Microsoft Word, a component of the Microsoft Office productivity suite, is used by more than one billion people every day.
The program is popular for work and personal use and can be a handy word processing tool. Despite its simplicity, many tips and tricks can be learned to maximize your use of the program.
Learning how to use Microsoft Word tools fully can be helpful. Read on to learn some essential tips on how to use the program and enhance your skills.
Tip #1: Deleting Entire Words
One of the most common things you will find yourself doing when writing is hitting the backspace key. Restructuring sentences and changing words leads us to hold down the backspace key, but there’s an easier way.
To delete an entire word, press Ctrl+Backspace with the cursor placed directly after the word you want to delete.
This will save you a lot of time in the long run!
Tip #2: Determine Readability
Determining how easy your work is to read based on someone’s reading level can be tricky.
This is one of the Microsoft Word productivity tools. When you want to check the readability and determine the complexity of your work, navigate to File > Options > Proofing. Next, select “show readability statistics” under grammar.
From here on out, when you run a spell check, it will also show you this information. There are other programs that work in conjunction with Word to ensure your writing is mistake-free and a great read.
Tip #3: Strikethrough Text
Have you ever found yourself editing something and wanting to track the changes that were made? You can if you learn how to use strikethrough text.
This is one of Microsoft Word’s editing tools. It will allow you to cross out words with a horizontal line drawn through the text to show when something can be removed entirely or replaced with something different. It can also emphasize a change and make sure that the reader doesn’t miss it.
Tip #4: Find Words Easily
Picture this: you have a document with multiple pages, and you realize you need to change one specific word or phrase.
Scanning through the document to find it can be a huge time waster. So instead, click Ctrl+F to open the find command window.
From here, type in the word or phrase you’re looking for, and it will show you all the places it shows up in the document.
To take this tip to the next level, you can click the magnifying glass on the command window and choose “replace.” You can then replace this word with something else in every place that it’s used. This is particularly helpful if you misspelled a name or want to switch out a word you often used for another.
Tip #5: Ask the Program for Help
Microsoft Word has many valuable tools, but not all can be found in the Microsoft Word tools menu. If there’s something you want to do, but you aren’t sure how to do it at all or wonder if there’s an easier way, you can ask Microsoft Word how to do it.
There should be a toolbar that says, “tell me what you want to do.” Type in what you want, and the command you’re looking for should come up.
Use Microsoft Word Tools Now
This article highlights just a few Microsoft Word tools that exist.
The tips found here will help you save time, increase productivity, and avoid headaches from not knowing how to do things efficiently.
Start applying these tricks today to take your Microsoft Word skills to the next level!
If you thought this article was helpful, look at some of our other articles to learn more useful tips.