1.2 billion workers worldwide use Microsoft Word every day to develop letters, reports, templates, training manuals, invoices, flyers and more. If you count among them, you may be interested to learn that, with some simple hacks, you can save time and boost your work productivity. Considerably.
Read on for tips that will instantly enhance your MS Word skills and take your efficiency to another stratosphere…
- Favour keyboard shortcuts over mouse move to save time. To go beyond a simple Ctrl + C to copy and Ctrl + V to paste, press F1, select ‘keyboard shortcuts’ and luxuriate in a world of shortcut possibilities. Our personal favourite is the shortcut for deleting a word. Just place your cursor after it and hit Ctrl + backspace. Bingo!
Equally useful is the ability to highlight a word simply by double-clicking on it. Click a third time to highlight a full sentence or section. Genius!
- Explore formatting options in the ribbon at the top of your screen. Changing the font style and size, line spacing or bullet point formatting is a vital part of producing high-quality professional materials.
- If you often create documents with the same formatting, creating macros (via the View tab on the ribbon) will save you swathes of time. It will also reduce the risk of an inconsistent look and feel across your documents.
- Select customisable templates and themes for your documents by hitting New on the File menu and choosing your favourite.
- Click on the Review tab on the ribbon to check your grammar and spelling, and to access alternative vocabulary suggestions.
- Use tables and charts to further boost document quality and readability. To create a table, you’ll need to link to your Excel table from the Insert tab on the ribbon. To create a chart, link to your data from the Chart tab on the ribbon and create bar chart poetry in an instant.
For more tips on improving your MS Word skills, please visit the Microsoft Word for Windows training page. LinkedIn is another great resource, offering lots of free online courses to help.
We hope you found the above tips useful and wish you every success at becoming a bona fide MS Word pro! Please let us know your favourites or – if it’s time to land your next dream job – get in touch with our team of expert recruiters at info@ablrecruitment.com or on 020 7092 3911 today. ABL Recruitment is the UK’s number one multilingual recruitment consultant and we’re here to help!
