Microsoft Word Tips to Smooth out your Work Formatting, Printing

Microsoft Word Tips to Smooth out your Work Formatting, Printing and Paginating

Here is an ever-popular area to direct our tip-generating machine at - Microsoft Word. Microsoft's blockbuster Office package is the world's most widely used productivity suite; but the fact that Office is from Microsoft means one thing for certain - things can be a bit unintuitive; and a set of Microsoft Word tips never goes wasted.

Let's get started with some Microsoft Word tips that should come in handy when your text doesn't format the way you like it. Everyone knows that Word (or even any free word processor for that matter) lets you format what you've written with fonts, bullet points, indented text, lists and tables. But it's easy to let these tools run away with you, and to end up with a document that has too many complicatedlooking formatting embellishments and too many gimmicks cluttering up your space. If you feel you got the makeup on a little too thick, there is a way to take all the formatting away, and to just start over with plain text. You just highlight the text you need to see stripped of all its formatting, and depress Ctrl+Space, and voila! you're back to plain old text.

How about the formatting you get when you copy and paste a webpage you like into Word? Is there a way to get the text, but not the formatting? Well, help is at hand with Word. You need to choose Paste Special, instead of the regular Paste. You will find this on the edit menu, and you'll also find it on the Home command tab under Paste. You get a little dialog box that allows you to choose your kind of Paste - and you can just choose "Unformatted".

Anyone who runs a small business needs to print addresses out on envelopesfrom time to time. People are often a little mixed up over where exactly you go in Word to do this, and they wonder if you need a specialized printer. These Microsoft Word tips should do the trick for you. What you do is, you choose the Envelopes tool on Word. You just go to the Tools menu, pick Letters and Mailing, and then further on, pick Envelopes and Labels. A dialog box opens up, and you enter the address you have in mind in the box that says Shipping Address. If you have a return address, that goes in the appropriate field too. You don't need a special printer for this. But you will need to adjust the plastic paper tray guides to make sure that your envelopes are all nice and straight.

Here's a final tip on our way out, on how the pagination on Word works. By default, Word numbers every page at the bottom. Sure, you can change them from bottom to top individually on each page. But how do you change the default setting? You just need to go change the defaults on Word's Normal template. But that is kind of a drastic solution. A less intrusive way to go about it would be to make your own custom template. This way, Word won't go chage the page number location for every single document you create. Just open a new document, have everything changed exactly as you want, margins, fonts, page numbers and anything else, but save that as a Word template, and not as a.doc file, and there you go.