By Adriana Linares
Hi everyone, welcome to another Tech Tip in a 10th. I’m Adriana Linares. I’m the San Diego County Bar Association’s Technology and Practice Management Advisor. As a reminder, if you have any questions about technology, practice management, your website, launching your law firm, running your successful law firm – from the technology and practice management side – if you have any questions like that and would like some help from me, appointments are free for members! You can always go to scba.org/techappointment to do that.
Today’s Tech Tip in a 10th is going to be for Microsoft Word. And we’re going to talk about how to download and work with a pleading template that Microsoft has sort of tucked and hidden away in its templates gallery. To get to it, you’re going to open Microsoft Word. Whether you’re on a PC or a Mac, this will be the same. You’re going to click on file, you’re going to go to new when you’re in file new, you’re going to see a blank document, of course, but that’s not what we’re after. We’re going to come down here and look at the templates. We visited templates in Excel in our last tip.
For today I’m going to type in the word pleading here and click or hit enter on your keyboard. You’re going to see there’s only one option that it gives us – it says legal pleading paper. Once we get to it, click on it, click create. If you’ve never downloaded it before, it might say download, but go ahead and do that and don’t be afraid. This is a good download of course – it’s from Microsoft, so now that it’s going to open up the pleading template. The very first tip I have to give you is: do not fuss with, do not mess with it. Leave the numbers alone and I’m going to explain why in just a second. It’s just the- the thing is, this template is set up and it’s ready to go. Don’t change the font size. If you change the font size, you’re going to fuss with the numbers, so inasmuch as you can just leave this template alone and get to working on and drafting your actual document, you will struggle less and be in pretty good shape.
Couple of side tips after having said that though, if you insist upon changing the font. Maybe you want Arial font. Please don’t do this….Control + A, go to the fonts and change it to Arial. Do not do that – it won’t affect footnotes and other important elements of the document. The proper way to change a font and its default font so that all the components of a Microsoft Word document work correctly. Is to right click on the style called Normal, go to Modify and change it in here. So, I would choose Arial from here and then click OK. Now you’ll see that most of the elements of the document have switched to Arial, including the numbering. A couple of elements didn’t change in here, and the caption I would have to change those manually, but for the most part, the important part is that the guts of the document now think it’s Arial. I’m going to switch it back to times new Roman because it’s probably what you want anyway. But again, to change the default font for a Word document, it’s.. right click on the style called Normal, Modify… I’m going to switch this back to Times.
OK, so now let’s take a few minutes just to study what’s going on with this document. First of all, they’ve given us the numbering. If you insist on fussing with the numbering, which will create more problems for you than not, the way to do that is to double click in the margins, way outside the body of the document – that’s going to take you to the header and footer area of the document, and this is actually where the numbers are and you can see the numbers are nothing more than a text box that have numbers in it. They don’t repeat automatically. It’s literally just a text box with numbers in. Which is why I say – if you fuss with it, you’re going to sort of disassemble the template that is actually perfectly designed and created. You’ll see that the one lines up the half lines up the two lines up the half lines up the three and so on. So really if you can stand it, just work with it. Don’t touch it. Now you know if you do want to sort of edge the numbers a little bit, you double click in the header/footer area to go into the header /footer area, you would click on the numbering and I will tell you if you need to just move it, just inch it over up and down a little bit. And again I don’t suggest doing this, but if you do rather than using your mouse, you’re going to click directly on the little text box itself and then you can use your arrow keys to sort of nudge – milliliters at a time, rather than trying to do it with your mouse. So I’m going to undo all that, put it back to where it came in, which is as I mentioned earlier, just perfectly aligned.
So now that I’m in here, you might want to turn on your paragraph markers to see how the document is laid out. There’s no space between the address here. The court name has space after it. You’ll see this gray area -it has forced space after it so you can adjust that if you need to. The plaintiffs name, the defendants name -all of this is sort of ready to go. You would start typing and working on the body of the document. Here, all of the paragraphs already have space after them. So you might just want to download it, take a look at it and get to work on it. I hope this was a helpful tip, and don’t forget if you need any more help with anything, you can always meet with me by making an appointment at scba.org/techappointment.