Word Start Page

The pages in the Word section were written to help you make Word work for you. They can show you how to perform your tasks in the quickest and easiest way, minimize your pain and frustration in performing unfamiliar tasks, deal with unexpected strange phenomena, save time by performing some tasks in a simple way using advanced features, and more.

The following list of the topics currently available in the Word section includes brief descriptions of the content of each page. A list of links to these pages is also provided on every page in the Word section. If you would like to know which pages are visited most frequently by other users, see Top Five.

The User Interface: Word's graphical user interface includes elements, such as the Ribbon or menus and toolbars, which can help you to quickly find the way to perform a task without having to search for documentation and read it. However, there may also be keyboard shortcuts for performing tasks that you need to perform frequently or repetitively in a quicker and easier way.
Opening Documents: There are different ways to open existing documents. In general, the quickest way to open a document depends on whether the document was recently opened or not. Large documents may take a long time to open. This is usually normal, but sometimes it may be necessary to repair a document when you open it.
Tables Made Easier: This page focuses on the easiest, quickest, and most reliable ways to perform tasks related to tables, such as creating a new table, moving about and selecting part or all of a table, adding rows, adding columns, moving rows, moving columns, deleting parts or all of a table, and repeating the header row.
Searching: After a brief introduction to Word's Find and Replace feature and a description of a simple search, this page describes in detail how to perform some advanced types of searches that find all instances of the search string, special characters and nonprinting characters, and formatted text and how to use wildcards. The last section tells you what to do when Word cannot find something that you can clearly see is in your document.
Selecting: A brief introduction and a review of the basic techniques for selecting text are followed by a description of how to use the F8 key to extend a selection to a specific location in your document, how to select a large block of text by searching for a specific location in your document, and how to select multiple nonadjacent words or blocks of text.
Font Formatting: After quickly listing the various types of formatting that can be applied to characters, words, phrases, and larger blocks of text, this page emphasizes that font formatting can often be a highly repetitive task. In such cases, you can benefit greatly from using keyboard shortcuts, which let you work like a touch typist by eliminating the need to move your hands away from the keyboard and your eyes away from your work. This page also describes how to use the Search and Replace feature to apply specific formatting to a word or phrase throughout a document, how to add a colored background and borders, and how to create formatting effects, such as an overline and a dropped initial capital letter, that are not available as font formatting options in the Font dialog box.
Paragraph Formatting: The types of formatting that can be applied to paragraphs include alignment, line spacing, indents, paragraph spacing, borders, shading, control of automatic page breaks, and tab stops. Paragraph formatting is set in various elements of the user interface, including the Paragraph groups in Word 2010 and Word 2007, the Formatting toolbar and menus in Word 2003, the Paragraph dialog box, and the Tabs dialog box. There are also shortcut keys for quickly applying paragraph formatting.
Applying Styles: Word provides various types of styles that can be applied to different elements of a document. This page describes the various techniques that you can use to apply styles quickly and easily, when to use a style separator, some things that you should know about the automatic updating of styles, and how to modify predefined styles that are not used in your document.
Copying and Pasting: The Office clipboard can help you to copy and paste items into your documents with greater ease and speed in many common scenarios. This page describes how to use the Office clipboard and provides detailed instructions for performing tasks in the Clipboard task pane.
Special Characters: The characters that word classifies as special characters, which include both special symbols and some nonprinting characters, can be inserted into your document by opening the Symbol dialog box and double-clicking the name of the applicable character on the Special Characters tab. They can also be inserted by pressing the applicable shortcut key listed on the Special Characters tab. Many of the special characters have codes that can be used to search for them in a document.
Showing Page Numbers: After introducing the PAGE, NUMPAGES, PAGEREF, SECTIONPAGES, and SECTION fields, this page presents several short tutorials that illustrate the techniques for creating customized types of page numbering in the specific cases of displaying page numbers that start after front matter, displaying pages numbers along with a second series of numbers, and displaying the same page number on side-by-side pages.
Inserting Dates and Times: This page describes the use of the DATE, CREATEDATE, SAVEDATE, PRINTDATE, and QUOTE fields for displaying various dates and times related to a document and provides detailed information about the switches and codes that you can use to specify how the dates and times are displayed.
Bookmarks: the Basics: This page defines bookmarks, describes their principal uses and then provides detailed instructions for creating or deleting a bookmark, linking to bookmarks, changing the content associated with a bookmark, and using bookmark brackets.
Bookmarks: Their Full Power: This page describes the REF field that Word creates for cross-references to bookmarked text in the same document, the field codes used in cross-references to other types of targets in the same document, the field code used for inserting the content of a bookmark from another document, additional things that can be done with cross-references to numbers, dates, and times, creating a cross-reference to a range of pages, adding an invisible bookmark in a SET field, and the shortcut keys for working with field codes
Sending E-Mail Messages: This page show how to set up and run a mail merge process that generates and sends individual personalized e-mail messages from a single Word document (the main document) and a list of recipients (the data source). Users who are not familiar with the steps required to set up and run a mail merge process can be assisted by the Mail Merge wizard. Experienced users can set up and run the mail merge process by using the Mailings tab on the Ribbon (Word 2007) or the Mail Merge toolbar (Word 2003).
Forms: This page describes the basic types of user forms and provides a guided tour of selected information and tutorials that others have written to help users create forms.
Word Macros: the Risk: This page describes the risks and dangers that macros may pose and how to avoid them and safely use macros to automate some of your work. Macros may contain malicious code or coding errors that can harm your data files and applications or install viruses on your computer. The risk in using macros from unreliable sources is magnified by the fact that malicious code can easily be inserted into macros that run automatically. Fortunately, Word 2010 and Word 2007, as well as Word 2003, provide security levels that control which macros will be allowed to run. With a properly selected security level, you can use macros safely.
Word Macros: the Benefits: This page demonstrates the benefits of macros by providing instructions for recording a simple macro that you may find useful and for assigning a keyboard shortcut to it. There are also procedures for modifying an existing macro by copying macro code as text from another source, and for renaming, deleting, and copying macros.
Preparing for Distribution: Sometimes you may pass a document on to other people, who open the document and see a document that differs from the document that you intended to distribute. This page describes ways to prevent the dates in a document from changing after distribution, to remove any colored wavy lines under words and phrases that indicate spelling or grammatical mistakes, and to prevent recipients from seeing any secrets, such as revisions, private comments, and hidden text, in documents that you distribute. There are also instructions for distributing Word 2007 documents to users with older versions of Word.
Mysterious Behavior: Many of the unexpected and mysterious phenomena that users encounter in their Word documents are caused by features that were intended to help users, but end up causing very unpleasant experiences when users are not aware that they have done something to activate them. This page tells how numbers can suddenly appear as a user is typing ordinary text, why L-shaped symbols may unexpectedly appear in the corners of every page of a document, how seemingly strange symbols can appear between words and at the end of lines, how various types of lines that stretch across the page can be unintentionally created, how content from an old document can appear in a new document, how the top margin can disappear from your document, how problems can appear overnight, and how whole paragraphs or pages of random or Latin text can suddenly appear.
Moving to the Ribbon: After an introduction that provides some tips that may ease the transition to Word 2007 from a previous version of Word, this page introduces the Quick Access Toolbar, details how to deal with the changes in the familiar AutoText feature, provides instructions for disabling the appearance of pop-ups automatic completion of dates, and describes how to manage the list of recent documents.
Shortcut Key Reference: Shortcut keys (or keyboard shortcuts) provide the fastest and easiest way to perform many tasks, especially tasks that you need to perform repeatedly. The problem with keyboard shortcuts is that we can remember only a relatively small number of them. This page is intended to be a reference that you can search in your browser at any time to quickly find the keyboard shortcuts that you want to use.

The MakeOfficeWork.com website does not have all the answers, but it can be the fastest gateway to the information that you need. If you do not quickly see a topic that relates to the issue that brought you here, use the Search Office Sites search box in the banner. The Search Office Sites search box confines your search to a customized list of websites that is sent to Microsoft Bing™ along with your query terms. These websites generally contain the most useful information about the Office products. When your search is limited to these websites, a high percentage of the search results will be related to your issue in Office even if your search terms are not specific to Office and would normally return numerous results that are not related to any Office product. Using the Search Office Sites search box can save you a lot of time.

You may also find the information that you are seeking by using the links to the other resources listed on the right. This list includes links to the Microsoft online help for Word 2010, Word 2007, and Word 2003, the MSDN Library, and websites that provide the content written by experts who have been granted the title of Most Valuable Professional (MVP) by Microsoft. If you still do not find the information that you are seeking, use one of the links to the Word forums to submit your question to the large community of users and experts. Almost every question submitted to these forums is answered within an amazingly short time.