Microsoft Word might be the world’s most widely used writing instrument. It’s certainly far more powerful than other popular tools like pencils and pens. And it’s simple enough for beginners but has accumulated a bigger list of features than almost any software ever written—far more than latecomers such as Google Docs. Many of these features are well-hidden, even from expert users. We’ve gathered a set of tips designed both for beginners and longtime users that will make Word more productive and more efficient than you ever imagined.
Which Word?
We’ve focused on the desktop versions of Word for both Windows and macOS, not the reduced versions available on mobile devices and accessible online through a web browser. These desktop versions come in different flavors. Unless you searched for Microsoft’s hard-to-find option to buy Word without the rest of Microsoft Office and bought it that way, you likely have Word as part of the Office suite that also includes Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and more. Microsoft ships Office in subscription-based and single-sale perpetual license versions.
If you’re a home or small business user, you probably have an annual subscription to Microsoft 365. That subscription brings you regular updates to the whole Office suite, as well as cloud-exclusive AI and collaboration features. If you’re a corporate user, or if you’ve gone to the trouble to find and buy a one-time permanent license for Office, you probably have Office Professional Plus 2021 or Office Home and Business 2021 for Mac—or 2019, 2016, or earlier versions of those suites. These one-time purchases don’t get the added-feature updates that subscription versions get, but that means that Microsoft won’t surprise you with changes in the interface, as it often does with the subscription versions.
An AI Is Coming to Word!
One big surprise that you’ll see before long in the subscription versions is a Copilot button that lets you use ChatGPT-4 to generate new content, edit or summarize existing content, or otherwise use AI to produce or modify your prose. The initial release is based only on your organization’s data, but if you use Copilot for general information, double-check what it produces: the related Bing Chat AI can get facts wrong. Ask Copilot for summaries or editing improvements that may produce better results, but we haven’t been able to test that yet. In any case, proceed with caution!
How to Use These Tips
All the tips in this story should work with any version of Office that you’re likely to be using, including the versions dated 2016, 2019, and 2021. Most but not all will work in 2013 and earlier versions. If you’re a Mac user, when I suggest you right-click on something, Cmd-click on it instead. When I say to press Alt-something, press Option-something instead.
Here are our 24 tips, starting with some simple ones, and ending with more complicated ones. Even if you don’t want to use the complicated ones, they’re worth looking at to learn techniques you can use to customize Word in the ways you want.
1. Use the Search Box to Find Features
Many Word features can be hard to find unless you already know where to look. For example, to edit or insert a page header or footer, you need to open the Insert tab on the Ribbon, which is not even remotely intuitive. Instead, click on the search bar at the top of the window and type Header. Word will show a menu of header-related features and you can choose the one you want. Unfortunately, Word won’t show you where to find those features on the Ribbon, so you may need to use the search bar again.
In Windows, the keyboard shortcut that gets you to the search bar without using the mouse is Alt-Q, which you can learn by hovering over the search bar with the mouse. On a Mac, the search bar is the field in the menu bar that says “Tell me.” The only keyboard-friendly way I could find to reach it was to press Cmd-F6 until the keyboard focus moved to the menu bar, tab right until I reached the search bar, and then press the space bar.
2. Highlight a Sentence With a Click
When you want to highlight an entire sentence, simply hold down the Ctrl key in Windows, or the Command key on a Mac, and click anywhere in the sentence. Word takes care of the rest.
3. Select Text From the Keyboard
Most of Word’s 80s-era keyboard-based commands still work. For example, to select an arbitrary block of text, press F8 to turn on the selection, and use the arrow keys to move the cursor and extend the selection. Or simply start by pressing F8 twice to select the word at the cursor position, press F8 again to select the entire sentence (If you’ve only selected part of a sentence), press it once more to select the whole paragraph, press it yet again to select the entire section of a multi-section document, and finally press it again to select the entire document. Of course, you can also select text by holding down the shift key and moving the cursor to where you want the selection to end.
4. Jump to Your Most Recent Edits
Another of Word’s hidden keyboard tricks is Shift-F5. If you recently made an edit at some remote place in your document, you can get back to it with a keystroke. Press Shift-F5 once to jump to the place in your document that you most recently edited. Press it again to jump to the edit you made before that, and again to jump to your third most recent edit. After the third keystroke, it takes you back to where you began.
5. Change Capitalizations the Easy Way
Do you want to capitalize every word in a header, or reduce all-caps text to lowercase? Select the text you want to change, and press Shift-F3 repeatedly until the text looks the way you want. Each press toggles between lowercase, uppercase, “sentence case” (capitalizing the first word of a sentence), and, if you didn’t know the Caps Lock key was down and yOU tYPED tHIS, a “toggle case” option that gets it right. You can also do this from the “Aa” pull-down menu on the Home tab of the ribbon, in the Font region, but why bother when a quick keystroke or two can get it done?
6. Add Your Most Used Commands to the Quick Action Toolbar
Do you waste time searching the Ribbon for commands you often use? Bring them front and center by using the Quick Action Toolbar. In Word for Windows, start by selecting File > Options > Quick Action Toolbar. (On a Mac, choose Word > Preferences > Ribbon & Toolbar, and choose the Quick Access Toolbar tab.) In the menu, select on the left a command that you want on the toolbar and click the Add button to add it to the toolbar. You may need to go to the Choose commands from… dropdown and select All Commands to find the one you want.
One advantage of the Quick Action Toolbar is that you can hide the Ribbon (in Windows, Ctrl-F1 toggles the Ribbon on and off; on a Mac, it’s Option-Cmd-R) and find commands with one click on the toolbar instead of opening the Ribbon and navigating among tabs.
I use the Quick Action Toolbar for Word’s Format Painter—the tool that copies the formatting of one paragraph so you can apply the same formatting to other paragraphs—and for much else, including a button that switches to full-screen instead of windowed mode. You can also add your own Word macros to the toolbar for instant access.
In Windows, you have the choice of placing the toolbar either above the ribbon, where it’s likely to look cramped and displays only icons, not the command names, or below the ribbon where an option lets you display both the command name and the icon of each command. This is especially useful for commands that don’t have easily recognizable icons, like the Calculator that I mention in tip 23.
7. Show Hidden Characters
When Word isn’t acting as it should, you can only sort things out by seeing the invisible paragraph marks, tabs, section breaks, and other formatting marks that are causing the problem. Press Ctrl-Shift-8 in Windows or Command-8 on a Mac. You can remember this easily because the 8 key also has an asterisk, which can remind you of a symbol.
You can also find this function in the Home tab. Its icon is a paragraph mark. But you can add this to the Quick Action toolbar (see tip 5 above) by adding the “Show All” command.
8. Search For and Replace Hidden Characters
Until a few years ago, when you wanted to search your document, Word opened a full-featured Find and Replace dialog box that floated above the editing window. Now, by default, when you press Ctrl-F (or Cmd-F on a Mac) or you open the Find command from the Editing box in the ribbon, Word for Windows opens a Navigation pane to the left of the document, and Word for the Mac opens search box at the upper right. If you want to search for a paragraph mark or a tab or nonbreaking space or other nonprinting characters, there’s no obvious way to do it.
The slow solution, in Windows, is to click the drop-down arrow at the right of the search box in the Navigation pane and choose Advanced Find. This opens the old-style Find and Replace dialog box, with a More… button that leads to options for searching invisible characters or text formatted with a specific font or margins, and much more. (On a Mac, choose Edit > Find > Advanced Find and Replace…) The “Special…” button shows you a list of invisible and other codes that you can enter in the Find or Replace box, including ^p for a paragraph mark, ^t for a tab character, and much else. You can replace excess paragraph marks by replacing ^p^p with ^p and repeating the operation until no excess paragraph marks clutter your document. For a faster solution, see the next tip.
9. Add Keyboard Shortcuts for Your Favorite commands
It’s always easier to press a key combination than to navigate a menu for what you want. I want the old-style Find and Replace dialog when I press Ctrl-F (on a Mac, Cmd-F), not the new Navigation toolbar. Here’s how I got it back. You can use the same technique to assign keyboard shortcuts for almost anything in Word.
In Windows, use File > Options > Customize Ribbon, and click the Customize… button next to Keyboard Shortcuts. On a Mac, choose Tools > Customize Keyboard. In the keyboard-customizing dialog, in the left-hand box, under Categories, scroll down to All Commands. From the right-hand list, select EditFind. Move the cursor into the Press New Shortcut Key field and type Ctrl-F. The dialog will tell you that this key is currently assigned to SmartFind, which is Word’s internal command that opens the Navigation pane. Click Assign, then Close, then OK, and you can use Ctrl-F to open the full-featured Find and Replace dialog. If you want to use the Navigation pane, you can open it from the Editing box on the Home tab in the Ribbon, or you can assign another keystroke to it, using the same technique I described here.
Notice that you can assign keystrokes that run macros by scrolling down to Macros in the left-hand list and choosing a macro from the right-hand list. You’ll find this feature useful for some of the tips described below.
10. Hide White Space at the Top and Bottom of the Page
One major annoyance of almost all word-processing programs is the space they waste displaying the top and bottom margins of the page you’re typing. If a sentence extends across a page break, the first part of the sentence is separated by an inch or more of screen space from the second part of the same sentence. You can hide the page header and footer by double-clicking in the break between pages. In Windows, you can use File > Options > Display and remove the checkmark next to Show white space between pages in print layout view. On a Mac, you’ll find the option in Word > Preferences > View.
To save time, you can assign a command to a keystroke that will show or hide the white space between pages. Follow the technique in tip 9, above, and assign the command ViewTogglePageBoundaries to a key combination. I use Alt-zero, which Word doesn’t use for anything by default.
Credits: https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/24-microsoft-word-tips-to-make-your-life-easier