Word help

Microsoft Word is a powerful tool to create professional looking documents. This tutorial will help you get started with Microsoft Word and may solve some of your problems, but it is a very good idea to use the Help Files that come with Microsoft Word.

Managing numbered headings and outline numbering in anything but the simplest of Microsoft Word documents can easily drive you crazy. You seem to go round and round in circles, and never end up with what you want. And just when you get close, it falls to pieces.

Have you ever tried pasting from someone else's documents into your own, or even just changing the page margins, or the font; and found that their tabbed lists no longer line up – so you have to waste a lot of time reformatting them? If so, it's because the person who created the document didn't use tabs properly.

When you open a new blank document in Word, you begin typing at the left side of the screen/page and continue typing to the right margin, where Word wraps your text back to the left so you can start again. All your lines of text are full width. But sometimes you need to divide your text into two or more columns.

The Microsoft Word Help suggests that you can automatically generate an index. Sorry, but you can't (the "result" looks like an index, but the reader can't use it). You can automatically mark index entries: however, the amount of work required to edit the result into a useable index is usually double the effort required to manually mark the index entries one-by-one.

Versions of Word prior to Word 2002 don't provide any built-in way to do booklets, although Word 2000 does allow you to print more than one logical page on a physical page. The good news is that Word 2002 has the built-in ability to print booklets with automatically numbered pages.

Word automatically converts text you type into fraction characters. Unless you have disabled the feature in Tools | AutoCorrect (Options) | AutoFormat As You Type, whenever you type 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4, Word substitutes the ¼, ½, or ¾ font character. These three characters are found in virtually all fonts, so this feature works reliably. Users often ask whether it is possible to get Word to “create” other fractions in a similar format. Well, yes and no.