IF YOU’VE BEEN WRITING ANY LENGTH OF TIME, you’ve probably heard of Scrivener. And if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I’m a big fan. I use Scrivener for pretty much all my writing these days: blog posts, short works, such as essays and […]
ONE OF THE BENEFITS of having learned to use Word’s Styles is that now you can quickly insert and update tables of content (TOCs). Just think—no more manual typing of chapter titles and tedious checks and rechecks to make sure you got the pagination right. It’s easy to add and […]
ONE MICROSOFT WORD SKILL you will never regret taking the time to learn is how to create and use templates. Templates are files that contain ready-to-use formatting and styles. You simply add the content. You may already be aware that Word comes with loads of stock templates for manuscripts, research papers, cover […]
LEARNING HOW TO MANAGE IMAGES in Microsoft Word is an essential skill, yet it is not a skill that writers need or call upon every day. After all, writing is all about creating pictures with words. Still, there are times when you’ll need to be able to include pictures in […]
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 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 […]
