When executives at any company are considering which employees to cut and which to keep, they want to hold onto the most helpful, knowledgeable people. So, if you’re the only person on your team who knows how to format the company reports properly or you’re the one that your boss counts on to help with document formatting, you have a leg up on your coworkers. Master the Microsoft Word tips below and make yourself indispensable.
Your boss calls in a panic, because he was working on an important document and his computer crashed before he had a chance to save it. Be a hero by heading over to the File menu on his computer, clicking the Manage Document button and selecting Recover Unsaved Documents. You should then see a list of all the available unsaved files. The latest one should be his lost Word document.
You send a critical document to a business partner or client and they send you back a revised version, without enabling the track changes feature. Whether it’s a joint press release, a legal contract or just an important memo, you need to see exactly what changes they made to your work.
To compare two documents in Word 2016, navigate to the Review tab, click on the Compare button and select Compare from the drop down menu which appears. Then select the two files you want to look at and hit Ok. You’ll see a version of the document with all the changes highlighted.
Word makes it easy to draw on top of your document with your finger, a pen or even your mouse. You can draw lines on top of your text, scribble a shape and have the program automatically convert it into a resizable vector graphic or even draw an equation and insert it into your document as ASCII text. Unfortunately, most people do not have the Draw tab enabled by default so they can’t use any of these features.
To enable the Draw tab, right click on the navigation bar at the top of the Word window and select Customize the Ribbon. In the dialog box that appears, check the box next to Draw under Main Tabs.
When you’re writing a long report or white paper that you plan to distribute, a tablet of contents makes your document much easier to read. Fortunately, Word makes it easy to generate a TOC, without manually entering all the sections and page numbers yourself.
While you’re editing your document, use headings and subheadings for the different sections you want to appear in your TOC. When it’s time to generate the TOC itself, click Table of Contents under the References Tab and choose the style you like best. Word will then add the TOC to your document and you can edit its content as wish. You can also click the Update table button to regenerate the TOC, based on any changes you’ve made to the document.
While Word’s collaboration features are not nearly as good as those on Google docs, the software provides a way for you, your boss and your coworkers to edit the same document at the same time. There’s just one caveat: you all have to have accounts in the same Office 365 organization so forget about co-editing in real-time with people at other companies or freelancers.
First save your document to your company’s OneDrive account. Then click the Share button in the upper right corner of the Word window and enter the names of the people you want to share it with. Click the Share button and you’ll all be good to go. You will see each other’s changes in real-time with a different text color for each person (and their name next to it).