word time-saversmathcs.wilkes.edu/~wagnerja/usac/wordtimesavers.pdf · now, suppose after creating...

Word Time-Savers Designed by Jason Wagner, Course Web Programmer, Office of e-Learning

CUSTOMIZING RIBBON .................................................................................................................... 1

INSERTING SCREENSHOTS .............................................................................................................. 1

CLEAR FORMATTING ........................................................................................................................ 2

QUICK STYLES .................................................................................................................................... 3

GENERATING A TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................... 5

BOOKMARKS AND CROSS-REFERENCES ........................................................................................ 7

CONTROLLING TEXT AROUND PAGE BREAKS .............................................................................. 9

ADDING SHAPES AND SMARTART ............................................................................................... 10

TRACK CHANGES ............................................................................................................................ 13

Word Time-Savers | Page 1

CUSTOMIZING RIBBON Microsoft Word and other Office products allow you to customize the icons that appear in the top-left corner of the window.

To customize these icons, click the button that has a horizontal line with an arrow pointing down below it in the top-left corner of the screen.

You will see several options that you can select from this list, such as Save and Quick Print. You can also select More Commands.... This will bring up a menu where hundreds of different buttons can be chosen. To add one, find it in the list of actions on the left, click it, and click Add >>. When you have finished adding actions, you can click OK to save them.

INSERTING SCREENSHOTS Word easily allows you to add screenshots to a document without requiring any programs like Paint or Photoshop.


First, click the Insert ribbon, and click the Screenshot icon. Then, you have two different choices.

The first choice is to take the screenshot of an open, unminimized window.

If one of your windows is not appearing, it is likely because it has been minimized to the taskbar. Click the window in the taskbar to open it, and then switch back to Word and it should now appear in the list.

The second option is to manually select a region of the screen for the screenshot. To do this, first switch to the window you want to take a screenshot of. Then, switch back to Microsoft Word, go back to the Insert ribbon, click the Screenshot icon, and then the Screen Clipping option. Word will then switch back to the other application, which will then allow you to draw a rectangle of the region for the screenshot.

After using either of these two options, it will then paste the image into your document.

CLEAR FORMATTING If you copy and paste something into Microsoft Word, it may come with unwanted formatting. It may include the text in different or unexpected, unmatching fonts, or the text may have been white, which would not be visible inside the document with the white background. Although you can select all of the text and reapply different fonts, sizes, or colors, we'll see in the Quick Styles section why you should not do that.

To clear the formatting, you should simply highlight everything that you paster into the document, and click the Clear Formatting button. This button is in the top-right corner of the group of Font buttons on the Home ribbon, and has the text "Aa" in a rectangle with with an eraser next to it.


QUICK STYLES Quick Styles allow you to easily apply formatting to text. This formatting could refer not only to the text (such as font face, size, color, or style, like bold or italic), but also different options such as paragraph spacing, indenting, etc.

Applying a style is very simple. First, select the text you want to apply the style to. Then, go to the Home ribbon, and click on the Style that you want to use.

Suppose you formatted a section of your document and want to apply that formatting to other sections. Before Quick Styles, you would copy the section you created first, paste it into where you wanted the new section, and edit the text.

However, it is easier to create a custom Quick Style. To do this, highlight the text you've formatted. Then, go up into the Home ribbon, and you'll see an arrow pointing down with a horizontal line above it in the bottom-right corner of the Style selection. Click that, and it will expand the Styles selection menu, and you can select Save Selection as New Quick Style.

When the dialog box pops up, enter a name for it and click OK.


Now, your style will appear in the menu to apply to other text.

To edit the formatting options of either a built-in style or one you have created, you can go to the Style selection menu in the Home ribbon, right click on the style you want to change, and select Modify.

You can see that you can modify the text from the toolbar above the preview. There are additional formatting options under the Format button in the bottom-left hand corner of the dialog box, such as setting tabs or modifying the formatting of the paragraph.


NOTE: Although you can apply any of the styles listed, there are some that you will want to be careful of applying or editing. The Normal Quick Style is the default one used when no style is applied, and it is recommended that you do not use that for any special text. The Heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc.) will play an important role later when the Table of Contents features are covered, and should only be used as headings.

GENERATING A TABLE OF CONTENTS Word has functionality built in that will automatically generate a Table of Contents (TOC) for your document, and keep the page numbers in it up to date automatically.

First, you must add the headings that will go in your TOC by using the Quick Styles feature previously mentioned, and applying Heading 1 to the major headings of your Table of Contents, Heading 2 to the subheadings, and so on.


Once you have applied your headings, scroll through the document and click your cursor where you will want the TOC to appear. You do not need to add a heading for your TOC, as one will automatically be added automatically.

Next, go to the References ribbon, and click the first icon that says Table of Contents. Select one of the automatic built-in items, such as Automatic Table 2.

Now, suppose after creating the initial TOC you have added several pages, and perhaps new headings. To update this table, click anywhere inside the TOC and a box will appear around it, with a menu on top of it.


Click the button that says Update Table.

There are two options that appear. If you have not added any new headings, and only added or removed text that changed the headings the numbers are on, select Update page numbers only. If you added or removed headings and need the items in the table to be updated, select Update entire table. If you are unsure of which item to pick, use Update entire table. Even if no headings were added or removed, updating the entire table will update the page numbers.

BOOKMARKS AND CROSS-REFERENCES Bookmarks work similar to a Table of Contents, but allow you to automatically reference a page number anywhere within a document, rather than just in a Table of Contents. For example, you could add text to a different page that says "See table on page 5." and the page number will automatically be kept up to date by Word.

First, click your cursor where in the document you want to reference. Then, click the Insert ribbon, and select the Bookmark button inside the Links group.

In the dialog that appears, enter a name that you want to reference this bookmark by. Then, click Add.


Now, go to where in your document you want to reference the section you just bookmarked. Inside the Insert ribbon, select the Cross-reference button inside the Links group. In the dialog box that pops up, select Bookmark from the drop-down menu for Reference type and Page number from the drop-down menu for Insert reference to. Then, select the Bookmark which you named in the previous dialog box, and then click Insert.

The page number that the text you bookmarked will now appear in the document.

If you add/insert text in the document that moves the page your bookmark is on, you can go to where you referenced the bookmark, right-click on the reference, and select Update Field. Alternatively, you can close and reopen the document to update all cross-referenced bookmarks, which may be faster if you have created many of them inside your document.


CONTROLLING TEXT AROUND PAGE BREAKS Although you can do it by manually inserting spaces into documents, Word has many features to help you control text.

In some cases you may want certain text to start on a new page. To do this, go to the Insert ribbon, and under the Pages group of buttons, select Page Break.

In some instances, you may want two lines to stay together. For example, if you add an image to a document, you may put a line above it describing the image, and you want that description to stick with it. For example:

To make this text stick with the image, we can highlight the first line of text, in this case, where it says "This is the Wilkes logo:." Then, right click on the text, and select Paragraph. Now, click the Line and Page Breaks tab, and check the box next to Keep with next. Click OK.


You'll see that the text now stays with the image, even if they would normally be separated on different pages.

This will also work to keep text below images, in which case you would select the image and do the above steps. You can also uses this to keep two lines of text together instead of a line of text and an image, as well as lines of text with tables.

ADDING SHAPES AND SMARTART You can easily create diagrams to your documents in Word.

Although you can manually create these diagrams, Word also has a feature called SmartArt that easily allows you to create some common diagrams, such as hierarchical charts (often used in organization charts), pyramids, cycles, processes, Venn diagrams, and several others.

For this example, let's create an organizational unit chart. To do this, click the Insert ribbon, and then click SmartArt.

Then, from the menu that appears, select Hierarchy from the left menu, and then pick the first option for Organization Chart. Click OK.


Consider a 24-hour restaurant with the following hierarchy:

• There is an owner/president of the company • A senior vice president reports to the owner • There are three vice presidents that report to the senior vice president: finance, operations, sales • The controller reports to the Vice President of Finance • There are two accountants that report to the controller • The warehouse manager and purchasing manager report to the vice president of operations • Three warehouse workers report to the warehouse manager • Two analysts report to the purchasing manager • Three regional sales directors report to the Vice President of Sales

On the SmartArt Tools ribbon, click the button that says Text Pane. This will make it much easier to edit our hierarchy.

In the SmartArt Tools ribbon, there are several buttons for Promote, Demote, Move Up, and Move Down. We will use these to make your list match the following example:


• Owner/President o Senior Vice President

§ Vice President of Finance • Controller • Accountant 1 • Accountant 2

§ Vice President of Operations • Warehouse Manager

o Warehouse Worker 1 o Warehouse Worker 2 o Warehouse Worker 3

• Purchasing Manager o Analyst 1 o Analyst 2

§ Vice President of Sales • Regional Sales Director 1 • Regional Sales Director 2 • Regional Sales Director 3

Type in each of the job titles above. If something is indented, it falls on the next level beneath the object it is indented other. To indent an object in the Text Pane, select it in the Text Pane and click the Demote button in the ribbon. To unindent an object, click the Promote button. The items will also appear from left-to-right in the order that they are from top-to-bottom. To change this order, select an object in the Text Pane and click Move Up or Move Down.

If your Text Pane matches the indented list above, you should see this:

If there isn't a pre-built SmartArt template created for what you want to do, you can create your own diagram.


First, go to the Insert ribbon. Click the Shapes button, and select the last option that says New Drawing Canvas. This will make it easier to arrange your diagram inside a document.

If you are not already on it, click on the Drawing Tools ribbon. Toward the left of the screen, you will see different arrows and shapes. To add them to your diagram, simply click on the shape/arrow.

Then, go down to the canvas you created, and click and drag your shape.

Each shape has, usually, four anchor points. Anchor points allow you to easily connect lines, which will stay on the anchor point if the shape is moved or resized. These anchor points are generally on the midpoint of each side. As you draw a line, arrow, or other "connecting" shape, you will see the anchor points of shapes in the diagram turn red, showing you where you can attach the connector to a shape.

There are other options in the ribbon that allow you to customize color, size, etc. You can also click on a shape you have added to your canvas and begin typing to add text to the inside of the shape.

TRACK CHANGES Track changes allows you to easily find what has changed in a document since the function was turned on. It will underline text that has been added, put a line through text that has been removed, and add boxes in the margins showing formatting changes to text. It will also color code these boxes and underlines so that you can see which person edited them.

To turn this function on inside a document, go to the Review ribbon, and in the Tracking group of icons, select the Track Changes icon.

Then, edit your document, or send your document out to other people to edit. When changes have been made, it may look something like this:


You can then go through and review each change to accept or reject them. To do this, go to the Review ribbon, and under the group of Changes icons, you can click the Next or Previous buttons to go through each change. Then, click Accept if you would like to add the change to the document (and remove the "new text" underline it has), or click the Reject button to remove the change from the document.

You can also add comments to text to tell others something about a certain group of text. To do this, highlight the text you want to highlight, go to the Review ribbon, and in the Comments group of buttons, click New Comment. This will add a box in the right margin where you can type icons. To remove it, click on this box, and click the Delete Comment button next to the New Comment button.

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