Microsoft Office Word is by far the most popular word processor for Windows. Learning some tips would help speed up your work and boost your productivity. Whether you are a new user or an experienced user, you may find some tips here that you would find very useful.

Replacing Words And Phrases With Multiple Occurences

You may have typed a lengthy document only to find out afterwards that you misspelt a word several times. Let’s assume you typed “on line” instead of “online”. You won’t go through a 50-page document, replacing “online” with “on line” in all the places it occurred.

Simply press Ctrl+F and the find and replace tool will open, likely in a pane on the left. Click on the dropdown beside the search field and select Replace. A window with two fields will open – one for the word or phrase for which you want to search, and the other for the replacement text. Type in the word or phrase you want to replace. After that, type the word or phrases with which you want to replace the former content.

Delete Words Using Just One Key

Ever wanted to delete many words at the same time? Maybe a whole sentence or paragraph? Just holding down the backspace key would only delete one letter at a time. That is not what you want. It’s rather slow.
Highlight the text you want to delete and press the backspace key and everything goes off instantly. Alternatively, you could hold down the CTRL key and hold down the backspace key until all the text you want to delete is gone. This method deletes one word at a time instead of one letter at a time. And it’s fun to use.

Disable Spelling And Grammar Check

Everyone knows that right-clicking a word highlighted for a spelling error displays the Add to dictionary option that prevents Microsoft Word from highlighting that word in the future. This is helpful when you often use made-up words or words from another language.

To turn off those annoying red and blue lines, you can completely disable either grammar or spelling options, or disable both of them entirely. To do this, click File at the top left of the window. Click Options, then go to Proofing on the left pane of the window. Locate the boxes labelled Hide spelling errors in this document only and Hide grammar errors in this document only and check them according to your needs.

Customize AutoCorrect Settings

Sometimes, you may have to work with words or names that are not English. Rather than having to manually edit the “errors” each time they are made, you can make changes to the autocorrect settings.

Go to File, click on Proofing. Then click on the AutoCorrect Options. There, you can add your custom words and never be bothered again with what you know is not an error on your part. Microsoft Word would ignore the words in the future.

Highlight Text Quickly

Rather than clicking and dragging to highlight text in Microsoft Word, just click once at the beginning of the text you want to highlight, then hold Shift and click at the end of the text you want to highlight.

I hope you found the tips helpful. Perhaps, you know some tips that I didn’t mention here. Why not share them in the replies section. And please try the ones here and let us know how they worked for you.