The Secret of Microsoft Word

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Other tips for Windows 2000.

For Starters:

1. Ctrl-Z is Undo. Made a mistake? Made several? Just keep pressing Ctrl-Z until its all better.

2. Use Ctrl-S to save files. Use it often. Use Tools, Options, Save Tab and select "Save Autorecovery" option.

3. Ctrl-Home goes to the top of document, Ctrl-End to the End. Ctrl-PageDown or Page Up are the top of next and previous pages.

4. You can work menus from the keyboard, press Alt and the letter that is underlined on the menu. So Alt-F selects the File Menu. Keep the Alt key pressed and follow up with the next letter. So for Save As you would go Alt, F, A.

5. You can select text with the Shift key. Hold down the Shift key then move around the document using arrows, page up/down etc.

6. To select a word you can double click on it.

7. To select a sentence hold down Ctrl and click on the sentence.

8. To select a paragraph. Triple-click within the paragraph or move the mouse just past the left margin of the paragraph. When the pointer changes to a right-pointing arrow, double-click to select the whole paragraph.

9. To select a table hold down Alt and double-click anywhere in the table.

10. Select the whole document (great for cut and paste, or whole document formatting) use Ctrl-A.

11. Grow and shrink fonts with Ctrl+> and Ctrl+<

12. Experiment with Print Envelopes options - a lot depends on your printer, but you may be able to get good results for envelope printing - which sure beats handwriting them.

13. Right-click on words that are misspelled and MS-Word gives you its choices. Click on Add if the word is genuinely OK, no need to keep reviewing it.

14. Use Shift=F7 to view the thesaurus for the currently selected word.

15. Righ click usually presents options commonly used for your current selection. So right click on a table and you get table options. Right-click on text and you get common text options.

16. Often when cut and pasting text from another program like Access, Excel or Explorer you get the text formatting too, even when you don't want it. Try Edit, Paste Special and select Unformatted Text instead.

    Advanced Users

17. Turn on the visibility of paragraph markers and tabs. Click on the Show/Hide button (the funny P shape). This will help enormously in formatting Word documents.

18. Remember you can use AutoText as a speed typer. Why not set W2K to auto-correct to Windows 2000?

19. If you need to delete the contents of all the cells in a table, select the table (Alt and Double-click) then Delete (not backspace).

20. You can quickly total columns in a table, just place the cursor in the last cell of the column, then select Table, Formula and select the SUM default provided. Warning. It only sums up to the first non-numeric cell - this stops at blank cells.

21. Use F9 to recalculate a field

22. Use Alt-F9 top toggle Field codes and Results.

23. You can add page borders. select Format, Borders and Shading then click the page border tab.

24. YOu can double click the left end of the status bar to bring up the GOTO tab to jump to specific locations.

25. Make ragged text line up by turning on hyphenation - Tools, Hyphenate. But be careful how you use this, sometimes hyphenation looks desparately tacky.

26. Use Ctrl-F6 to swap between open documents - works like Alt-Tab does for windows. New improved Office 2000 runs Alt-Tab anyway.