Crucial Microsoft Word Skills That Just Don’t Get Taught

By Deane Barker • • 2 min read •
AI Summary

This post outlines essential Microsoft Word skills for effective document creation and management. The author emphasizes the importance of mastering formatting, collaboration tools, and advanced features to enhance productivity and streamline workflows in various professional contexts.

My church is building a huge new addition, and part of it is going to be a computer lab. This means that I’ll finally have a nice spot to teach some free computer classes, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

I got to thinking the other day what I’d teach, and I think there’s really a need for a class on Microsoft Word. I could call it, “The Things They Never Taught You About Word That Have Been Driving You Nuts Ever Since.”

Here’s what I’d teach:

  1. How styles work. How to create them, how to derive them, and how to apply them.

  2. How to strip the formatting from existing text and start over.

  3. How to paste unformatted text.

  4. The different between a paragraph break and a line break. (This is one of the most overlooked things in any text formatting program.)

  5. How to use tabs or tables to line up text columns (instead of spaces, which is what normally happens).

  6. How templates work, including how to modify the Normal.dot template to carry styles through to every new document you open.

  7. How to do “Select All.”

It sounds simple, but knowing these things would improve most users’ experience with Word a hundred-fold.

Links from this – The State of Microsoft Word in the Enterprise September 10, 2005
One thing that continues to amaze me is how poorly people use Microsoft Word, considering its dominance in business word processing. The “barrier to entry” for a Word user is extremely low – just open it and start typing – so very few people bother to learn how to really use it well. I spent three...
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