Top Tips to become a Microsoft Word "Guru" with Pitman Training Waterford

Microsoft Word Tips

1.    What’s another word for... ?

Word  provides  a  full  thesaurus,  so  if  you’re  stuck  for  a  synonym, antonym or other related word just click into the word on screen and press Shift+F7. You’ll see the research tab appear on the right with the thesaurus open.

2. Nothing compares to you

Click the Review tab in the ribbon, click the Compare tool and then choose Compare. Word shows the Compare Documents dialogue box, where you can select the original document and the new edited document and the sort of mark-up you require. When you have finished click on OK and Word makes the changes and shows the two documents side by side.

3. Adding special symbols

If your keyboard hasn’t got a Euro symbol, or you want to type a temperature in degrees, then you’re going to need the special symbols dialogue box. Click Insert in the ribbon then choose Symbol. Select the symbol you want from the list displayed. There are more options available by clicking ‘More Symbols’. Just click the symbol you need and close the dialogue box and the symbol will appear in your text.

4. Run that by me again?

If you’re looking for a way to apply an action more than once, you’ll need the F4 key.

Let’s say you want to apply a particular style to a list of subheadings - select the text, apply the style then select the next subheading and hit F4. Word will apply the same style to the current selection.

Here’s another example. Select an image, apply some effects to it. Choose another image and hit F4. Boom! The effect is applied to your image!

5. Selecting and moving around effortlessly

Keyboard shortcuts are brilliant timesavers, here’s an example that makes selecting text much quicker.

      i.           - Press Shift, Control and the UP (or down) cursor key to select an entire line at a time.

     ii.          - Press Shift, Control and Left or Right to select individual words, one at a time.

    iii.         - Press Control whilst clicking a word to select the entire sentence at once.

   iv.          - Holding ALT whilst moving the mouse allows you to select text in blocks and ignores word breaks.

6. Copying text formatting

Copy one block of text’s formatting to another by selecting the formatted text you want to use then clicking ‘Format Painter’ on the Home tab in the ribbon - then selecting the text that you want to restyle to apply the new formatting.

7. Printing backwards

By default, you print off documents first page first, which can cause problems when collating. Click the File tab, then choose Options. Select Advanced and then, under Print, check the box marked Print Pages In Reverse Order.