best Addresses
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday November 7, 1998
How to share your favourite sites.
MOST Web browsers let you maintain a list of Web pages as bookmarks or favourites, but sometimes you may want to create a list that can be printed or accessed by people using Web browsers other than your own. One way to create such a list is to use a table in Microsoft Word 97.
CREATE A NEW TABLE
Start a new Word 97 document. Open the Table menu and select the Insert Table command. In the Insert Table dialog box, type "2" into the Number of Columns text box and type "5" into the Number of Rows text box, then click OK.
In the first column of the table, type the following topics (put each topic in its own cell of the table): "Insects", "Animals", "Sports", "Drama", "Countries". Format the text with the options you want.
Let's insert a row for some headings. Word inserts new rows above the row that contains the insertion point, so click in the top row of the table to put the insertion point there. Now open the Table menu and select the Insert Rows command. Word inserts a new row. In the first cell of the new row, type "Topic". In the second cell of the new row, type "Web addresses". Note that you can move the insertion point from cell to cell using the mouse, the arrow keys or the Tab key.
Format the table headings with the options you want. The first column is probably much wider than you need it to be. To make it narrower, position your mouse pointer over the border between the two columns. The mouse pointer becomes a double-headed arrow. Drag the border towards the left until there is just enough space to display the widest entry in the first column. Your table should look similar to the table in figure 1. If you later add longer text entries to the first column, you can re-adjust the column width.
ADD SOME WEB ADDRESSES
Word can automatically format Web addresses as hyperlinks. When you click on a Web address that is formatted as a hyperlink, Word will automatically open your default Web browser and search for the address that you clicked on. If your Web browser can find the address, it will display the associated Web page.
Let's make sure the automatic formatting for Web addresses is active. To do this, open the Tools menu and select the AutoCorrect command. In the AutoCorrect dialog box, click on the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Make sure there is a tick mark in the Internet And Network Paths With Hyperlinks check box, then click OK.
In the second cell of the second row, type "www.insects.com.au" and press Enter. Word automatically formats the address as a hyperlink. Hyperlinks are usually formatted as underlined, blue text.
If you don't want a particular address to be formatted as a hyperlink, press the Backspace key on your keyboard immediately after Word applies the formatting. Do this now. Word leaves the address as it is, but removes the hyperlink formatting. Let's re-do the formatting by pressing the Redo button on the Standard toolbar (figure 2). If you decide you don't want any of the Web addresses formatted as hyperlinks, you can re-open the AutoCorrect dialog box and de-select the Internet And Network Paths With Hyperlinks check box.
Now type "www.ants.com.au" and press Enter. The cell should now contain two Web addresses formatted as hyperlinks (figure 3). When you move your mouse pointer over one of the hyperlinks, it becomes a pointing hand, indicating that you can click on the hyperlink to open the associated Web page. This is useful when you want to use the hyperlink, but not so useful when you want to select it for formatting.
To select hyperlinks for formatting, use your keyboard. Let's select the two hyperlinks that we've just created. To do this, hold down the Shift key and press the up arrow key twice. With the hyperlinks selected, you can format them with the options you want.
Go ahead and add other Web addresses to the other topics. It doesn't matter if you invent the Web addresses as we are just using them as examples in this project. Each topic in your sample table should now have at least one Web address beside it.
SORTING THE TOPICS
To make the topics easier to find, let's put them into alphabetical order. To do this, click on a cell in the first column of the table, then open the Table menu and select the Sort command. Word opens the Sort dialog box.
Whenever you sort the entries in a table, it is important to specify whether or not the first row of your table contains headings. If the first row of your table does contain headings, as in our sample table, make sure the Header Row radio button at the bottom of the dialog box is selected. This tells Word to exclude the header row from the sort.
The Sort By section at the top of the dialog box already contains the options we want, that is, we want to sort the text in the Topic column into ascending alphabetical order. To start sorting, click on the OK button. Word sorts the topics into alphabetical order.
INSERTING NEW ROWS
To insert a new row below the last row in the table, click in the bottom-right cell of the table, then press the Tab key. Word inserts the new row. If you want to insert a new row above an existing row, click in the row, then open the Table menu and select the Insert Row command, as we did to insert the header row earlier.
When your list of Web addresses is complete you can save it. If you want to, you can add coloured borders and clip art to brighten it up, like the list in figure 4. Others can use your list by printing it, or by opening it in Word and clicking on the hyperlinks to display the associated Web pages.
VANESSA WALLER
E-mail: vwaller@websterpublishing.com
Web:htttp://www.websterpublishing.com
Webster produces training books, computer-based tutorials and multimedia CD-ROM titles.
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald