How to hit without cutting your fingers

Many, many years ago, when I first worked with words and images, my least favorite task in the art studio was cutting type from galley proofs on paper and gluing them together. Using a Swann-Morton scalpel, it involved carefully cutting the length of a new galley of printed type. It was important not to use a plastic ruler: the scalpel blade had a nasty habit of jumping out and cutting the tip of a finger if it hit the flexible edge. A metal one was much less likely to move when working with a new blade.

But even if my fingers survived the cutting process, the anxiety wasn’t over. Once I had carefully cut away the bromide, I had to very, very carefully feed the inert remains into a wax machine, or worse yet, use cowhide to apply the adhesive. By the time I’d breathed in the heady fumes and managed to cover the back of my word column, I was lucky if the type was still fit enough to stick on a design sheet. And then things got even more twisted.

So when production processes took a quantum leap into the world of new technology, it’s safe to say that my favorite commands were Control X and Control V: the Cut and Paste commands.

Oddly enough, the most commonly used command in Microsoft Office 2007 is the Paste command. And that’s why it’s been given its rightful place as the first command on the ribbon in Office 2007 Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Sitting proudly on the left hand side, just below the Office button, it’s an important position for an important tool.

Other related commands located on the Home tab are Cut and Copy. Cut is obviously another favorite of mine, now much safer and easier to use with just a few mouse clicks. The scissors icon still gives me a sense of comfort, much less scary and easier to use than a surgical blade. These features are most frequently used and therefore should be at your fingertips and luckily for me, they also save years of sliced ​​features.

But there’s another wonderful feature in this Office 2007 command set: Format Painter. This command is definitely unique to the desktop era and can’t really be compared to any original manual process. Format Painter is a useful tool when you need to copy an entire set of style instructions. For example, in PowerPoint 2007 you can select the formatting applied to a picture and use the information throughout your presentation. Or in Word 2007, when you need to copy font styles that you’ve customized, Format Painter saves time and avoids duplication of effort.

A final word of praise about the Clipboard command group: the Paste Special feature lets you specify formatting when you paste slides, images, objects, and text from other presentations, programs, or the Web into your Office documents. For example, images, graphics, and text that have their own formatting, such as font, color, and font size. When you copy text that is formatted differently into your presentation, PowerPoint 2007 automatically reformats that text to match the text in your presentation. However, you can use Paste Special to keep the original formatting.

I can honestly say that I never had a successful career as a glue artist, but I have spent a lot of time using Office 2007 without any obvious danger to my hands.