13th November 2001

I'm a details kind of guy; I obsess when Web graphics are off by one pixel. This disorder manifests itself whenever someone sends me a file that hasn't been formatted properly. When you apply different font faces, colors, and sizes throughout your document, keep it consistent! Don't use Red 14-point Arial Bold here and Blue 72-point Comic Sans MS there. Ugh. It's an eyesore. Can't seem to convince your friends and co-workers to lay off the layout? If you see a spreadsheet that's too loud (visually), press CTRL+A to select all, then click Edit | Clear | Formats. This also helps take care of those rogue formatted cells. Ya know, the ones that were being used at one point and were subsequently abandoned? Yeah, those. You can do the same thing for Microsoft Word documents, although you'll have to take a slightly different route. The easiest way (I've found) is to save a copy of the file as "MS-DOS text with Layout" and then re-open it. From there, you can format the document to your liking without stumbling across any previously used styles.