Things to do with Word You Might not Know About

Microsoft Word is probably the software that almost everyone uses and associates with using a computer. Microsoft Word 2013 adds some important features. You can try these features on other versions, but they may only work on MS Word 2013.



Only in Microsoft Word 2013 - Edit and save PDFs directly in Word. If you have a .pdf document that you want to edit first open up MS Word 2013 (you have to upgrade if you have an earlier version). Then choose FILE>OPEN and find the .pdf. It will open in Word and you will be able to edit it and then Save As .pdf. It will save your changes!

These are TABS

If you like using TABS to switch between windows in a browser, now you can do the same thing with different documents that you have open at the same time. Just download this free add on. It will work with older versions of Word. If you have Microsoft Word 2013 you will have to purchase a $25 copy.





Use different Key Strokes or clicks to easily select different amounts of text. Triple Clicking anywhere in a paragraph selects the whole paragraph. Control Clicking anywhere in a sentence will select the whole sentence. Holding the Alt Key and Dragging your mouse over any rectangular space will select the specific text that you drag over.

Microsoft Sky Drive is the place that Microsoft has created for saving things online. If you have images saved in this location and are using Word 2013 you can choose pictures directly from the Sky Drive to put into your document.

Have you ever seen a document sample with "lorum ipsum...... " latin words? Those are place holder words which help you to visualize what a document will look like after you replace those words with your own. With Word 2013 you can generate your own placeholder text. When you are in a document type =rand(p,l) and press enter. The p stands for paragraphs, so you put a number instead of the p that indicates how many paragraphs you want to generate. The l (L) stands for how many lines you want the paragraph to be.

Words dictionary - You may not realize that when Word does a spell check it is checking words that are already in its dictionary. If you want more words in the dictionary you can add them one by one. If you type in a word that the program thinks is misspelled, but you know it is correct you can right click the word and choose "add to dictionary". That word will be added and it will not show up as misspelled any more. You can also download Bing's Dictionary for Word 2013. If you have Word 2013 you can go to this link to download the add on. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/store/bing-dictionary-english-WA103136166.aspx?redir=0

Toggle between word cases - It often happens to me that I leave my caps lock on and find I am typing all in caps when I did not mean to be. The other side is that sometimes I am done typing, but decide that a word should be Capitalized or in all lower case. After highlighting the words you can just click SHIFT and F3 at the same time and it will toggle between ALL CAPS, Camel Case (Where The First Letter Of Every Word Is Capitalized) and lowercase.

Recover Unsaved Documents - Have you ever experienced the horror of closing a document you were working on and then realizing that you had not saved it? I think we all have.  In Word 2013 click "File" and then "info" and then "manage version" and you will have a choice to "recover unsaved documents". Click on that and then find the one you want to save and do that right away!

These ideas come from:

http://www.cmitsolutions.com/corporate/blog/10-tips-tricks-apps-and-add-ins-supercharge-microsoft-word#list

Working with Several Open Windows

When you are working on a computer you can have SEVERAL programs open at the same time. Each program shows up in a WINDOW. Usually they fill the whole screen, but sometimes they are smaller boxes. At the top is an example of two windows that are open at the same time.

You can open several things and easily switch between them by clicking on the icons that show they are open.

No matter what kind of computer you have or what operating system you use there is some way to do this. It looks different on each one.

On a Mac each of your programs shows up on the dock.

The white dots below the programs show which ones are open. If you have too many things open your computer begins to run slowly. You can close them by either going to each application that is open and choosing to Quit or by holding your mouse down on the icon long enough for a menu to appear and choose Quit.

PC's do the same thing differently. On the bottom bar anything that is open shows up. If you have several windows open you can switch between them using the buttons on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. The button that is dark is the one that you are currently using. To switch click on the one that you want to work on.

Browsers also have ways that you can open several websites at the same time and then switch between them. These are called TABS. If you find your computer is running slowly you may want to check how many tabs or programs you have open.

You can also resize windows so that you can see more than one window at a time. Some programs have a choice to "arrange all" and will automatically arrange all of the windows you have open in that particular program.

Every window has a way that you can manually resize it by rolling over an edge or corner and dragging it in to make the window the size you want it to be.

On a Mac there are lines on the corner and you can drag that to change your window size. On a PC you can do this on the edges or the corner. Watch to see how your mouse arrow changes into a double arrow before dragging.