Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Word for Windows Trick: Now I Find It...

I've been using Word to lay out a poster for the Dayton .NET Developers Group. Yes, there are probably a lot better ways to do this, but Word is the tool I've got... I figured out everything for scaling a 4' x 5' poster, got the drawing canvas laid out, put all my text and graphics on it, moved and resized everything so I had a spot in the middle for an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper for the current day's topic. Then I figured out I was completely nuts for thinking I could schlepp around a 4'x5' foam core-mounted poster in my Sebring, already stuffed with car seats and leftover toys. So I do the math to resize the thing to 2.5' x 3.5', smoosh all the text boxes and graphics to one side so they don't get lost when I resize the paper, resize the paper, lay everything back out (fixing text box font and graphic sizes), get the space in the middle right again, and lean back for a sanity check. Yep, everything looks right. Although... I see the drawing canvas is still sized for the old paper size. Right-click on the canvas border, enter the new horizontal and vertical sizes, click OK and Presto! the canvas resizes to the new paper size -- and everything on the canvas shrinks in perfect proportion. I flip back to my original document, sized for 4'x5', and try the same thing with its canvas. Yep, resizing the canvas automatically scales things down, text and graphics objects included. Holy smokes, what a great trick. It's probably documented somewhere, and I'm sure everyone who's more smarter than me figured this out long ago. Duh.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

'more smarter'? Have you been talking with Drew? Thats his favorite line.

See you next week!

Jim Holmes said...

>>Have you been talking with Drew?<<

Heh. Yep, I read about that on his log, although I'm a longtime sufferer of my own mangled grammar. (Ownership of The Chicago Manual of Style notwithstanding...)

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