TO be or not TO be?

[Diannecp]

Everyone has their word they tend to overuse - mine is "to." Ugh! Sometimes it reminds me of one of those carnival games where you bat at the little critter that keeps popping up! I think it might come from doing a lot of business writing or something.

I think I'm pretty good at eliminating unnecessary "that's" - anyone have a suggestion for "to"? I'm primarily speaking of "to" as an infinitive - to be, to do, etc. Not so much in prepositional phrases.

[AngelAzariah]

_____I was going to write a how to book on microsoft word to help with things like this... but no one showed any interest. If you use word do the following.

-Hold down ctrl and hit F.
-Type in the word to.
-There should be a more options tab, or something (I don't have word open right now).
-Click find whole word only.

_____Now if you want to get really flashy.

-Click the middle tab part for replasing text.
-Click the speacial stuff at the bottom to tell it to highlight the text.
-Be sure to pick the highlight color and to put the highlight option with the text that will replace the other.

_____Anyway, with those tricks, you will highlight the word you want throughout your work. I have a mess of word that I keep an eye on.

[whitehawke]

Thanks Angel, think I might try those. Sounds like a worthwhile trick to know. What others do you have?
Rulan

[AngelAzariah]

whitehawke,
_____If you know how to with word, run everything like a webpage. I use frames. If you seperate each chapter onto a diffrent htm page, you will save yourself some display and editing problems with word. That's if your work with a 100,000 or more project like me. I have a dicinary laid out alfabeticaly, each chapter, a notes page, scratch sheet page, and several other things.
_____The best advice I can give, is luarn how to use the tools you have at your fingertips. I recently luarned how to record and play micros in word. I don't have to use ctrl+f that much anymore. I just click my highlight micro, and it highlights about 30 diffrent words that I keep an eye one, fixis miner punctuwation problems such a ,' to ," or - to --, :D I can't even remmember how to make the long - here.
_____First luarn everything you can about ctrl+f. ;) Oh and ^t means tabe in the search and ^p means page brake. There is a shortcut in the ctrl+f window, but I've just memorized them now. :cool: