Here are some tricks that will make working in Word easier.

a. To turn off the Office assistant:

1. Click Help > Microsoft Word Help on the menu bar.
2. Click the Options button.
3. Uncheck all of the boxes except Respond to F1key and Move when in the way.

b. To change the appearance of the Office Assistant:

1. Click the Gallery tab and choose a different office assistant.

2. Click OK.

c. To turn off automatic grammar and spell checking:

1. Click Tools > Options on the menu bar.
2. Click Spelling and Grammar tab.
3. Uncheck the Check spelling as you type and Check grammar as you type boxes
4. Click OK.

d. To select a whole section of text:

1. Click to place your cursor at the beginning of the section you want to select.
2. Using your scroll bar, scroll down to the where you can see the end of the section you want to select.
3. Hold down the SHIFT key and click once at the end of the selection. The whole section will be highlighted!

e. To fit text on a page:

Margins

1. Set all of the margins to 0
2. Choose Fix
3. Word will reset the margins for you to the minimum allowable margins for the printer you have selected. Make sure you’ve already selected the printer you want to use.

Font sizes

To use half-point font sizes:

1. Select the text you want to change
2. Click in the font size box on the formatting toolbar
3. Type in a size such as 11.5 or 10.5
4. Press ENTER.

Paragraph spacing

Instead of using a blank line to separate your paragraphs, reduce the amount of space in between your paragraphs and headings by using paragraph spacing.

1. Select the paragraph above or below which you would like to add space.
2. Click Format > Paragraph on the menu bar.
3. Under Spacing, select measurements in the Before and After boxes to add space above or below the paragraph. This spacing is measured in points, the same unit of measurement used for font sizes.
4. Click OK.

f. Speed tricks

• Double-click to select a word
• Triple-click to select a paragraph
• Drag highlighted text to move it instead of cutting and pasting
• Assign a keyboard shortcut to a frequently used formatting style
• To select vertical sections of text, hold down the ALT key while dragging over the text you want to highlight.
• To select whole rows of text, hold down the CTRL key while dragging over the text you want to highlight.

g. Formatting better & faster

First-line indents and Hanging indent

1. Select the text to format.
2. Click Format > Paragraph on the menu bar.
3. Under Indentation, choose measurements in the Left and Right boxes to indent the entire paragraph.
4. For a hanging indent, select Hanging from the Special box
5. Select a measurement.
6. For a first-line indent, select First line from the Special box
7. Select a measurement.
8. Click OK.

h. Page and section breaks

To get to the top of the next page, don’t press Enter until you get there! Instead, insert a Page Break.

To get to the top of the next column, insert a Column Break.

To change formatting styles within a single document such as having one page in landscape while the rest of the document is portrait, or having two columns in one part of the document while the rest is in a single column, insert a Section Break between these differing sections.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Click Insert > Break on the menu bar.
2. Select the type of break you want
3. Click OK.