Stuff I Love About Word

I admit I'm a bit prejudiced about Word 97... it's what we use at work, so MS Word is the only word processing software I've used for the last 5 years. But, since I'm the person who does the classes to help everyone else learn how to use this and other Office software, I've had a chance to discover a lot of its niftiest secrets.

Sometimes I think those folks in Redmond are psychic: with the 97 version of Word, they added a lot of the things I'd wished for but hadn't bothered to tell them about. Evidently, other people did tell them, 'cause they added some wonderful enhancements.

I'm including this short article so that you can get an idea of some of features in Word 97 that you might not have discovered on your own. I hope you'll find one or two that will help you in your work by making it easier, or - at least - that will encourage your creative spirit.

If you need help on a particular topic, send e-mail either to my work email address (this is for the folks who work with me) or use the envelope on the Contents bar. I'll try to respond promptly.

Have you used MS Word 97's templates? If not, you may be doing a lot of extra work when you create documents that use the same format over and over. You can set it up one time exactly as you'd like, and then just fill in the blanks the next time.

If you'd like more information read the Templates section of the Word 97 Basics article.

Office 97 has a whole new set of drawing tools. There are great 3D effects, flow chart tools and, of course, the enhanced Word Art function. Here's an another example:

The best part about the drawing tools is that they're available in all the programs in the Office 97 suite! So you can jazz up your Excel spreadsheets, too!

If you learn about tables and templates, then throw in a few form fields, you can create forms that can be filled in online by tabbing from field to field and filling in the blanks. It's great for any document in which the format, labels, and standard text remain the same, but the stuff that goes in the blanks changes every time.

You can print either the filled in form or - if you have a preprinted form that you have to use - just print the data into the form.

Here's a portion of a form you could create easily using MS Word's tables:

Mail Merge is the best way to handle some documents. For example, if you have a database (perhaps a customer mailing list), and you regularly send the same information to everyone on the list, Mail Merge should be your tool of choice.

And, by the way, it's important to set up the mailing list correctly -- so that you can use the data in a variety of ways.

I'm sneaking in a bit about Excel 97 - it's got a lot of new, hot tools as well. Do you know about conditional formatting? It's definitely hot, if you work with numbers and like to see what's happening with them. If you're monitoring expenses, you can train the numbers to turn red when expenses go up, green when they go down, or stay the same color as everything else when there's no change (this, by the way, is a very effective - if somewhat horrifying - way to keep track of personal expenses/accounts. You can see immediately how much damage that little indulgence last month really did!)

This is just a teensy sample of some of the things you can do with the MS Office 97 programs - Word, Excel, PowerPoint. Go back to the Office Contents page to see what articles are available and read any that interest you.

I hope you'll be able to find something that will save you time and make your work easier.