How to Master Microsoft Office Word

Posted on March 28, 2016 by resourcefulman

Microsoft Word is by far the largest and most popular word processing program, but it does much more than just edit text and TPS reports. If you’ve told yourself that you’re finally going to learn the ins and outs of Word, now is the time to learn how to edit styles, add a table of contents, and more.

Get up and running fast with Word

Of all Microsoft Office programs, Microsoft Word is probably the simplest in terms of user interface. If you’ve ever used a text editor in your life, you’ll recognize the menu for opening and creating files in the upper left corner. The larger menu at the top of the document is what Microsoft calls the Ribbon. The ribbon has all the formatting tools you need, as well as a few contextual commands that change depending on which tab you’re on.

For this series, we’ll assume you’re familiar with the basics, but if you’d like to brush up on a refresher, Microsoft’s Quick Start Guide to Word will help you get started with the basics.

How to perform the most common important tasks in Microsoft Word

Everyone’s needs are a little different, of course, but given that most people use Office in the office, we bet you will need to do things like editing styles, comparing two documents, preparing a table of contents, and more. Let’s go ahead and look at some of these common tasks.

How to apply and edit styles

A style in Word is a predefined formatting for your document. This is what the document looks like , so it includes the font, font size, paragraph style, and so on. Creating or modifying a style lets you change the look of your document right away, so you don’t have to go through and highlight individual sections and make specific changes. You can do things like set a universal heading style or change how the default bulleted list looks like.

For example, if you’re working on a book, you might get a list of style guidelines from the publisher. Or, if you’re working on weekly memos, style is an easy way to create a format guide so that everything you do looks the same every time. Plus, you get the ability to change styles at any time, so if one department likes their notes one way and your boss prefers a different style, you don’t have to change a bunch of formatting every time you open a new document.

To apply a style, make sure you’re on the Home tab, select the block of text in the document that you want to change, and then click the Style menu on the ribbon. For example, if you want to create a heading in the middle of a block of text, you must select the desired text as the heading, then click Styles> Heading 1. It’s very simple.

It’s pretty easy to create your own style too. This is useful when you are writing something consistently, such as a newsletter or book, and you want a specific set of rules to be easily applied to the entire document. For example, you can change the font size for the default title parameter, or change the way the list is created. Here’s how to do it:

On the Home tab, click the Styles Panel.
Click New Style or select the style you want to edit.
You will see a pop-up window for editing a number of parameters, including type, stem, and formatting. Click on the parameters you want to change.

If you don’t understand what each term means, don’t worry, it’s pretty simple. Paragraph styles determine the appearance of text at the paragraph level. When you apply this style, it will change the entire paragraph. Character styles define character-level appearance, so you can highlight one word. Table styles change the appearance of tables, such as the header row or how gridlines work. Finally, list styles change the appearance of the list, such as bulleted lists or numeric outline.

How to add a table of contents to the beginning of a document

If you’re working with a large document, the table of contents adds quick navigation. Fortunately, creating a table of contents in Word is very easy, and it will update automatically as more items are added to your document.

Word’s automatic table of contents generator takes each heading you add to your document and then generates a table of contents from it. If you plan on creating a table of contents, make sure you add a title to each section heading.

Click the empty paragraph where you want to insert the table of contents.
Click the Links tab.
Click “Table of Contents” and select the appearance you want to use.

That’s all. Word automatically updates this table of contents every time you add or change a heading.

How to compare and merge two documents

If you have two versions of a document, whether it’s because someone edited their copy, a cloud backup failed, or if you’re just trying to hash what exactly changed between two versions of the same, you you will need to use the compare and combine functions.

If you just want to see what changes exist between two documents, you can compare them. Here’s how to compare two documents:

Open one of the two documents you want to compare.
Click Tools> Change Tracking> Compare Documents.
Select the original document and revised document files.
Enter a name in the Label Changes From text box so that you can distinguish between the two documents. That way, Word will add a note telling you where each change came from.

Merging documents works the same, but the end result is a single document that merges the contents of both documents together, so that anything that is the same is overwritten:

Open one of the two documents you want to combine.
Click Tools> Combine Documents.
Select the original document and revised document files.

When documents are combined, the differences between them are highlighted. From here you can go in and choose what you want to keep in the final version.

How to format a document correctly with tabs and indents

If you’re the type of person who formats a document by hitting space or tabs multiple times, it’s time to learn how to do it right: using indents and tabs. The video above shows how tabs and indents work, so it’s easy to understand, but let’s just summarize what these two terms actually mean.

Tab : Tab is where the cursor stops after pressing the tab key. In Word, it’s a way to easily align text. When you click the ruler in Word, the tab stop appears as a small, curved arrow. When you press the tab key, the cursor and text will move to this arrow. If you add multiple tab stops, you can make it so you can format the text simply by hitting the tab key a couple of times so that it snaps into place and aligns perfectly.
Indents : As the name suggests, indents determine the distance of a paragraph from the left or right margin. On the ruler, you will see two triangles that adjust the indentation. You can click any triangle and move it to change the indent. The upper triangle adjusts the indentation of the first line of a paragraph. The bottom triangle adjusts the indentation for subsequent lines (aka hanging indent) in a paragraph. You can also click on the square below them to move them at the same time.

Learning how to use these indents and tabs can greatly simplify the creation of a document such as a resume or academic paper.

How to add quotes and links

Writing academic papers is monstrous, but Word makes it easy to create bibliographies and citations. Once you’ve created a new document and are writing this article, you can add a quote with just a few clicks.

Click the Help tab.
Click the drop-down arrow next to the bibliography style and select the style you are using for this document.
Click the end of the sentence or phrase where you want to add the quote.
Click Insert Quote. In the Create New Source field, enter all the required information.

After you enter a quote once, you can add additional quotes from the same text by selecting a sentence, then clicking the Quotes box and choosing the link you want to insert. When you’re done, click the Bibliography button and select Bibliography or Cited Works to automatically generate a reference page for your article.

The best new features in Word 2016

Word 2016 is a word processor, which means it doesn’t have to make giant revolutionary leaps over previous versions. However, Word 2016 has several improvements worth noting:

You can search the ribbon : on Windows, above the ribbon, you will see a box “Tell me what you want to do”. Here you can enter any question you want, and Word will tell you how to do it. For example, you might ask him how to insert an image, how to format text in a certain way, or how to create lists. Basically, it’s a boring 21st century version of Clippy . For some reason, this is not included in the Mac version.
You can see the changes coauthors make in real time, just like in Google Docs : you might have been working on Word documents as a team for a while, but Word 2016 adds real-time changes to them so you can see notes and updates from others right away. people.
Smart Search makes searching a little easier : Word is now slightly more connected to the Internet than it used to be. In Word 2016, you can right-click a word, then choose Smart Search from the menu to find the word definition, the corresponding Wikipedia article, and the best Bing search results.

Aside from these minor improvements, if you’ve been using older versions of Word, you’ll be right at home in Word 2016 in minutes.

Work faster in Word with these keyboard shortcuts

Microsoft has full lists of all the keyboard shortcuts in Word for Windows and Word for Mac to bookmark, but let’s go over some of the basic ones you’ll probably use every day, and a few word-specific ones that are really useful:

CTRL + N / CTRL + O / CTRL + S : Create, open, and save a document.
CTRL + X / CTRL + C / CTRL + V : Cut, Copy, Paste.
CTRL + B / CTRL + I : Bold, Italic.
CTRL + A : Select All
CTRL + Z : Undo
CTRL + K : Insert a hyperlink.
CTRL + P : Print the document.
CTRL + H : Open Find and Replace
Shift + F3 : Toggle capitalization options.
CTRL + SHIFT + C : Copies the formatting for the selected text so that it can be applied to another set of text with CTRL + Shift + V.
CTRL + Shift + N Applies a normal style to the selected text.

In addition, Word supports universal keyboard shortcuts for editing text, such as Shift + CTRL + Up / Down arrows for selecting entire paragraphs. They can make navigation and highlighting a lot easier, and we have a list of them . If you use Word a lot, check out these shortcuts, they will make your life better.