I was asked how to do a dotless i with an ogonek. Unicode doesn’t have a character for this, and the combining ogonek doesn’t line up reliably with a dotless i. But I got a pretty reasonable one in Word by doing the following.

Insert field…, and type eq o(a,b). Right click on the field and toggle field codes so you can see { eq o(a,b) }. Remove the spaces inside the braces (yielding {eq o(a,b)}), and then select the a, open the Character Viewer (in the international/input menu bar widget, turn it on in System Preferences on Mac OS X), and replace “a” with a dotless i, and replace “b” with a (non-combining) ogonek. Right-click, toggle field codes. You can now copy and paste it wherever it is needed.

This will undoubtedly come in handy regularly. For example, if you need to render Piglet in text.

I just came across quite a nice set of pages put up by Susanna Cumming at UCSB that goes over a bunch of useful things to know when using Microsoft Word for Linguistics. It covers styles, templates, automatic example numbering (the right way, too), special characters, and some other things. Worth a look. She doesn’t cover trees, though.

I got there from the pages of an academic writing course that Uli Sauerland taught. From there were linked a couple of other nifty things, including the Leipzig glossing rules, Travis Bradley’s advice on using Word for Linguistics (but don’t do automatic examples that way, do it the way Susanna Cumming, and I, elsewhere, have suggested), and Ryo Otoguro’s advice on writing a thesis in Word (which leads off by saying “don’t, use LaTeX” but it’s useful and has an interesting method for drawing trees. Plus, if you can’t use LaTeX for some reason, like if you’re submitting somewhere that doesn’t allow it, or you are collaborating with somebody, it’s good to have this information).

Speaking of drawing trees, I would not suggest using the method outlined in either Travis Bradley’s or Ryo Otoguro’s tips (both recommend the line drawing tools in Word). This works, but it is frustrating and slow, and often doesn’t look good. Spend $20 on the Arboreal font from Cascadilla Press. When you get the hang of it, it makes typesetting trees in Word quite fast. I have some settings predefined in an Arboreal example document that I use (basically, it’s just center-justified tabs spaced just right for 3-width branches, so I can rapidly tab into place and hit the 3-width key. Combined with a keyboard shortcut to switch into Arboreal and one to switch back to Times, a simple binary-branching tree can be produced very quickly.) You still have to draw your movement arrows with Word’s drawing tools (or live with the square ones that Arboreal provides), though.