Have you or your kids been using Word a lot recently? Do you find yourself repeating the same tasks over and over again. Maybe you keep getting a niggling feeling that there ought to be a better way of working? Maybe you’re about to start your Uni course, or a new job and you’d like to upskill. One quick way to do this is to learn some essential Word skills.
Back in the mists of time, I learned Microsoft Word and Excel in order to complete assignments. Most people didn’t bother at the time, but the geek in me had to learn something new. Since then, and for most of my working life, I’ve utilised those skills, refined them, added to them. They helped me get the Microsoft Office Specialist Master Instructor qualification.
Despite the annual version updates, the essential skills for using Word haven’t changed. If you compare the content of word processing course from 15 years ago with today, they’re pretty much the same. In fact, they’re so consistent that Google docs uses almost exactly the same skill set. So if it works in Word, there’s a really good chance or will work in Google docs as well. I only mention this because Google docs is available as an online tool for free with a Google account.
In this post, I’ll be lining up a few essential Word skills that can speed up your working and help you create better looking, easier to read documents.
Formatting text
We’ll start with the basics – getting the text consistent in a document.
It’s quite easy to accidentally get different text styles in a document. This is especially the case for reports, essays, even CVs, where you might be copying text from other places.
Word has some preset font styles. You can normally find them at the top of the screen usually, in the middle of the ‘Home’ tab.
Here’s a quick video showing you how they can be used.
As you can see, once you know they’re there, they can be really useful to quickly format a document consistently. This is especially true for long documents, or to get consistency across a range of documents that you might be producing.
Images and text wrapping
Adding images to Word documents is straightforward enough, but getting the to work with the text can be a little tricky sometimes.
Here’s another quick tip video about wrapping text around images.
If you get a spare few minutes, you might find it useful to have a play to get used to the different options available.
More content coming
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be adding to this post with more essential Word skills. Be sure to check in regularly. If you can, please like and subscribe to the YouTube channel, that way you’ll be sure to catch all the video updates.
Over to you
Is there something specific that you’d like to know how to do in Word? Let me know in the comments.