What great tips, shortcuts and other ingenious things have you learnt to do in WORD? Share them here!

[OverMyDeadBody]

Because I know I'm not using word to its full potential, and would really like to learn more.

My favourites (this is basic stuff!) that I've noticed others don't always use are the keyboard shortcuts for bold, italic and underline. Just hold down shift and press b for bold, of shift and u for underline, or shift and i for italics.

What have you got?

Oh God yes it is a bit like an american nanny, I quickly and quietly executed that blardy paperclick when it dared appear on my screen .

I've also undone all the automatic styling and have saved my own instead. If word even thinks about changing something without my consent it gets a torent of abuse from me.

Ctrl [ and ] makes the size bigger or smaller on my computer.

What do you do snowleopard? I have used Quark pretty extensively, but never could edit in it.

I work on a lot of children's non-fiction books with lots of pics and little labels and captions.

lol snowleopard that was me when the paperclip dared to appear!

You can disable all the 'helpful' bossiness though, and customise it quite a lot.

I have never worked with Quark so can't compare really.

Quark and Word aren't really comparable products though are they? One is aimed at professional publishing work while the other is more your general business docs, letters etc.. ...if you're using Quark to produce letters then you definitely want to check into one of those nice padded cells and put on a nice jacket with arms that fasten at the back.. ..same goes if you're trying to do DTP stuff in Word!

Threadworm - they keyboard is better casue your ginfers are already on the keyborad if you are typing stuff.

I find it really irritiating to have to keep taking hand off the keyboard onto the mouse to do something.

My personal favourites are "Contrl C" for copying selected text, and "Contrl V" for pasting said selection.

Oh I agree that Quark is excellent once you get to page layout stage, esp. with illustrated books.

roffle at geekboy!

You are wrong geekboy, wrong! Doing a letter/simple document in Quark is great because what you write stays where you put it. I can add a lovely letterhead with a logo and not worry it's going to move around. I can control exactly where everything goes on the page. I can put in a photo with ease if I want to.

Conversely, you can actually do DTP in Word - you can use it to make leaflets, booklets, birthday cards etc. It's just very difficult because it keeps interfering, but it does have all those facilities.

my logo, leterheads, and pictures never move around on word! They stay where I put them.

You must have managed to turn off a bossing function that I haven't. I put a pic in word, if it decides it's too close to the edge of the page or something it moves it to another page, or creates a new page, instead of just letting move it. Aaaararrgggh!

double click on the logo/picture/image after inserting it, choose layout and then click 'behind text'. You can then position it exactly where you want it using the arrow keys.

ooh - great thread - just what I need - could anyone tell me how to make a booklet in Word? I have one to do for church and normal they are only 4 pages so I do them 2 sides to a page but I have some for Easter that are longer and I can't work out how to do that!

Thanks OMDB!

I didn't say you couldn't, only that you shouldn't! You can use a trowel to dig a swimming pool but it's not really the tool for the job, similarly, using a tractor and plough to turn over your vegetable patch is probably overkill - both tools will do the job the their appropriateness for the task might be questioned!

Word is a wordprocessor that you can also use to do DTP,but DTP is not what it was designed to do (hence the lack of typography helpers, ability to properly flow text around images (fine for squares/rectangles) and the sort of thing...). Quark CAN do simple letters etc but its great strength is DTP.. :-p

Ahem - you didn't say I couldn't, just that if I did I should be locked up

You're just jealous of my stunningly silky quark skills I'll warrant.

Can someone explain what mail-merge is all about and why I might use it?

have a letter you need to send to a gazillion people? Have a big list of contacts in outlook/excel/access/similar? Want to personalised those letters? If you answered yes to all those questions then Mail Merge is for you!

Basically it's a way of merging information from a database/spreadsheet with a document. Letters are a popular thing to send to lots of people, hence mail merge..

Not all DTP software is expensive, try Scribus. I've heard good things about it, but I haven't used it.

Thank you Geekboy! Yes I send lots of letters, I just manually change the name/address etc. How did I not know about this before!? [ignorant imoticon]

Cheers, will be mailmerging this afternoon!