40 Ultimate Word Tips and Tricks Updated for 2020! This video is the ultimate compilation of Word
tips and tricks to enhance your skills using Microsoft Word. I've combined long-established
tips and tricks featured in previous videos with prominent new ones Microsoft added in 2019 and
2020. You'll find these tips and tricks useful whether you're using Word for the first time
or just wanting to enhance your Word skills. For the complete list of contents please refer to
the description of this video. Let's get started! #1 Line Spacing. Here's a trick to change the line
spacing on your text. Just click anywhere inside of a paragraph. Hit Ctrl-2 to change it to double
line spacing. Ctrl-1 takes it back to single and Ctrl-5 does one and a half. You can do
the same thing by selecting a range of text. it's just a quicker method
to change the line spacing. #2 Dictate. Dictate is a new feature available
in Office 365 versions of Word. It allows you to transcribe your voice directly into a Word
document and it's available under the Home tab, right here. This is a test of my voice
recording directly into Microsoft Word. Dictate also lets you select from
different languages and as you can see there are a number of preview languages
that are going to be added into Microsoft Word in the future. It's a great option to
record your document rather than typing it #3 Read Aloud. Not only does Microsoft Word allow
you to record your voice into a document, it will read it back to you. Just highlight the text
you want to read, go to the Review tab, click on Read Aloud. "This is a test of my voice recording
directly into Microsoft Word". It also gives you options here where you can change to a different
voice and you can adjust the reading speed "This is a test of my voice
recording directly into Microsoft Word". It's a great way to review your document. #4 Quick Lines. Want to draw lines quickly into
your document. Use dash-dash-dash Enter and it creates a line for you. Use underscore three
times Enter and it's a bolder line. Equals and you get a double line. Asterisks and you get a
dashed line. You can use multiple symbols right up there by the number keys and you can get a variety
of different lines quickly into your document. Give it a try. #5 Researcher. Researcher is a great tool to add
external content into your Word document. It's available under References, Researcher. You start
by entering a topic that you want to research. It brings up a list of relevant topics that you
can select from. If you look at the detail on any kind of text information you can select part of
it and add it into your document just by adding and citing that information and as you see here
it inserted that text, it created a bibliography with a link to the original source. You can even
select pictures. You can also further break down your information between journals, websites, and
books and select topics within each one of those to find a particular article to
research that information as well. Any of the information that's inserted in
your document is referenced and you can hit the Ctrl-Click to follow
those to the actual website. Researcher uses the Bing search engine to
find this information so you can insert it into your Word document. So you have a
ton of information at your fingertips. #6 Quick Font Size. If you want to change
the font size really quickly just highlight your text and hold down the Ctrl-Shift
and the >. That increases the font. < shrinks it back down. It's the same
thing as using these buttons up here. #7 Vertical Select. Normally when
you select text it does it in order but you can do a vertical selection
by holding down the Alt key. Once you've done that then you can change
the color, change fonts, change the size, or do a variety of other things on that
group of text. That's the vertical selection. #8 Clipboard Multi-Paste. You're probably familiar
with Copy and Paste using Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V or right clicking on text but the clipboard actually
allows you to do multiple pasting of text. You can click on this little icon down here in the corner
to bring up the clipboard and when you highlight a group of text and hit Ctrl-C or right click on it
and Copy it, it creates the text in the clipboard. You can do multiple copies and it retains
each one individually. Now when I go to a new location I can just click on the one that I want
to paste and select from that list. There's also an option available here where you can show
the clipboard when Ctrl-C is pressed twice. So if that's closed and you highlight text and
you hit Ctrl-C twice it brings up the clipboard. That's a quick method to doing multi-paste. #9 Shrink One Page. If you have text that overlaps
onto a second page there is a quick method you can do to shrink this down to one page. Just go up
to the Quick Access Toolbar, go to More Commands, change this to All Commands, and in the
list do a search for Shrink to one page. Select it, add it to the menu, and hit OK. Now you
need to select all your text, click the button to shrink to one page, and it condenses everything
down to make it fit within that one page. #10 Dark Mode. You may prefer changing
the theme in Microsoft Word to Dark Mode there's an option for that available by going
to File, Pptions, and under General you'll see this Office theme setting right here. It
defaults to Colorful but you can change it to Black and hit OK. Now you have Dark Mode.
There's another option by going to File, Options, and changing this to Dark Gray,
which I personally like a little better. Now this setting affects all the Microsoft
Office apps, not just word so be aware of that. You can also change the background white
color on your page by setting the Page Color to a dark mode or a gray so you have
those options available as well. #11 Share to Email. Typically when you have a Word
document and you want to send it to somebody as an email you save the document, go into your outlook
email, attach the Word document to your email, and send it. But there's a way you can do
this directly in Word. Just go to File, Share, and here you have multiple
choices. You can save it in your onedrive folders or you can do a Word
document attachment or a PDF. Choose Word. It opens Outlook and allows you to address your
email and send the document as an attachment. When it's complete you're back in Word and
you can continue working on that document. It's a much easier method of sending your
document as an attachment in an email. #12 Insert Date & Time. Word provides a
simple method to add the date and time anywhere in your document. Just click where
you want it located, go to the Insert tab, and select date and time from the menu. It
gives you a choice of the format that you want to choose for your date. Hit OK
and it inserts it into your document. You may also want the date and time or other
types of information to show up on every page. That's where the footer and header come in.
We're going to go ahead and insert a header, select the blank type, and in this location
we're going to go back to Insert date and time, and select the date again. Now it's going to
be on the top of each page. You can do the same thing for a footer so use this method as an easy
way to add the date and time to your documents. #13 Convert Text to Table. If you've typed
columns and rows of data using the tab key it's easy to convert this to a table.
Just highlight your data, go to Insert, under Table select Convert text to table. It
should default to the columns and rows based on the data you've selected. If that's
correct hit OK and it converts it into a table format. At this point you can adjust the
columns and rows just like you would another table and you can change the border to no borders if
you want to make it look like your original. Now that it's in a table format you can do all
kinds of things like paint the borders, change the shading, and pick different formats. It gives
you a lot more flexibility than using the Tab key. #14 Formulas in Tables. Word allows you to apply
formulas to data in tables. First let's go ahead and insert a table. We'll make it three by
three and we'll insert some numbers in here and now let's go ahead and take the sum of these
two numbers. In this column right here go to the Layout tab, click on Formula, and it automatically
does some of the above items by default. Hit OK and you have the sum of those two numbers. You
can do the same thing here. It defaults to Sum of Above and you've got those two numbers. Let's say
we want to take the sum of everything to the left. Well it defaults that way. You can hit OK and
it sums those. You can do a variety of different things here though. Let's go ahead and do a
formula instead of the sum. We'll take the Product of everything to the Left and now it's multiplied
those two numbers. There are a number of different functions available in the list including the
IF statement which helps you to create complex formulas. Also remember in the formula you
can reference Above, Left, Right, and Below. #15 Calculate. Did you know there's a way
to do simple math in a Word document. Just come up here to your Quick Access Toolbar,
go to More Commands, select All Commands, and in the list find Calculate. Click on it
and add it to your menu. Hit OK and now the Calculate button is available up here. If you have
a formula on the screen just highlight it, click the Calculate button, and the results of that
formula will show up down here on your taskbar. #16 Insert Hyperlink. You can easily insert hyperlinks into your Word
document. Just highlight a Word and press Ctrl-K. This brings up the Insert Hyperlink screen where
you can link it to an existing file or web page, a place in this document, create a new
document, or link it to an email address. We'll leave it a web page for now and we'll put in
the address of the location we want it to link to. Hit OK and now it creates the underscore in blue
where you can hit Ctrl-Click to follow the link. If you right-click on the
hyperlink you can edit it and make changes to the
names or update the address. #17 Smart Lookup. Smart Lookup is another method
to find information about your topics on your Word document easily. Just highlight a word,
right-click on it, do search, and it brings up the Smart Lookup Search where you can get information
regarding that subject. It's that simple. #18 Remove Leading Spaces. If you copy text
and you end up with spaces at the beginning and you want to get rid of them here is
the quickest method. Just highlight it, select the bullet points, and then select it again
to turn it off. That clears those leading spaces. #19 Save as PDF. Microsoft Word makes it
very easy to save a document out as a PDF. Just go to File, Export, and here you can change
the file type to a variety of different options but we're going to create a PDF document. Click
Create, give it a name, select your location, and you can choose some options here
if you want to adjust the document and then Publish, and it opens the document
in PDF format. That's all there is to it. #20 Format Painter. Format Painter allows you to
copy the text formatting from one area to another. Just click anywhere inside of your text that
you want to copy the formatting, go up to the Home tab under Format Painter, and select
the area you want to copy that formatting to. Format Painter works with any of the format
options in here like the size, the color, bold, italic, underline, or
other types of formatting. #21 Resume Assistant. Resume Assistant is a
brand new tool to help you build your resume in Word. It's available by going to the
Review tab and clicking on Resume Assistant. Here you define a role and in this case I took
the Assistant Hotel Manager from the resume we have as a sample and it pulls information directly
from the profiles of other users on linkedin. You can then choose an Industry if you want to or you
can filter these results by different skills. It provides multiple profile information and you can
go into the details to help use this text for your own resume. The Resume Assistant also provides top
skill information for that position and articles about how you can improve your resume. It's a
great resource to help build your own resume. #22 Insert File Path. Sometimes it's useful
to reference the original file location in your document so that you can find it
later. So let's do an insert of a footer and in this location we want to add the file
location so it prints out with this document. Go up to the Customize Quick
Access Toolbar, More Commands, select All Commands, and in this list
find Insert File Path. Select it, add it, and hit OK. Now when you click on
this location you can select this button to insert the document file path and it
will print out with your Word document. #23 Insert Screenshot. Did you know you can
insert a screenshot from another application into your Word document. Just go to the Insert
tab, select Screenshot, and all the available windows are listed. Select one and it inserts
the image of that window into your document. Now you can resize it and move it around as
needed. There's another option if you go to Insert, Screenshot where you can select a Screen
Clipping. That allows you to capture an image and insert just that image into your document. #24 Page Numbering. You can easily add page
numbers to your Word document. Just go to the Insert tab, select Page Number, and then choose
between these four options - the top of the page, the bottom of the page, in the margins or at the
current position where your cursor is located. We'll do the top of the page and we'll
select this format right here in the center and you can see that it's
numbered the pages 1 two three. You have some additional options
available here. If you don't want the first page to have a page number check
this box and it'll start with page two. You can also do different odd and even pages that
will skip page two and then go to page three. When you're done with these settings close the
header and footer and now those are locked in. #25 Sort Lists. You can sort
a list of names or numbers. Simply highlight the list and on the Home
tab go to this option right here for sort. It defaults to paragraphs and text and you
can choose ascending or descending order. Hit OK and it sorts them alphabetically. You
can do the same thing with a series of numbers and it defaults to number. Hit OK and it sorts
that list as well and if you have two columns of data you can sort that as well but you're
going to have to change this to a table first and then you can go back to
the Home and do the sort. Sow it gives you the option to sort by column
one or column two and you can choose ascending or descending order on either one of those. This is
by column one. Now let's do it by column two first and column one second and you can see it's sorted
by number. So if you want more than one column you're going to have to make sure to convert
it to a table first before you do the sort. #26 Superscript & Subscript. You can do superscript
and subscript by highlighting the text that you want to convert, right-click on it, go to Font,
and check the box for superscript or subscript. There is a shortcut to do the same thing. When
you have your text highlighted do Ctrl-+ for subscript and do Ctrl-Shift-+ for superscript.
That's a shortcut method to do the same thing. #27 CTRL Key. The CTRL key is very handy to help
you navigate around a Word document. For example, you can do Ctrl-Right Arrow to move around
one word at a time. If you do Ctrl-Left arrow it takes you back one word at a time.
Ctrl-Backspace deletes the previous word. Ctrl-Down arrow moves one paragraph down and
Ctrl-Up arrow moves one paragraph up. If you hold Ctrl-Shift and hit the Down arrow it
highlights an entire paragraph at a time. Up arrow unhighlights it. If you do Ctrl-Home
takes you to the beginning of the document. Ctrl-End takes you to the end of the document.
And if you hold the Ctrl key down and click in a sentence it highlights that entire
sentence. You're also aware of the Ctrl-C to copy and Ctrl-V to paste so
theCtrl key is very powerful. #28 Mouse Select. You can also select text using
your mouse. Click anywhere and it positions the cursor in that location. If you double-click it
selects the entire word. And if you triple-click it selects the entire paragraph. Pick a starting
location and hold the left mouse key down, drag it and you can select a group of text.
Once you've selected text you can go anywhere inside of it, hold the left mouse key and
drag that text to a different location. When you release it pastes it
there. Choose a starting point, move to the end point and hold the Shift key
and click and it selects everything in between. Highlight some text, hold the Ctrl key
down and highlight a second set of text and now you can move them together. If you move
over to the margin you can click to select an individual row. Hold the left mouse key down
and drag and you can select multiple rows. If you highlight a little bit of text
and you right drag it to a new location it brings up the menu where you can choose
what you want to do with that text - Move it, Copy it, or Link it. So let's move it there.
The mouse is very powerful just by itself #29 Translator. Translator is available
to users of Microsoft Office or Microsoft 365 versions of Word. You
can highlight a section of text, go to Review, choose Translate,
and then translate that selection. This takes the english version
of the text that I just selected and converts it into other languages. It defaults
to English but you can choose from a variety of different languages. Let's take French for
example. It converts the text to French and then we can choose to insert it back
into the document. Since I'm highlighted on that same set of text it's just going
to replace it with the French version. But if I did the same thing and just click outside
of that text, then did insert, it adds the French version of that text separately. If you click
the double arrows it actually swaps the order so that it now converts it in reverse and so
it's taking our French text that we just created converting it back to English and
I can click somewhere and Insert that. You'll notice that it changed some of
the wording a little bit in the translation. If you were to choose the entire document it could
do an auto detect of the language. Convert it into whatever language you choose from the list and it
translates and creates a completely new document. There are additional settings available here where
you can offer to translate the content that isn't in a language I read, Yes or No and you can add
additional languages. There are a number available in Microsoft Office. Translator is a great
tool to work with different languages in Word. #30 Scroll Zoom. You're probably used to using
the mouse wheel to scroll up and down in your document but you can hold the Ctrl key down
and use the same wheel to zoom-in and zoom-out of the document. Congratulations you've made it
through three-fourths of the tips and tricks list. The rest will continue in 15 seconds but please
take a moment right now to subscribe to Sele Training and click the Bell icon to get notified
when new videos are released. Don't forget the entire 40 tips and tricks list is in the
description of this video with hyperlinks to each. Now let's get back to it. #31 Get Add-Ins. Office
Add-Ins is a tool that's available for Microsoft Office users. You can access it by going to
the Insert tab and clicking on Get Add-Ins. Here you'll find a number of add-ins that can be
installed into your Microsoft Word application. There are many different ones available
including one of my favorites which is QR4Office. This add-in allows you to create 3D
barcodes and insert them into Word. With most of these add-ins you just click the add button
install it. It opens the add-in and the next time you want to access it you can go to my add-ins
to see which ones you have installed. There are thousands of add-ins available. If you do a search
you'll find one that I'm sure will work for you. #32 Show Formatting. As you work with Microsoft
Word sometimes it's helpful to see the formatting that you might have applied to different areas
of your text. You can access that from the Home tab by clicking this button right here to show the
formatting. You can see that there's a dot between each representing a space. This is a
carriage return, This is a paragraph and you can see where page breaks are as well.
You can edit in this mode if it's helpful and when you're done you can just turn
it back off. It's useful when you can't quite get the formatting right and
you need to see what's in there. #33 Microsoft Editor. With the change
from Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365 in the summer of 2020, Microsoft added a new tool
called Editor. It works similar to Grammarly in that it checks your document and gives you grammar
suggestions, spell check, and other features. It's available from the Home tab. Just click on
Editor with the document that you have open and it goes through and makes suggestions. Here it's
suggesting a grammar change. When you click on it, it tells you that this "for example" should have
a comma after. Select that, it makes the change, and you move on to the next
grammar check if there are any. It's a great tool to help you improve your writing
skills. I'll also mention that if you go to File, Options, in proofing check this box to
Show Readability Statistics and hit OK. Then when you're checking your document
with the Editor it also brings up this readability statistics page and gives you
a bunch of information about your document including the grade level of your writing.
A great way to improve your writing skills. #34 AutoText. AutoText is a way to
store frequently used phrases and insert them into your Word document. You
can access it by going to the Insert tab, under Quick Parts. First thing you need to do
is highlight the text that you want to store, click on the Quick Parts, go to AutoText, and
save the selection to the auto text gallery. Here it allows you to create a new
building block. You give it a name, you can select which gallery you want to store
it as but we'll do auto text. You can choose the General or Create a New Category. You can give
it a more detailed description, you can save this under Normal or under Building Blocks, and you
can choose how you want to insert this data into your word document - Just the Content, or put
it In its Own Paragraph, or On its own Page. Hit OK and now when you're working in
a document you want to insert autotext just come up here to Quick Parts, select it from
the menu, and it inserts it for you. If you want to organize these autotext you can come back
into the Quick Parts area, go to the Building Blocks Organizer, and you'll see a list of all
the building blocks including the autotext. There's the entry we created. You can delete it
or edit it and manage everything right there. AutoText is a great way to speed up
the creation of your Word documents. #35 Keep Text Only. There are two quick methods to
removing the formatting on text in your document. One is to highlight the text,
right-click, and copy it, and then right-click and paste it to
a new location. But when you paste it choose this Keep Text Only. That removes all the
formatting. The other is to highlight your text and on the Home tab choose this button right here
to clear all formatting. You'll notice that it cleared everything but it did not do the highlight
area. Choose the option that works best for you. #36 Search. Microsoft has enhanced the
search capability in all of the Office Apps and at the top of Word there is a search
option. Here you see your recently used Actions, Suggested Actions, Recent Searches, and Files
that you've opened up recently. If you type in a topic that you want to search for it gives
you actions from the menu that include that word and even gives you the definition from Bing. If
you find the action that you want you can click on it and trigger it directly from this menu
or you can do more search results from the web. So don't forget to use the search
capability at the top of Word. #37 File Open & Repair. Occasionally when you try
to open a document in Word it'll give you an error message saying the file is corrupt. There is a
way in Word that you can try to solve this issue. Go to File, Open, and choose
Browse to find your file location. Select the file but don't open it yet. Come down
here to where it says Open and hit the down-arrow and choose Open and Repair. This will scan
through your document and it'll try to make any corrections if it finds corruption. Once
the documents open then you can turn around and save it under a different name and fix
those errors. #38 Set Default Font. Have you ever wanted to change the default setting on your
fonts when you open up a new document. There's a way to do that by opening up your Font settings,
select the font that you want to change it to, select the Font Size and any other settings
you want, and Set as Default. It will prompt you to do it for this document only or for
all documents based on the normal template. We're going to select all documents and hit
OK. Not only can you change the default fonts but you can also come over here to the Advanced
tab and you can set the Scale and different settings for your documents and those will be
set as defaults as well. You have to close out of Word and open it back up again but then
it will default to your new font settings. #39 Split Into Columns. You can easily split
your text into multiple columns in Word. Just select the text that you want or Ctrl-A
to select everything, go up to the Layout tab, and select Columns, pick the number of columns
you want, and it splits it into those columns. To format it to make it look a little
better you may want to justify the text and now you have two even columns. #40 Embed a Spreadsheet. Did you know
you can insert a spreadsheet directly into your Word document. Just go
to the Insert tab, select Object, and pick Microsoft Excel Worksheet from
the list. There's a number of different items available here that you can import from
but we'll hit OK on this Excel spreadsheet. It inserts a table in Word and opens
up Excel. Now when you fill in data and close the worksheet it inserts that
data directly into your document. You can double-click this to open Excel again but here's
a trick. This time we're going to go to File, Save As, and hit Browse, and give
this file a name, and save it. Now when you make changes to your numbers it
changes them directly into your document because your Word document is linked directly to the
spreadsheet. You can even update this worksheet separately from your Word document and the next
time you open it, it will show your new data. Hey if you want to see more videos like this one
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