Top tips on working with Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is an integral tool for businesses around the world but, as with most professional software packages, it is packed full of features most users simply do not know about. 

And with every business looking to increase the productivity of its staff, learning some small, quick shortcuts and features can really help speed up workflows and better develop their key skills.

With this in mind, we have detailed a few of our favourites to help you increase productivity when working with Microsoft’s flagship word processing package.

Select paragraphs quickly

When proofreading your work you may realise you want a particular paragraph to be bold, italicised or have a different font size. To do this, you may think the quickest solution would be to manually highlight the text and then perform your operation, however, if you triple click anywhere in the paragraph, the whole unit will be highlighted.

The same theory applies for selecting sentences, but rather than triple-clicking however, all you need to do is press the Ctrl key and click the sentence you wish to modify.

Change the case

IT CAN BE REALLY ANNOYING WHEN YOU START TYPING and then realise halfway through a sentence that your Caps Lock button is on, meaning you have to delete your sentence and retype it in the correct case. There is however, a quicker and easier solution. Select the offending text and press Shift and F3 to toggle the case between UPPERCASE, lowercase and so-called Camel Case – where the first letter of every word is capitalised.

Quickly change text to plain text

When you copy and paste something from the internet or a file into a Word document, all the formatting – such as the font colour, size and style – is retained. Changing the text to ape the rest of your document can be a time-consuming process involving scrolling through several menus, however, if you press the Ctrl and space keys any highlighted text will be transformed into plain text, getting rid of any awkward spacing, sizing and colouring the text once had.

Easily add placeholder text

While ‘lorem ipsum dolor sit amet’ may sound like nonsense, sometimes it is easier to design a document before the copy is ready to put in it. In those instances, so-called placeholder text, or ‘lorem copy’, can be handy.

Type =lorem() to insert random Latin words to form a placeholder for future reference. And if you know how much copy you would like to add in later, you can always specify the amount of placeholder copy required by adding the number of paragraphs you would like followed by a comma and the number of lines you want each paragraph to contain – =lorem(3,2) meaning three paragraphs of two lines, for example.

Move text without copying and pasting

Most people copy and paste text when they want to move paragraphs around, however, there is another way – highlight the text, press F2, place the mouse where you want the text to appear and hit enter. Job done.

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