If you’re anything like most people, you probably use Microsoft Word a lot. And for good reason. It’s an incredibly useful tool. But are you aware of just how useful it can actually be?
Sure, on the surface, it’s as simple as can be. You type some words onto the screen and save it as a document. Pretty easy, right?
But typing isn’t all you can do with Word. Not by a long shot. In fact, if you use Word that way, you’re barely scratching the surface of all the features and options available to you.
Word is a surprisingly deep and versatile tool with a lot of options at your disposal. By taking advantage of them, you can make your work a lot easier and more appealing.
Here, we’re going to take a look at ten common and easy to use MS Word functions.
1. Formatting
One of the most simple to use MS word features is the formatting bar.
Granted, there are a lot of formatting options in Microsoft Word. But luckily, most of them are condensed into a simple-to-use toolbar at the top of the screen.
This bar contains most of the basic formatting options you might need; indentation, paragraph spacing, font, and header options.
Each of these different parts gives you options right away to help make your documents look better. Most of them also have a drop-down menu that gives you more options to choose from. But we’re going to take a look at some of those options separately.
2. Insert
Another very useful tab that can be found at the top of the page.
The Insert tab allows you to insert all kinds of media into your Word documents. It’s a much easier and more efficient way to add pictures than a simple copy and paste, and it also allows you to embed video into your documents.
You can add so much more than that, though.
Tables and graphs are available to easily display information. Comments can be added to the document. Links to webpages can be inserted here, as can headers, footers, and page numbers.
3. Layout
A deeper expansion of the main formatting bar, the Layout tab is full of functionality that lets you manage the appearance of your documents.
From here, you can fine-tune the size of your margins, indentations, and paragraph spacings. You can also control line spacing, line breaks, and text wrapping.
4. References
A favorite of students everywhere, the References tab allows you to easily insert a variety of different references into your documents.
This tab includes options to include a table of contents and footnotes. It also includes an option to automatically include inline citations. It even allows you to specify the exact citation format. No more worrying about the differences between MLA and APA. Let Word take care of it for you.
5. Review
The Review tab has all sorts of helpful features to make proofreading your documents a lot easier.
Here you can run a spell checker throughout your document, compare versions of documents, and even have what you’ve written be read aloud to you by the program.
Granted, the text to speech voice sounds pretty silly, but it can still be a helpful tool to hear your writing read back to you.
6. Transform
Inside the file page, the same place where you go to save and open documents, there’s an option about halfway down the menu called Transform.
If you have access to Microsoft Sway service, this little option allows you to quickly and easily convert your Word documents into Microsoft Sway web pages that you can share easily.
7. Right-Click Menu
Right-clicking on the mouse in Microsoft Word opens up a drop-down menu full of a lot of commonly used functions. In this menu, you’ll find options to change the font type and size. You’ll also find some basic formatting, like paragraph spacing.
A few other tools are found here as well. The thesaurus option is a favorite. A quick right-click lets you spice up your writing with some fun synonyms.
8. Keyboard Shortcuts
Microsoft Word is absolutely full of keyboard shortcuts. To go over all of them would take all day, and there’s plenty that you won’t need often anyways.
But there are a few that are helpful to know. Most everyone knows the shortcuts for copy and paste; Control-C and Control-V, respectively.
But what about Control-Enter?
This is a very useful shortcut that immediately inserts a page break where the cursor is. What that means is the next time you start typing, regardless of how much space is left on the current page, your text will appear on a new page.
This is great if you find yourself mashing the enter key to get to a new page.
Alt-Space is another very useful one. This shortcut will take any formatting applied to the highlighted text and reset it back to the default settings.
9. Search Bar
If you find yourself digging through all the different tabs and buttons and can’t find the function you need, Word comes with a search bar built-in.
Just type the function you need into the bar, and if Word has it, it’ll show up.
You do have to be careful with your wording, but the search bar is still an extremely useful tool.
10. Save Different File Types
As with most other Microsoft programs, you can use Word to save your documents in a variety of different formats.
The default for post-2007 Word is DOCX, but you can save them in any text format you like.
Of course, if you accidentally save it as the wrong file type, you can always reopen it and save it as another type. Or you can use our free online file converter and we’ll take care of it for you.
Use MS Word Effectively With These Shortcuts
Because Microsoft Word is the most popular word processor in the world, even people who don’t run Windows take Word into account. Now that you’re equipped to use MS word more efficiently, it’s time to put those skills to use.
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