One of the most powerful features in Microsoft Word is the field. It’s a topic on which I don’t go into detail in my book, Word For Dummies, mostly because I don’t have the pages. Still, you gain a lot of power from Word once you understand how useful fields can be.
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Like many complex things, when Microsoft Word decides to get weird, it does so with expert precision. Fortunately, Word contains a few tricks to help you fix annoying problems.
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My Word For Dummies books don’t cover the topic of file management. If they did, I’d have less room in the book to write about word processing, which is kind of important. File management remains a valid topic, however, so I thought I’d show you some Word file management tricks in this post.
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It’s not hidden, yet you may have never used the feature. I’m talking about the Text Effects and Typography command in Word. It can really do some crazy things to your document’s text.
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I see a lot of documents where the watermark feature is used. Mostly it displays the text “Draft” diagonally on the background of every page. That trick’s pretty easy to figure out, but it’s not the limit of what you can do with Word’s watermark feature.
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Above you see the title page from my proposal for Samsung Galaxy Note For Dummies. That’s the first page of a Word document. It’s completely formatted without using two presses of the Enter key in a row. You too can create such title pages as well, providing you learn the secret.
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A word processor is a blessing, a massive improvement over writing by hand or by using a typewriter. Even so, most people who use a word processor slog through it just as if it’s an automated typewriter. Of all the foibles they commit, three rise to the level of great sin.
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Years ago, an Outliner was a separate type of program you could buy. It was a thought-organizer, and a very handy tool for anyone who deals with lots of information that has to be arranged in a logical and effective manner. Today, the Outliner is a feature — a subset, actually — of a word processor. That doesn’t diminish its usefulness.
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If you’re the only one working on a document, great. You know what you’ve changed, and you’ve probably changed it because you want it that way. But in the world of collaboration, revision marks become necessary. That’s when things can get ugly, not only emotionally but visually as well.
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