Everyone I talk to thinks they know how to use Word, but think again. The problem with Word is that it appears easy to use initially but what that means for most people is that they are missing the key features of the tool and after a while they just get frustrated and complain about it. Sound familiar?

Word is a very powerful tool if used properly. Very few people have a document authoring background therefore miss the essence of the tool. I have recently been running a series of Office 2016 conversion courses with Word being one of the subjects, people are amazed at what they have missed over the years and how much time they could save, with comments such as:

“Excellent, I would definitely recommend it. I am self taught on Microsoft Office and have picked up tips and tricks I never knew existed.. also seems I have been ignoring some really useful functions.”

“Excellent tips and new functionality that I wasn’t aware of.”

“You will learn smarter ways of doing your work, as well as about features that you would have been unaware of or are new.”

“We spend all day using this software and in my experience most of us muddle through half the time. Trainer was able both to give us “differences” training and tips on using the software, and exposed where we weren’t using properly at the moment”.

Here are my top five tips for getting the best out of Word:

1. To create effective and repeatable documents you need to use templates so that you are not forever opening and saving documents as, then removing unwanted information.

2. Styles are key. These enable you to define how text should look for different headings and content and easily apply and change it when, for example six pages on you realise you want things to look different. They only take about 10mins to setup but will save you hours in the long run. They also mean you can create a table of contents in seconds!

3. If you want to have different page orientations and page setups you need to master section breaks as these allow you to combine these things into one document.

4. How to use Headers and Footers combined with section breaks is key, this is one area that can be very frustrating if you don’t know how to do it properly.

5. Knowing the full functionality of tables can you show you that they can be used for a lot more than you think.

If you are an existing user of Word but would like to improve your Word skills and see how it should be done, view our Public Programme Dates, to see the next available training date for this course. Click here to see the full course outline.

You can email us on training@underscore-group.com to book your place or if you have any questions.


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