Remembering Spike
There were loads of TV programme on over Christmas in the UK about the late Spike Milligan, one of the wittiest people to have ever walked this earth. Gawd bless 'im!
But these programme somehow reminded me (isn't it weird how our brains work?!) of another spike that computer users shouldn't forget. And that's the CTRL+F3 spike in Microsoft Word.
"What's that then," I hear you cry. Well, it's a bit like the spike that they give to park keepers to help them pick up leaves and litter. Every time they spot an errant leaf they stab it with their spike until eventually they have a spike full of leaves, like bits of food on a fully-loaded shish kebab skewer.
"So why do I need to pick up leaves or think about kebabs," I hear you groan. Well,... bear with me, when you're working in Microsoft Word, say typing a dissertation or composing an email, you can use your spike to pick up bits of text then deposit them somewhere else in the exact order you picked them up. Here's how:
- Highlight a bit of text that you wish to spike (i.e cut and place on your spike)
- Press CTRL+F3
- Repeat steps 1 and 2 until you have picked up all the bits of text you need
- Place your cursor where you'd like to drop your text and press SHIFT+CTRL+F3
- Your spike is emptied depositing the collected text exactly where you want it!
The spike is actually a subset of Word's autotext feature so each time you hit CTRL+F3 it just appends a bit of text to the spike autotext entry. To see what's on your spike right now, in Word go to Insert, Autotext, Autotext..., then select spike in the list. If spike is not listed, you need to do some spiking first!
And, as any decent park keeper knows, your spike fills up continuously until you empty it. So remember to empty your spike of any unwanted detritus before starting a big spiking operation either by deleting the entry in the Autotext dialog box or by SHIFT+CTRL+F3'ing the contents in a temporary file.