Tabs and Sorting

[gatz]

I read the responses to D7666's question dated 8-9-2006 re: "Left and right
justified text on one line."
Thanks to Suzanne Branhill and Dave Rado, I've gotten a good part of my doc
done.

Now, I have 2-column pages set up for a home crossword dictionary using the
tab leader as suggested so that on the left is the Clue, and justifed to the
right of the column is the ANSWER, with a dotted line tab leader between.
Looks nice.

I've got a few more questions.

1) How can you make the Sorting function ignore punctuation ?
For instance, I'd like to make some (not all) entries to the crossword
dictionary that contain quotation marks. If these are placed before the
"Clue" and an Ascending Sort is done, the entries with the quotation marks
are placed at the beginning of the list. I want them to be placed in their
alphabetical order as if the quotation marks weren't there. This also
happens if an entry is made with leading dashes, such as
--- Bono. Here, the missing part of the Clue is the required ANSWER i.e., PRO

2) How can a second line be kept with a proceeding line in the Sort
function. (ignoring what appears on the subsequent line regardless of content)
For instance, a Clue would be the beginning of the entry, and the answer
would be right justified as in 1) above. However, there are occasions when
an explanation might be given to explain word origin or futher clarify the
meaning. This explanation may require the use of an additional line. Is
there a way to keep the explanation line with the Clue line during a Sort ?

3) The FAQ that was suggested by Suazanne was exactly what I was looking for
as regards to the TABS. How can these HTM pages be made "printer friendly" ?

Thanks in advance, Gatz

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The old word.mvps.org pages should be pretty printer-friendly as is. It's
the newfangled ones that don't behave so well. Well, I just looked at that
one in Print Preview and see they've screwed up even those. It used to be
that just the frame that contains the article would print. You can still
achieve that (at least in IE 6.0 and above). In Print Preview, change the
view from "As laid out on screen" to "All frames individually" and click the
Next Page button till you get to the content, of which there are three
pages. If you then click Print... and choose Pages 3-5, you'll get just
that.

 

[Jay Freedman]

Suzanne answered your question 3. I'll try for 1 and 2...

1) Word doesn't have any way to ignore punctuation, short of replacing the
entire sorting mechanism with a fairly complex macro. I would give up and
drag/drop the affected entries to the correct positions after using the
built-in sort, or maybe remove the punctuation, sort the list, and restore
the punctuation.

2) For pieces of text that should be separate lines but sort as one item,
separate them with a manual line break (Shift+Enter) instead of a paragraph
mark (Enter).

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I thought about that, too, but it requires post-processing the index, which
it is usually desirable (but often impossible) to avoid.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Ah, right. I'm not sure this person has an auto-generated index, though.