Tips and Tricks for Microsoft Word


Case Changes Control End/Home Copy Date/Time
Find Fonts Format Painter Graphic Restoration
Keyboard Commands Line Spacing Lines Move
Print Preview Remove Formatting Reproduce Text/Graphics Select
Shrink to Fit Sort Sticky Tools Synonyms
Tables Transparent Objects Zoom Links



Case Changes: Toggle through

You can quickly change the case of text from Title to UPPER CASE to lower case:

Control end and Control home

To move quickly to the beginning or end of a document, do the following:
This also works on web pages. Try it!

Copy Multiple Items on the Word clipboard

Easily Cut and Paste from Multiple Documents in Office 2000. Collect and Paste allows you to store up to 12 pieces of information from different documents on the clipboard, and then insert them-one at a time or all at once-into your Word document.

Date and Time in Word: Insert

You can insert the current date or time in a word document using keyboard shortcuts. Here's how:

Find and Change

To change one word, part of a word or any text:

Find Your Place in Word Documents

If you are working on a long document, it's easy to lose your place. With Microsoft Word documents, you can pick up where you left off in your last editing session because Word keeps track of the last three locations where you typed or edited text.

Just press SHIFT+F5 immediately after opening the document, and the cursor will appear at the exact point where you last made a change.
To reach the previous two editing locations, press SHIFT+F5 until you reach the location you want.
Or on the right hand scroll bar hit the round button and select the pencil.

Fonts:Grow font and shrink font from keyboard

Fonts: Format

Format font in Word document or table before you start typing:

Format Painter

The Format Painter icon can be used to copy character or paragraph formatting from one portion of text to another.

Graphic Restoration

To restore an imported graphic to its original size...
Hold down Ctrl and double-click on the graphic.

Horizontal Lines in Word: Add attractive lines

It's easy to add a variety of horizontal divider lines to Word documents.

To create a solid, black line for example, type three HYPHENS (-) at the beginning of a new paragraph and then press ENTER.
Typing three UNDERSCORES (_) will make a thicker line, and so on.
Experiment with ===; ###; ~~~

Note: If you're having trouble making this tip work, try this:

Select AutoCorrect from the Tools menu. Click the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Then select the Borders check box under the Apply as you type heading.
If you find that you cannot delete one of these lines, select the line and the text around it. Hit ctrl + Q and the line will disappear.

Line Spacing in Word: Increase or Decrease from keyboard

To quickly change the line spacing of a paragraph in Microsoft Word:

Move Images in Word to the Exact Position You Want

When you position an image in a Word document, it automatically aligns (or snaps) to an invisible grid, which helps keep everything lined up. If you ever need exact control over the placement of your image, You can temporarily override the grid by pressing the ALT key as you drag the object into place.
You'll notice that the image moves smoothly and not in increments along the grid. This works particularly well with lining up lines, arrows and shapes.

Moving text by dragging

Moving text without dragging

Print Preview: Change text in Print preview

Whoops! Are you in Print Preview and seen something you need to change?
Don't worry about going back to your normal view, just click on the Magnifying Glass button, and the pointer will change to a cursor. Now you can edit your document as normal.

Removing Formatting for a Portion of Text

To quickly remove character formatting, such as bold, italic, or underline, and reset text back to the normal style:

Reproduce Text or Graphics in Word (instead of copy and paste)

A copy of the original item is made right where you want it. This is helpful when you're creating a document that will include a lot of repeated text or images.

Select easily in long (or short) documents

Select Columns of Text in Word

To select a vertical block of text in Word, such as a column of numbers or one column in a worksheet: Then you can delete it or copy it into another file. This works well if you have a worksheet set up in columns that are not in a table.

Select by Clicking

Select with the Cursor Keys

If you have trouble dragging the cursor to select, this will be your favorite. Each time you depress the cursor key the next letter will be selected!

Shrinking a Document to Fit

If you've created a document and one or two lines spill over onto a new page; you can use the "Shrink to Fit" feature to fit everything on the page.

Select Print Preview, then click on the Shrink to Fit button.

Sort a bulleted list

Word can do the tedious work of alphabetizing for you. For example, suppose you have the following list: and you want it to appear in alphabetical order, like this: Here's how to do it:

Sticky drawing tools

Have you ever wanted to insert the same drawing object several times in a row in your document, worksheet, or presentation? It's easy. Instead of clicking the drawing object button every time you want to insert the object, you can take advantage of the drawing object button's "sticky" feature. You can also turn any of the drawing objects available from the AutoShapes button on the Drawing toolbar into "sticky" drawing object buttons.

Synonym Shortcut

Find that word you're looking for fast. You can find a common synonym for a word without using the Thesaurus command. Word will sometimes supply antonyms for the selected word, for those times when you only know what you don't mean to say.

You can access the full thesaurus both in and out of a table by going to:

Tables: Use the table tool bar to split cells, erase even draw a diagonal line in a table.

Insert your table then:

This can really help you because the other parts of the table are not affected.

Tables: Split

Sometimes you need to break a table in two. Or you might need to add a title to a table that starts at the top of the file, without even a space or carriage return before it. The solution in both cases is:

Table: sort list

Tables start point

When starting a new document with a table, press Enter several times first in order to create some empty space above your table or graphic. This will save frustration and time later if you decide to add anything to the top of the document. If you do not need the space, it can be deleted upon completion of the document.

Transparent objects

If you would like to make any of the auto shapes or drawing objects transparent (this is great for making a Venn diagram), do the following:

Zoom in and Out

Using Ctrl + the mouse wheel you can zoom in and out on a document. This also works on web pages! Try it now on this web page.

SHORT CUT COMMANDS USING THE KEYBOARD

Cursor Movement

Formatting

Tables

You can find a complete list of shortcuts by following this link:
Keyboard Shortcuts
This link and many others can also be found on my
Tips and Tricks Web Page

HOME