This month I thought I would share a few tips for MS Word that will save you time and hopefully stop you from pulling your hair out on those days when you just can’t make Word do what you want it to.
Comparing documents in MS Word
Sometimes you may need to compare two documents and track any differences. This comes in handy when you are trying to see which version of a document was created first or even if you have two copies of a large document and you wish to see, without reading the whole thing, if it has been tampered with.
Make sure you are on the Review tab in MS Word, with no files open. Click the compare tool. The Compare dialog box should appear. You can now choose the two versions of the file that you wish to compare. You can also select a variety of changes that you would like to be marked up. These changes are anything from case changes to new text to white space to punctuation. When you are done, click OK and just like magic, Word will show the two documents side by side along with the differences between them.
Hide the new ribbon in Word
If you are like me and not a big fan of the “ribbon” interface mentioned above, then you may want to hide the ribbon until you need it. It’s quite easy to do; simply right click on the ribbon and check the box next to “Minimise the ribbon”. This will make the ribbon vanish until you click one of the tab headings. This is also a good trick if you are trying to maximise screen space.
Jump to a page
Now that you have compared two large documents and hidden the ribbon to give you some more reading room, you might want to jump to page 327 out of 1,000 and you cannot be bothered to scroll down. No problem. Press F5 and the Go To dialog appears. On the left side of the dialog you should indicate that you want to go to a page, enter the page number and click Go To. Keep F5 in mind the next time you are working on a large document.