Microsoft Word tips and tricks

Evidently the chap who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going was not a practical sort of fellow. Quite unlike us who dote on the shortest route to success with application like MS Word.

Our series on making you an expert at Microsoft Word continues with more tips and tricks for the world’s most ubiquitous word processing application.

Formatting Killer
Want to kill all formatting in Word doc? Select the whole document by pressing Ctrl+A, or select just a portion of the document that you want to remove formatting from, And simply press Ctrl+Shift+N.

Password Protection
To prevent all and sundry from opening sensitive Word document, open the file you want to protect. Select Tools > Option and click on the Security tab. Against the “Password to open” box, type in your password and click on the OK. In the “Reenter password to open” box, key in the password again. Click on the OK. If you want a more than 15-character password, hit the ‘Advanced’ button and select RC4 encryption. Remember, these passwords are case-sensitive. And just ensure that you never forget the password…

Professor Calculus Here!
If you need to do a lot of calculation in Word, do not flap your arms around looking for a calculator, or sit around sighting with pencil and paper. Use Word’s calculator. First add the Tools Calculate button to your Word toolbar. Click on the Tools in the Word menu. Or right-click on the toolbar. Then click on Customize. In the Commands tab, find Tools in the left pane (Categories) and click on it. Next, in the right pane (Commands), scroll down the tool calculate, click on it and drag it to your Word menu, placing it between the existing icons. Releasing the mouse button creates the toolbar button. Close to the Customize dialog box. Now for calculations in your Word doc, select the numbers you want to add/subtract/multiply etc. and click the Tools Calculate button. You will see the total in the status bar below.

Where's that file?
Want Word to remember more than just five of your recent documents that appear that the bottom of the file drop down menu? Select Tools > Options, and click on the General tab. Next to the text “Recently used file list”, key in 9. Click on OK.

Need for Speed
If you have a slow PC, navigating and editing complex Word docs can be a real drag. To speed up the display, you can choose view your document in a draft font. This really speeds up screen rendering by hiding all complex screen formatting while retaining all the content intact.
For this, go to Tools > Option and select the view tab. Here, check the “Draft Font” box to enable it and click on OK. Then in the Word menu, click on View >Normal. Now you entire document will appears in a draft font with basic formatting like bold, italic, or underlined text. The change is only in the onscreen appearance of the document; the original formatting of the document is retained.

Table Magic
You can easily create a table in Word 2003 without clicking and editing data in each and every cell. To do this you need to key in you table data in a ‘comma-delimited format’. And that means something as simple as this:
Abhishek, 101
Rani, 95
Vivek, 94
Kiran, 76
John, 89

Highlight this text. In the Word menu go to Table > Insert >Table. That’s it. You can also work on its appearance via the Table > Table Auto format command to apply various style, or edit the table’s display properties manually.