The majority of us admit we only use a fraction of the functionality of MS Excel. Have you considered how much of the functionality of MS Word you use?
If you are writing a lot, and MS Word is your weapon of choice, it is worth upskilling. There are various sources of help – the online help, microsoft support and discussion forums, YouTube videos, as well as more professional training provided on platforms such as LinkedIn Learning. You may also have access to a super user in your network – you know, the person that always seems to know how to do things.
If you spend all day every day with Word, it is worth getting to know each other better. Like any relationship, it is something worth investing in. The following list are areas I think that are worth exploring, organised by tab (plus handy tips):
- Home
- Different forms of paste (keep text only, match formatting)
- Different fonts (Arial Narrow for table content)
- Styles (headings, paragraphs, captions, etc.)
- Paragraph styles (line spacing, indents, keep with next, space after)
- Insert (tables, images, charts, header/footers)
- Layout
- Page breaks and section breaks (between contents page and chapters)
- Margins (to meet those submission requirements)
- References
- Tables of contents/figures/tables
- Footnotes/Endnotes
- Reference software plug-ins (Endnote, Mendeley etc that have plugins)
- Insert captions (tables and figures), and cross references
- Review
- Track changes
- Accessibility and read aloud
- Document compare (and combine)
- View
- Ruler (your friend with decimal alignment – see how to)
- Navigation pane (handy to navigate large docs, and review and edit using the find and replace function)
- Table design* (border function allows you to hide lines and make tables look professional)
- [Table] layout* (insert new row, column; split/merge; distributing rows/columns evenly; content alignment/direction; cell margins; repeat header rows; convert table to text)
- Picture* Format (crop)
- Acrobat – allows you to create a PDF
* These menus only appear when you insert a table or image.
Please comment or email me with anything I’ve missed. We are all learning together.
Truro Consulting 