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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
