Web Worker Daily

If you live in Microsoft Word all day, as I do, then time-saving tips and tricks within the application can make a big difference for you. In this post, I’m collecting some Word tips that I think will be especially useful for bloggers, writers, editors and others who work–often in repetitive ways–on documents all day. While I’ve covered Word keyboard shortcuts and the like before, these tips are aimed squarely at getting writerly tasks done more efficiently.

Don’t Just Search and Replace Words. You’re probably already familiar with searching for and replacing words, but did you know that you can search for and replace, say, one font for another, or bold formatting instead of underlining? To do so, choose Replace from the Edit menu, then click More. At the bottom, choose the Format button to replace fonts, character formatting, etc. Or, choose the Special button if you want to replace, say, any recurring digit, how em dashes are treated, and more.

Use Toolbars and Customize Them. Word comes with a lot more toolbars than most users regularly employ. To pick from a list of available toolbars, go to the View menu, and select Toolbars. To customize any toolbar, select Customize at the bottom of the list of toolbars, click on the Commands tab, choose an item under Categories, and drag the item to a toolbar. If you want that command to permanently be there, click Default Style and right-click on the new toolbar item again. Choose Change Button Image and pick an image. Then close the dialog box.

Use the Synonyms Feature. You can get synonyms for any word very quickly by right-clicking on the Word, picking Synonyms and Thesaurus. This is very useful if you’ve echoed the same word several times in one paragraph.

The More Recently Used Files, the Merrier. If you’re like me, you juggle many Word documents throughout a given day. By default, at the bottom of your File menu in Word, you get a list of the four documents you’ve most recently used—and that’s it. I prefer to have eight documents listed there. To set this up, click on the Tools menu, then select Options. Click the General tab. Change the number in the “Recently Used Files List is…” box.

Record Macros and Use Them. If you’re not yet familiar with creating macros—which can record a series of steps you take in Word, and then execute them anytime at the push of a button—the process is easy. Just pick Macro from the Tools menu, choose Record New Macro, assign it to your keyboard and pick a keystroke shortcut to execute it, then record it and click Stop Recording when done. The shortcut you specified will execute all your steps. Macros are very useful when you have to keep producing a lot of recurring material in a document with the same formatting—such as tables with the same or similar formats.

Review Two Parts of a Document Simultaneously. Especially when you need to compare one part of a long document with an earlier part, it helps to see both parts simultaneously. To do this, just go to the Windows menu, and select Split. A horizontal bar will appear and you can put it where needed to get a view of the second part of the document onscreen concurrently with the first part. To escape from the view, just click Remove Split from the Windows menu. Also, if you have several documents open, you can select Arrange All from the Windows menu to arrange them top to bottom.

If you’re interested in many more tips for Word, see my previous post on efficient shortcuts for Word.

Do you have any good tips for Word?