• To enter the current date: enter Alt Shift D
• To enter current time: Alt Shift T
• To reference the current page number, enter Alt Shift P

Styles can be created to automatically control formatting. For example, you could have a style that defines how titles are formatted. You merely select the text and assign the appropriate style. If you use any of the pre-defined templates, you will discover that each one already contains many different styles. The problem that arises is that unless you try out each style, it is difficult to determine how each style will appear.

To address this issue, you can use a built in feature to print a definition list of all the styles within a template. To do so...

• Click on File
• Click on Print
• In the Print What box, select Style

You might also want to experiment with the other options that Print What provides. The default is to print the document. You will discover that there are several other pieces of information that can be printed besides the actual document.

Changing Existing Style

One of the advantages of using Styles is the ability to easily change the appearance of your document. Depending on the template that is being used to create your document, there are a variety of preset styles to pick from. A popular use of styles is for headings.

Let's assume you have used the style Heading 1 several times within your document and you want to change all existing Headings 1 to a different format. Perhaps change the font, font size, justification, bold, etc.

• First, go to an existing Header 1 text and make your new format changes. Notice that as soon as you access text assigned to Header 1 text, the Style drop down box changes to the name of the selected style.
• After you have made all desired changes, highlight or select the changed heading text.
• Click on the Style box and press Enter. A Modify Style dialog box will open with several options.
• If you want to update all existing text assigned to the Header style, select Update the Style to Reflect Recent Changes. The Heading style for this document is changed to the new format, along with existing text and any future text assigned to the Heading Style.

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Word provides an easy method of setting different tab positions. To do this the ruler bar must be displayed. If it is't, click on View and Ruler.

You will notice a small box on the left side of the ruler. The figure within the box represents the current type of tab that is in effect. There are four tab options:

• Left
• Right
• Center
• Decimal align

To select a different option, click on the box.

New Tab

To insert a new tab, click on the ruler bar at the position where you want the tab to appear.

Remove Tab

To remove a tab, drag the tab mark downward off of the ruler bar.

Adjust Tab

To adjust the tab, drag the tab mark to the left or right.

If you want to display or change the exact location of the tab, hold down the ALT key while you drag the tab left or right.

Another option for changing the tab settings, is to double click with the right mouse button on a tab mark. A dialog box will display that allows you to change the type of tab, location and several other options.

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Word provides a tool bar that lets you quickly select several drawing tools. To display the draw tool bar, click on View, Toolbars and Drawing.

One of the handy options is to select an object using the AutoShapes feature.

• Click on the AutoShapes button. You are provided with several categories of shapes such as Lines, Arrows, Flowcharts, Callouts, etc
• Select the category. You are provided with the options for that category.
• Click on the object you want to insert in your document.

You can also select one of the other buttons that allow you to create Lines, Arrows, Rectangles, Ovals, etc. When one of these buttons are clicked, you drag the mouse within your document to create the object.

If you want to create several objects of the same type, instead of clicking each time on the object you want...

• Double click on the icon. It will appear indented.
• Now you can create several rectangles, or whatever objects you double clicked, by just dragging the mouse.
• To cancel this mode, press the ESC key.

This trick of double clicking an icon to stay in a selected mode also works on several other buttons within all of the Office modules.

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Here's a quick tip on selecting entire sentences. It seems that often I have the situation where I want to move or delete an entire sentence. Most of us drag the mouse over the text to select the text. Usually resulting in selecting too much or too little.

A better method is to place the mouse cursor on any part of the sentence, hold down the Ctrl key and Click. Whamo! The entire sentence is automatically selected. You can now drag the sentence to a new location, press the delete key or whatever editing action is required.

The one problem that can occur is the situation where you may have an abbreviation that ends with a period in the middle of the sentence. In this case only the text up to the period will get selected. To select the balance of the sentence, move the cursor over any part of the unselected text, hold down the shift key and click. You will now have the entire sentence selected.

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You can easily change the case of a word or words in a document.

• Highlight the text to change
• Hold down the Shift key and press F3
• By re-pressing the F3 key, you can cycle through all the options:
  1. all uppercase
  2. all lowercase
  3. uppercase for the first-letter in each word

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Nothing is more frustrating than being interrupted while you are in the middle of a major word processing project.

Word can take you back to the text you were working on before you closed your document. When you reopen the document, press Shift + F5 before you do anything else. This shortcut executes the Go Back command, which moves the insertion point marker to your most recent editing location.

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Word offers a couple of ways to select a column in a table. One way requires you to scroll to the top of the table. You can then position the mouse pointer over the top of the column to display the column pointer and click to select the column. While this method is straight forward and easy to remember, it is pretty inconvenient if you happen to be working near the bottom of a large table.

Luckily, there is a simple alternative. No matter where you are in a table, you can select a column by pressing Alt and clicking on the column you want to select. In fact, you can use this trick to select an entire table just press Alt and double-click anywhere in the table to select it.

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If you download text files and bring them into Word, you are surely familiar with the problem of extra carriage returns. Instead of wrapping, each line ends with a paragraph mark. As you may have discovered, manually removing the extra marks gets old in a hurry. Fortunately, AutoFormat can often eliminate extraneous paragraph marks for you.

To see if AutoFormat will remove unwanted paragraph marks from a particular document...

• Select AutoFormat from the Format menu
• Click Options to determine which types of formatting changes AutoFormat is set to make. You can select or deselect the desired check boxes
• Click OK to return to the AutoFormat dialog box. Since your aim is to remove paragraph marks as quickly as possible, just leave AutoFormat Now selected. You may also want to choose a document type to govern the kinds of formatting AutoFormat applies.
• When you are ready to format the document, click OK

AutoFormat will apply whatever types of formatting you specified and if you are lucky it will delete unnecessary paragraph marks. If AutoFormat eliminates only some of the unwanted marks, you might try running it a second time. Some files require two passes to get the job done.

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Managing multiple documents can be frustrating when you can't remember what each document is about. Two features that can make you job easier are the AutoSummarize feature and Properties Summary.

AutoSummarize

The AutoSummarize feature automatically summarizes the key points in a document. Word analyzes your document, determines the most important sentences, and gives you a custom summary based on this analysis.

To open the AutoSummarize dialog box

• Choose Tools/AutoSummarize
• Select one of the four summary options to
  1. Highlight the key points
  2. Insert a summary at the top of the document
  3. Create a new document and paste the summary there
  4. Hide everything but the summary without leaving the document.

You can also customize the length of the summary and update the document statistics so you can access the summary through File/Properties.

Properties Summary

One good habit you can develop is entering information in the Summary Properties for each document. Doing so enables you to quickly locate even the most elusive document by telling Word to search for files that match a particular keyword.

Among the most useful bits of summary information are keywords, since they can give you a good idea of a document's contents as well as facilitating the search process. However, the prospect of having to think of appropriate keywords for each document may be less than appealing, especially if you're in a hurry. Fortunately, you can let Word come up with the keywords and automatically enter them in the Properties dialog box for you.

All you have to do is run AutoSummarize on a document to create and insert keywords and comments in the summary properties. Note: Word will replace any entries that may already appear in those text boxes.

How to Create

• Choose Tools/AutoSummarize
• Select Highlight Key Points
• Check the Update Document Statistics box
• Select OK

Word will highlight your document's key points and display the AutoSummarize toolbar. Click Close to dismiss the toolbar and the highlighting will disappear with the results being placed in the Properties Summary.

How to View

• Click on File
• Click on Properties
• Click on the Summary tab

You are now viewing the keywords and comments that were just automatically created. You can add, change or delete the contents. Keep in mind that if you rerun the above AutoSummarize step again, it will replace your changes.

How to Use

Let's assume that three months later you want to find all documents that have the keyword Job123. To do so

• Click on File
• Click on Open
• Click on the Advanced button (Odds are fairly good that you have never used this button)
• In the properties field, change filenames to keywords
• In the value field enter Job123
• Click on Find Now

You will be returned to the standard open window and only filenames that have a keyword of Job123 will be displayed.

Another option is to right-hand click on a filename in the Open window and click on properties. This will open the Properties summarize and allow you to view the keywords or comments. You can also change the keywords or comments at this point without having to open the document.

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Have you ever typed a word and wish you could come up with a better one? After you have typed a word...

• Press Shift + F7 to open the Thesaurus dialog box. The word you just typed will appear in the Looked Up text box. The Replace with Synonym list box will contain possible alternatives.
• If you see a word (or phrase) you like, select it and click Replace.
• Word will close the Thesaurus dialog box and replace your word with the selected synonym.

The entire process takes only a few seconds often a much quicker proposition than staring at a word in your document and trying to conjure up an alternative.

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Have you ever wanted to adjust the size of some text? For instance, suppose you create a heading and decide it needs to be just a tiny bit larger. You can make the change by using the time-consuming method of highlighting the text and selecting the desired point size from the Font Size dropdown list on the Formatting toolbar.

However, a quicker way is to simply...

• Highlight the text
• Hold down the Ctrl key
• Press the ] key
• Each time you press the ] key, Word will enlarge the text by one point.

To make the text smaller...

• Highlight the text
• Hold down the Ctrl key
• Press the [ key

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Office has the ability to insert hyperlinks within any of the Office documents. Now that sure is an exciting statement. In case you are not familiar with hyperlinks, a hyperlink is used to jump to another section of the current document or another document all together. Hyperlinks are commonly used on the Internet and is the basic method of navigating the Internet.

Hyperlinks appear with underlined text. Example: sample hyperlink. By simply clicking on the hyperlink, you jump to the location that the hyperlink points to. Easy, huh? So right about now you are probably thinking how do you create these links?

Let's first start with a link that occurs within the same Word document. Assume someplace near the top of your document you have a phrase like Jump from Here. Someplace at the bottom of your document you have a phrase like Jump to There. What we want to accomplish is the ability to click on the Jump from Here and have the screen automatically jump to the bottom with the cursor on the Jump to There phrase.

We first need to set a bookmark for the "Jump to There" phrase. To do so...

• Highlight the "Jump to There" phrase
• Select Insert and Bookmark
• Enter the bookmark name, in this case To
• Click on Add

What you have done is set a bookmark named To within the document pointing to the phrase Jump to There.

Now you are ready to create a hyperlink to the bookmark. To do so...

• Highlight the "Jump from Here" phrase
• Select Insert and Hyperlink. (Short cut is to enter Control-K)
• In the lower box, named location, click on the browse button
• From the displayed list of bookmarks, select the To bookmark
• Click on OK.

The "Jump from Here" phrase will now be underlined and by clicking on it you will jump to the bookmark which is the phrase "Jump to There".

A handy feature, if you are using Outlook, is that you can put a hyperlink within a Word or Excel document that will automatically open a selected section of Outlook.

In Outlook, you have a section called "Contacts". To create a hyperlink to this...

• Enter Outlook:Contacts

The phrase will be underlined and the link created automatically. By clicking you will open Outlook with the Contacts showing.

You may have subfolders under Contacts, such as Customers. If you want to hyperlink to the subfolder "Customers", enter the hyperlink as Outlook:Contacts/Customers.

Bookmarks and Hyperlinks are very handy tools, especially for large documents or linking documents. As you can see from the above examples, you do't have to be on the Internet to use them.

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Hopefully you are learning how handy it is to finally use that right-hand mouse button. Most of the new applications will pop-up a menu when the right-hand mouse is clicked. The menu that pops up varies according to the position of the mouse pointer. Get in the habit of right-hand clicking and you will find that your efficiency level will increase.

Within Office, these pop-menus are called shortcut menus and they can easily be customized. Open a Word document, place your mouse pointer anywhere on the text, and right hand click. You should have the options for...

• Cut
• Copy
• Paste
• Font
• Paragraph
• Bullets & Numbering
• Draw Table
• Define

A handy option that is not there is the ability to access the Thesaurus. As an example of how to customize the shortcut menu we will go through the necessary steps to add the Thesaurus option to the shortcut menu.

• Click on Tools on the top line
• Click on Customize
• Click on the Toolbars tab
• In the toolbars box, scroll down till you see Shortcut Menus
• Click on the box to the right of Shortcut Menus This will pop-up another option box called Shortcut Menus
• Click on the field labeled Text. This will present a list of options that are used in Word's shortcut menus.
• In the list, click on Text. This will present the same shortcut menu that you saw when you right-hand clicked on the text in your document.
• In the Customize window, click on the tab Commands. Do not close the other windows that are displayed at this point. You are going to need them in a few steps.
• In the categories box, scroll down and click on Tools
• In the commands box, scroll down till you see the selection for the Thesaurus displayed.
• Drag the Thesaurus selection to the shortcut menu and point the mouse to where you want this selection listed.
• Click on Close in the Customize window to close all windows.

You are now ready to test and use the new option.

• Position your pointer on some word in your document where you want to substitute a different word.
• Right-hand click and select the Thesaurus option.
• You will get the Thesaurus window showing alternative word choices for the word that the mouse was pointing to

If you find yourself constantly having to select from the top pull down menus, to save time add the frequently used options to the shortcut menu.

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Want to add a little pizzazz to your list text--but without a lot of fuss? You can take advantage of autobullet feature and quickly generate bullets from the symbol fonts.

First, you need to make sure the autobullet feature is activated. To do this . . .

• Choose AutoCorrect from the Tools menu
• Click the AutoFormat as You Type tab.
• Select the Automatic Bulleted Lists check box in the Apply as You Type panel (if it's not selected)
• Click OK

To create a bulleted list . . .

• Choose Symbol from the Insert menu
• Select the desired font from the Font dropdown list
• Click on the character you want to use as your bullet
• Click Insert
• Click Close
• Enter two spaces
• Type the first list item
• Press Enter to begin another line. Word will insert your symbol at the beginning of the new line
• Enter the second item and press Enter to create the third line
• Repeat the process of typing items and pressing Enter until your list is complete
• Finally, press Enter twice to "turn off" your bullets.

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View two areas of a document at the same time. If you're working on a large document and are tired of scrolling backwards and forwards to a different area of the document, you can split your view of the document and work on two areas of the same document at the same time.

To create the split

• Choose Split from the Window menu
• Position the split on your screen
• Click the mouse button
• This now enables you to view two portions of the same document.

To remove the split

• Choose Remove Split from the Window menu
• The split will go away, and you'll have only one view of your document.

You can also achieve the same split effect by dragging down on the small split bar just above the vertical scroll bar. To remove a split with the mouse, just drag the split border all the way to the top or bottom of the window.

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Word is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processor. Because of this, commands that control the formatting and fonts of he document are hidden from view. This works well until you run into the situation when it just doesn't format or print the way you would expect.

When this happens, you need to view the hidden format and font commands to help determine what is causing the problem. At first this may not seem possible, but there is a method.

• Click on Help (On the top menu bar)
• Click on What's This (The mouse pointer becomes a question mark)
• Click on the character or paragraph of concern A pop-up message box will appear, listing the format and font commands)
• Press ESC to cancel the pop-up display

There is also a keyboard short command that can be used in place of the first two steps - Hold down the shift key and press F1.

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When using Word, I find it very convenient to display the horizontal and vertical rulers at the top and to the left of the document. The downside of displaying the rulers is that screen space is utilized and therefore you can't see as much of the document page as you may like.

You can turn the ruler display feature off, but then when you need it you have to go through the exercise of turning it back on, or at least it appears that way.

An easier method, is to place the mouse pointer in the area where the ruler would normally appear and magically it will appear. As soon as you move the mouse from the ruler, it will automatically hide again.

If you have never used the ruler feature, you can find it under View and Ruler.

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In Word, when you create a table, by default it is stretched to fit the page margins and columns are evenly spaced. Have you ever had the problem where you add a column and Word extends the table beyond the right margin? When this happens, it appears difficult to readjust the width of the table to fit within the margins. Even swearing at the screen or the next person that walks in your office doesn't help. There is an easier way.

• Click anywhere within the table.
• From the menu bar (at the top) Click on Table and Select Table from the menu bar
• Click on Table again and select Cell Height and Width
• Click on the Column tab
• Click on the Autofit button

Your table should now fit the entire page width and each column should be equally sized and your blood pressure is still normal.

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When working with a large document, do you find yourself doing a lot of scrolling to review or find different sections of the document? Save yourself time by using a handy feature that allows you to view an outline of a large document.

To view a document map there are two methods...

1) Click on Document Map in the Standard toolbar OR

2) Click on View and then Document Map

The Document Map pane will open displaying any items in your document that have outline level styles assigned. Typically outline levels are assigned to heading and title styles.

When you click on a selection in the Document Map pane, Word automatically jumps to that section of your document. Much faster and easier than scrolling.

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Ordinarily in Word, switching to page layout view displays the items in a document, text, graphics, drawings, and so on in their real positions on the page. This WYSIWYG display enables you to see how your document layout is shaping up. By turning on the option to display text boundaries, you can make the page layout view even more useful.

To activate this feature, first make sure you are already in page layout view, then...

• Click on the Tools menu
• Click on Options
• Click the View tab
• Select Text Boundaries check box
• Click OK

With this feature turned on, you will see a dotted outline marking the boundaries of all your document elements. Word will display the boundaries that enclose the header and footer (if your document includes them) and the main text area with separate boundaries for each column in a multicolumn layout, footnotes, frames, and so on. Viewing text boundaries can help you visualize exactly how your document components fit together on the page.

If you modify your layout - adjust margins, add sections, reduce columns, and so on text boundaries will show you how those changes affect the arrangement of all your document elements.

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If you need to move one or more rows in a table...

1. Position the insertion point marker in the row you want to move (or highlight multiple rows if you're moving more than one).
2. Press Alt Shift and the up arrow to move the row(s) up a row, or press Alt Shift and the down arrow to move the row(s) down a row.
3. You can repeat the shortcut to continue relocating the row(s) one row at a time.

You can also use this technique to separate a row from its table.
For example, suppose you place the insertion point marker in the third row of a table.

1. Pressing Alt Shift and the up arrow once will make it the second row.
2. Pressing Alt Shift and the up arrow again will make it the first row.
3. And if you press Alt Shift and the up arrow a third time, Word will insert a paragraph mark above the table and place the row above the mark (unless the table is at the top of the document).
4. You can reverse the process to reunite the row with its original table--or simply delete the paragraph mark that separates them.

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