I WANT to let you in on a secret: Word’s Find and Replace feature is an indispensable editing tool. Here are just a few ways you can use Find/Replace to improve your writing: Revise passive to active verb construction Find useless adverbs Discover unnecessary prepositional phrases Correct simple formatting problems, such […]
WHEN A WRITER HAS NOT YET LEARNED how to use Styles, she applies formatting manually. For example, to format a title, she might select the title, apply bold formatting, make it a slightly larger font size, and center it. Applying formatting in this manner is called “direct formatting.” If you […]
OF ALL THE FEATURES offered by word processing programs, you may be most familiar with formatting text and paragraphs — commonly changing fonts, bolding, italicizing, and underlining. In its essence, formatting involves selecting text and then applying a format command using menus or buttons. In this article, I’ll show you […]
IF YOU’VE BEEN A READER of mine for a while, you know that I’m a big fan of Evernote. I use Evernote for journaling (it has replaced all other journaling apps), storing files and correspondence, recipes, travel, blog posts, articles I want to read, and much, much more. In fact, I […]
IF YOU’VE BEEN following this series, understand of how page and section breaks can help you organize your document. Today, I’m going to give you an overview of how to handle headers, footers, and page numbering. And because I’m writing this series with writers in mind, I’m going to focus […]
IN PART 7 OF WORD FOR WRITERS, I covered how to manage page breaks. Today, we’ll talk about section breaks. Many people work with Word for years without ever understanding or using Word’s sections. This may be due to the fact that many Word documents are only a single section. In […]
Do you habitually use paragraph returns to move text to the next page? Did you know that you can insert a page break anywhere in your document, automatically forcing the following text to a new page, and that you can control how and where Microsoft Word positions automatic page breaks? […]
In this final article on Microsoft Word’s Review Tab features, we’ll cover how to manage tracked changes. You may be wondering: What is Track Changes? And why would I want to use it in the first place? What is Track Changes? Track changes allows you to keep track of any […]
Many writers know how to read comments that have been added to a document in Microsoft Word; however I’ve discovered that many do not know how to add comments of their own, or remove comments once added. So they add comments by inserting a different color text into the body […]
Working collaboratively with other writers or with editors requires knowing how to use the tools under Word’s Review Tab — particularly how to effectively use Track Changes and Comments. If you have felt intimidated by the idea of learning these features, you can now relax. It’s easier than it looks. […]
Do you usually change margins and font when starting a new Word document? For example, the standard for manuscripts formatting is 12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced paragraph with a first line indent, and a 1” margin (top, bottom, left and right). However, Word’s defaults are 11 point Cambria, 1.15 line […]
In this post, the 2nd in a series on Microsoft Word for Writers. Last time, I talked about why you want to improve your Word skills. In this post, I outline the subjects I’ll be covering during the series. If your working knowledge of Word is limited, the list may seem overwhelming […]
