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Some Tips and Gotchas
for those who are new to Word
Especially if migrating from WordPerfect
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Article contributed by Dave Rado and Suzanne S. Barnhill
1. Tips
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1.
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Take the time to learn how to use templates and styles properly
they are the most powerful features in Word and will save you many,
many hours. See Creating a Template The Basics (Part I)
and How to save yourself hours by using Outline View properly.
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2.
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Read all of the articles on our Tutorials
page (or at least all of the non-VBA ones).
If migrating from WordPerfect, pay particular attention to John
McGhie's article on the difference between
Word and WordPerfect.
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3.
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Take the time to explore all of the menus in Word (and the dialogs they
bring up) to learn the features available and the terminology used for
them. One hour doing this will save you
many, many hours over the following weeks and months.
If in doubt, press Shift+F1
and click on a menu item or click on a dialog item and press Shift+F1
for more information.
When a dialog box is open, you can also right-click on any item in the
dialog and select
“What's This?”.
Or you can click on the ? button at
the top right of the dialog:

and click on an item.
Usually all three methods do the same thing, (a call-out is displayed,
giving more information); but very occasionally, for
example when you click on a Field name in the Insert | Fields dialog, the
mouse methods launch the relevant Help topic whereas the keyboard method
doesn't, unfortunately. For this reason, if you want to stick to one
method, the Right-click “What's
This?” method is
perhaps the best.
If using Word 2000, select Tools | Customize, and on the Options tab, de-select
Menus show
recently used commands first”.
Otherwise you are likely never to discover many of Word's most useful
commands, because you'll never see them! And if you see a dialog with a More”
button, click on it and explore the options it reveals.
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4.
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Follow this link for a description of some
of Word's most useful shortcuts and how to use them. The paper
you print this list onto will be worth its weight in gold to you, if you
learn and use them! Perhaps especially the shortcuts for selecting text.
You can also get a complete list of keyboard shortcuts by selecting Tools
| Macro | Macros, where it says
“Macros in”, select
“Word Commands”,
select the command called “ListCommands”
and press “Run”.
(I got this tip from Beth Melton, who also suggests pasting the resulting table into Excel, so that you can apply filters and make it more
readable).
Alternatively, you might find the following more useful: Word commands, and their descriptions, default shortcuts and menu assignments
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5.
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Select Insert | Field and spend some time exploring all the Field Names
on
the dialog. Many of them are a godsend. Click the Options button (Word
97 and 2000) to
see and insert the supported switches. (In Word 2002, you can see them in the
main dialog.)
To launch the Help topic about a particular field, right-click on it
and select What's
This?
Or, if you have already inserted the
field, right-click on it and select Toggle
Field Codes to
display the field codes rather than the field results; click in the field name and press
F1; you'll see a list of Help
topics, one of which will be the topic about the field you've inserted.
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6.
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Look up Sections in Help. You can't use Word for anything serious
without understanding how these work. See also Working with sections.
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2.
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Gotchas
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1.
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Much heartache can be avoided if you select Tools | AutoCorrect, and on
the
Autoformat as you type
and Autoformat
tabs, de-select most of the options. For more information on this, follow
this link.
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2.
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Make sure the Help
for WordPerfect users
and Navigation
keys for WordPerfect users
in Tools | Options | General are not selected. For one thing, they
don't work in the way WordPerfect (and especially WordPerfect for
Windows) users expect them to (they seem to be based on WordPerfect
for DOS); for another, they
will simply slow down the process of getting to know the Word
way of doing things,
so your learning curve will be much steeper; and thirdly, you will get
some very odd behaviour with these options switched on: for instance, see the
following article.
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3.
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Make sure Allow
fast saves is
switched off (under Tools | Options | Save).
Fast Save (which should really be renamed Fast
Corrupt!) works by
appending changes made since the last save to the end of the file, while retaining all of the
original information. The more times it does so, the more tenuous the link
becomes between objects (such as paragraphs, tables etc) and their
properties (such as formatting and text) until sooner or later the whole thing
goes bang and bits of your masterpiece are splattered far and wide. Think
burst balloon.
The larger the document, the more likely the Fast Save feature is to
cause a corruption. Don't use it ever.
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4.
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Never use Master
Documents.
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5.
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Never use Versions.
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6.
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Avoid the Document Map, which also tends to corrupt documents
(especially in Word 97). Use Outline View
instead.
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7.
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Never save to a floppy; this is also a very frequent cause of
file corruptions. If you must use a floppy, copy the file to it using
Windows Explorer or select Send
to, which you can
do even from Word's File | Open and File | Save dialogs rather than using File | Save As. And perform a full format
on the floppy first.
When you save a Word file, a large temporary file is created, and if
this is too large to fit on the floppy a corruption is likely to result.
See MSKB article Q89247, How
Word for Windows Uses Temporary Files,
for more information on this.
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8.
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Avoid Word's List Numbering (under Format | Bullets and
numbering) unless you're sure you know what you're doing. Manual numbering
works; so do SEQ fields. But Word's automated list numbering contains more bugs than a compost
heap. It is possible to work around the bugs, and some
articles on how to tame them and make Word's list numbering work for
you will appear on this site shortly.
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9.
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If using Page X of Y page numbering, see the
following article.
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