Category: 13 Quick Tips

Here we look at THE most important element of Microsoft Word – styles. Forget what anyone else has taught or told you about Word, if you don’t know about, learn, and master styles, you will always struggle with Word. They’re that important and tie into every single aspect of Word. You must learn them. Everything […]

I could rock a lot of boats in this video as this’ll probably go against the grain of everything you know (or think you know) with using Word. The direct formatting options are there, in your face, and they’re there to be used, right? Yes, and no. But NOT in the way that you think. […]

Don’t use it. The Normal style, that is. This one: This may (or may not) shake your very Word foundations and turn how you use Word upside down, but you don’t want to use the NORMAL style directly in your documents[1]. I know it’s selected by default when you create a new document, but you […]

Pictures are the bane of many a Microsoft Word author and document… Have you ever moved an image on a page only to find out that it ‘messed’ up your entire document? Many have. But, as always, there’s a reason (styles: it’s always styles). There are several ways you can insert pictures into Word, but […]

Whatever application or program you use, you use it for a reason (or reasons). One reason which is usually high up on the list is efficiency. Working with Word is no different. We’ve already mentioned multiple times about using styles correctly (and I can’t emphasise enough how important this is), about shortcut keys, and other […]

“Hey Russ, can you lock the template down so our authors can’t break it?” If only I had a dollar for every time I‘ve been asked that… My reply is, “I can, but it’d be much more fruitful to teach them how to use Word.” Imagine the rolls were reversed… and you were using a […]

The key to efficiency with using Word is getting away from the mouse. I don’t mean running screaming from the room when a little furry rodent appears in the corner of the room, rather using the keyboard as often as you can in place of your computer’s pointing device. This is applicable to all sorts […]

As unsightly and in-the-way as they are, you need to have your Show/Hide Characters displayed when editing your work. It’s essential that you can see what’s going on in your document when you’re editing, deleting, and doing all the myriad of things that we do with our documents. If you don’t show hidden characters and […]

One of very powerful feature that Word offers is the ability to quickly record and create macros. Macros DO get a bad reputation because of the security implication of downloading and opening documents that have errant macros in there that can-do untold damage. However, Microsoft instigated security measures long ago to prevent that from happening. […]