How to Add Page Numbers to Your Microsoft Word for Mac Template
It’s usually a bad idea not to include page numbers on multi-page documents. Adding them manually to every document, however, creates an extra step that is better removed by making page numbers a default part of the template. However, if you are on a Mac and use Microsoft Word for Mac, it is hard to figure out how to make the template automatically include them.
I finally looked in to how to do this, and found a forum that contains a solution that works.
First, here’s a more detailed statement of the problem, which explains the very complication that I used to run into whenever I would try this before:
I am using Word 2008 for Mac. I always want page numbers, but I always need to select it from the Insert menu. Is there a way to make this the default so I don’t have to manually select it every time? I have tried this: See the Word help topic ” Template locations in Word” for more information, which says to edit the Normal template and add them there: they will then appear in every new document I create. But this doesn’t seem to help. When I open the Normal.dotm file, it appears as Document 1, so I can’t actually change Normal.dotm. I can make a new Page Numbers doc but I’ll have to select it to use it. How do I make a default Normal, or how can I get Page Numbers to open as the default?
Here’s the solution that was proposed:
Open Word, New document, select File Open. Navigate to where normal.dotm is located: /Users/you/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/normal.dotm
Open it and make the changes to it that you desire. Save normal.dotm, save all, and close Word. Open Word again and the changes you made should be reflected as part of the normal template. The old normal template will be renamed and saved in the same location as a backup.
Now I can add: that solution works.
On Multiplying Rules
Well said by Marcus Buckingham in First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently:
“Some managers are hamstrung by their fundamental mistrust of people. A mistrustful manager’s only recourse is to impose rules. For a mistrustful person, the managerial role is very stressful.
The rules rarely succeed in anything but creating a culture of compliance that slowly strangles the organization of flexibility, responsiveness, and perhaps more important, good will.”
That is a key point: multiplying rules strangles good will. And if you strangle good will, you eliminate the motivation for people to do very much beyond mere compliance. In other words, you will have ripped the heart out of the organization.
4 Key Beliefs Regarding Innovation
In his book FedEx Delivers: How the World’s Leading Shipping Company Keeps Innovating and Outperforming the Competition, Madan Birla states that his experiences “with one of the most innovative companies in the history of free enterprise—FedEx—and my success in helping other companies become truly innovative” has shown him four key things about innovation:
- Everyone has the capacity to be creative.
- Creativity is a function of the mind and must be understood in the context of a mental model.
- Developing creative people (minds) requires the right mental environment (model) and the right leadership practices.
- A critical mass of creative people will enable the development of an organization-wide culture of innovation.
Setting the Leadership Tone is Not Enough
Jim Collins and Jerry Porras are right when they state in Built to Last:
Mechanisms–build that ticking clock! The beauty of the 3M story is that McKnight, Carlton, and others translated the previous four points into tangible mechanisms working in alignment to stimulate evolutionary progress — a step Norton never took. Look back at the list of mechanisms at 3M. Notice how concrete they are. Notice how they send a consistent set of reinforcing signals. Notice how they have teeth.
If you’re a division manager, you better meet the 30 percent new product goal. If you want to become a technical hero at 3M, you’d better share your technology around the company. If you want to receive a Golden Foot Award and become an entrepreneurial hero, you’ve got to create a successful new venture with actual products, satisfied customers, and profitable sales. Good intentions alone simply won’t cut it. 3M doesn’t just throw a bunch of smart people in a pot and hope that something will happen. 3M lights a hot fire under the pot and stirs vigorously!
We find that managers often underestimate the importance of this fifth lesson and fail to translate their intentions into tangible mechanisms. They erroneously think that if they just set the right “leadership tone,” people will experiment and try new things. No! It takes more than that. It requires putting in place items that will continually stimulate and reinforce evolutionary behavior [embodied in the principle "try a lot of stuff and keep what works"].
Scott Berkun on Google’s 20% Time
For his book The Myths of Innovation, Scott Berkun researched lots of mechanisms similar to Google’s 20% time. He summarizes some observations regarding the most common misconceptions of the concept in a helpful post from a few years ago.
Beautiful…Systems?
Tom Peters is right in Re-Imagine! when he writes:
We avoid words like “beauty” — and the concept of beauty — between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. (Especially if we work in the likes of HR or IS or Logistics.) But as part of the urgent process of re-imagining organizations, we must embrace both the word and the concept — and make beauty the primary attribute not only of product design but also of process design.
In short, we must create an enterprise environment in which enterprise systems are no less than … Beautiful Systems.
Mastering Both Ends of the Spectrum
“An effective leader must be the master of two ends of the spectrum: ideas at the highest level of abstraction and actions at the most mundane level of detail.”
That’s from Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in In Search of Excellence. They elaborate in this way:
“The value-shaping leader is concerned, on the one hand, with soaring, lofty visions that will generate excitement and enthusiasm for tens or hundreds of thousands of people. That’s where the pathfinding role is critically important. On the other hand, it seems the only way to instill enthusiasm is through scores of daily events, with the value-shaping manager becoming an implementer par excellence. In this role, the leader is a bug for detail, and directly instills values through deeds rather than words: no opportunity is too small. So it is at once attention to ideas and attention to detail.
Keeping the Monkeys Off
Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? is a classic Harvard Business Review article on time management for managers. I can’t find it online for free, but here is a summary that is so good that you probably don’t even need to read the full article:
You’re racing down the hall. An employee stops you and says, “We’ve got a problem.” You assume you should get involved but can’t make an on-the-spot decision. You say, “Let me think about it.”
You’ve just allowed a “monkey” to leap from your subordinate’s back to yours. You’re now working for your subordinate. Take on enough monkeys, and you won’t have time to handle your real job: fulfilling your own boss’s mandates and helping peers generate business results.
How to avoid accumulating monkeys? Develop your subordinates’ initiative, say Oncken and Wass. For example, when an employee tries to hand you a problem, clarify whether he should: recommend and implement a solution, take action then brief you immediately, or act and report the outcome at a regular update.
When you encourage employees to handle their own monkeys, they acquire new skills—and you liberate time to do your own job.
Creativity and Innovation are Different
Tom Peters in In Search of Excellence, quoting Theodore Leviit:
The trouble with much of the advice business gets today about the need to be more vigorously creative is that its advocates often fail to distinguish between creativity and innovation.
Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things. . . . A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action….
If you talk to people who work for you, you’ll discover that there is no shortage of creativity or creative people in American business. The shortage is of innovators.
All too often, people believe that creativity automatically leads to innovation. It doesn’t. . . . The scarce people are the ones who have the know-how, energy, daring, and staying power to implement ideas. . . .
John Mark Reynolds on the Health Care Bill
I don’t agree with the way he states everything in the article, but John Mark Reynolds gives some good thoughts on the health care bill. Here is one of his most significant points:
The more serious problem is what it might begin to do to us as human beings.
Giving more power to the central government harms human liberty. A physically healthy man who is not free and able to flourish as a man is not in an enviable state. I would not trade my liberty for comfort or care. As hard as it is to say, I would not trade my children’s liberty for government health care.
When the government makes me buy health insurance, it might be forcing me to do something I should do, but it is taking away the moral virtue of doing it. The profligate man will be protected from his profligacy, but this is not good if the goal is to create men who are good and not just conformists.
Some laws are necessary, but surely few think we live in a society with too few regulations?
And these points are excellent as well:
Giving more power to the central government harms human life. Pro-life groups, including those supportive of government health care, are unified: this new law will have the government pay to kill innocent human life. Lives saved by government spending on health care will be balanced by lives lost by government spending on abortion.
Giving more power to the central government harms human happiness. Men use their private property to create beauty. This bill will increase taxes and decrease the ability of thousands of fellow citizens to decide what to do with their own money. Happiness is best achieved by learning to flourish: body and soul. Fewer resources will give individuals less ability to decide what they need.
Government health care or too much government regulation is an assault on our diversity. It threatens to make all-important moral decisions at a central place. Instead of many solutions from a multitude of religions and communities, we will be left with one solution. Our basic unity will be strained if too much conformity is demanded on the individuals that make up our union.
Failure to support this new regime is not then a failure to support increased health care. I support laws that would make it easier to give to charity and to save for health care tax-free. I support regulation of the big insurance companies that can outgrow state regulation. I support some central government help, Reagan’s social safety net, for those who fall through the cracks of the family, community, and church structures.
I do not support this liberty and life destroying law.
Tim Ferris on Multitasking
(HT: Brian Barela)
IT Pros: Macs Cost Less to Manage Than PCs
A post at TUAW summarizes the results of a study that does a good job of showing the problem with organizations not getting Macs because they are “too expensive.” Here are two paragraphs from the post:
According to the survey, Macs were cheaper to troubleshoot and required fewer help desk calls; system configuration, user training, and servers/networks/printing were all cheaper for a Mac environment than a PC environment. Software licensing fees turned out to be nearly identical for both platforms.
The survey doesn’t factor in the costs of the Macs themselves; Macs do present a large up-front investment, especially compared to the budget-priced Dells you usually see populating most office cubicles. However, half of the survey respondents noted they switched to a Mac platform because of a lower total cost of ownership.
Government Health Care and Project Management
In a recent column on health care, Thomas Sowell writes:
It is not uncommon for patients in those countries to have to wait for months before getting operations that Americans get within weeks, or even days, after being diagnosed with a condition that requires surgery. You can always “bring down the cost of medical care” by having a lower level of quality or availability.
That last sentence is very illuminating. You will notice the same pattern that I blogged on in regard to project management a few weeks ago. In that post, I noted that there are three constraints on anything — cost, quality, and time — and you can have two but not all three. If you need something cheap, then you will either have lower quality or a longer schedule. If you want something fast, you will either have lower quality or higher cost. And so forth.
This reality exists in health care as well as project management; it exists anywhere that you have to utilize resources. So, in regard to health care, Sowell notes that many schemes to “bring down the cost of medical care” do so by decreasing quality or increasing the time it takes to get scheduled for important surgery and care. Yet, these schemes often talk as if there is no trade off.
We ought not talk about these things as though we are operating in an unconstrained world, as though having the government step in will magically result in cheaper health care, with the same standard of quality and the same speediness of implementation.
Now, I do think it is possible for health care to get cheaper while preserving excellent quality and timeliness. We have seen this happen, for example, with computers (and technology in general) — costs have gone down, while quality and performance has gone up, and you don’t have to wait in a breadline to get one.
But how did that happen? Through innovation. The cost of health care can come down — while preserving quality and timeliness — through innovation. The question then becomes: what environment is most conducive to motivating the innovation necessary to do this?
It doesn’t come from the government. Notice, again, the tech industry — it is not governmental controls that led to the creative and risk-taking entrepreneurship behind the creation of Apple, Google, and the thousands of other companies (even Microsoft) that have transformed our lives through technological improvements. Rather, it was the opposite — letting them be free to create, pursue, fail, regroup, and make things happen.
I don’t know why it is so hard to learn this lesson. We see it every day, and now the Internet itself is one of the best examples of it — it is through decentralization that society advances, not centralization of government power over an industry.
The greatest irony is that many of the people who get this when it comes to the tech industry, the Internet, and entrepreneurship fail to see the connection when it comes to every other area — such as taxation and, the main issue here, health care.
William Carey — Economist?
From The Legacy of William Carey: A Model for the Transformation of a Culture:
William Carey … introduced the idea of savings banks to India, to fight the all-pervasive social evil of usury. Carey believed that God, being righteous, hated usury, and that lending at interest rates of 36 to 72 percent made investment, industry, commerce, and economic development impossible.
Using Email Intervals to Save Your Sanity
Mike Anderson has a good post from a while back on how email intervals can save you from insanity. He gives good advice with some unique twists. Also, his statement of the problem is great:
Problem: Email is unrelenting, and when you tend to your inbox—people just reply back to you more quickly. Email will take over your life if you let it. Here’s how I fought back.
What You May Not Have Known About William Carey
William Carey arrived in India in 1793 as a missionary. But what you might not know is the true scope of his work, all done for the sake of the gospel and glory of God. The back cover of The Legacy of William Carey: A Model for the Transformation of a Culture brings this out:
He was an industrialist. An economist. A medical humanitarian. A media pioneer. An educator. A moral reformer. A botanist. And a Christian missionary.
And he did more for the transformation of the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than any other individual before or since.
It goes on:
Many know of William Carey. Some know about the specifics of his work and ministry. But few understand the profound contemporary significance of his life. Few realize how much we owe the increasing globalization of Christianity to the silent revolution he initiated. Fewer still are aware of his legacy of sensitivity to the variety of issues confronting true gospel witness in any culture.
[Carey's example] is a charge to all Christians to respond in kind within our own cultures, and to use Carey’s example as our model for taking the light of the gospel into every corner of society. If we follow in his footsteps, not only will lives be bettered this side of heaven, but hearts will be changed for eternity — and entire cultures transformed for Christ.
Get in the Zone Through Time Blocking
Another Fast Company column by Gina Trapani. Here are the first two paragraphs:
In an interruption-driven culture, it’s too easy to let everyone else decide where your attention goes and how to spend your next 10 minutes. If you jump every time your phone rings, a new email arrives, your Blackberry buzzes, or someone stops by your desk, you’re undermining your most important work and costing your company money. A recent study shows that unnecessary interruptions costs the U.S. economy $650 billion dollars in lost productivity per year.
Being available to your boss and co-workers is part of your job. But the most creative and important work you do requires total focus and attention for an extended period of time. Your brain needs at least 15 minutes of uninterrupted time to dive in, concentrate on one thing, and get into the zone where you’re truly focused and doing your best work. Time blocking is a technique that sets the stage for that to happen.
Stop Multitasking and Start Doing One Thing Well
Gina Trapani, founding editor of Lifehacker, has a recent column in Fast Company on multitasking.
ESV on iPhone Now Available
From the Crossway blog:
For the first time, read the ESV Bible on your iPhone or iPod Touch, with or without an internet connection — for free. Record your own notes, highlight verses, save favorites, and share with friends. Please take a look at the ESV App and tell us what you think.
How Magazines Will be Transformed
Wired has a very good video showing how their magazine will operate on the iPad. This finally seems to provide an electronic experience that is overall better and easier than reading the printed version:
Josh Sowin rightly observes: “This is really exciting from a design & reading standpoint. It will be the experience of reading a magazine, but with the interactivity of the web. It’s going to be a really fun decade.”
(HT: Josh Sowin)
5 Reasons Companies Should Not Block Access to Social Networks
A good, brief article in Advertising Age that argues that “collaboration can increase productivity and resistance is futile.” The five points are:
- Resistance is futile
- Don’t assume people won’t find other ways to waste time
- Social networks can actually make workers more productive
- You’ll miss great ideas
- Employees are much more trustworthy than companies think
Point five is absolutely critical — employees can be trusted. And trusting employees leads to higher performance. She adds: “If you can’t trust your employees, you have one of two problems: You are hiring the wrong people or you are not properly training the people you hire.”
Also, I think that point five overcomes point two — if you hire good people, they won’t waste time. Or, perhaps better, they will only waste time when doing so will lead to greater productivity overall.
Advice for Every Airline, Except Southwest and Perhaps One or Two Others
John Calvin on the Common Good
“It is an error to think that those who flee worldly affairs and engage in contemplation are leading an angelic life… We know that men were created to busy themselves with labor and that no sacrifice is more pleasing to God than when each one attends to his calling and studies well to live for the common good.” John Calvin
Getting Things Done Quick Review and Summary
Drew Buell has posted a good, brief review of Getting Things Done, which summarizes the system into four very good points.
The More You Multitask, the Worse You Get at It
From an article I’ve been reading on leadership and solitude:
That’s the first half of the lecture: the idea that true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions. But how do you learn to do that? How do you learn to think? Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.
One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.
Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
About Matt Perman
Follower of Christ. Husband of one, father of three. Former director of strategy at Desiring God. This blog exists to help equip Christians in good works, because that's what productivity is really about.
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