Despite the alternatives that exist, Word continues to be the favorite program for millions of users around the world when creating text documents. It is a basic work tool for many, so it is important to know how to use it well and get the most out of it. In this post we present to you 5 Tricks for Word that will help us be faster and, therefore, more productive.
It is true that anyone who uses this word processor regularly already knows the most basic tricks and functions. We will focus on some little-known tips. Discovering them and getting used to using them may make a big difference for many from now on.
Tip 1: Quickly generate text for testing
Many times we find ourselves in the need to have a test text to check the format and try different settings until we find the final look we are looking for for our document. This is especially important when we want to prepare a writing to present to our boss, our teacher or a client we want to convince of something.
Many users are unaware that for this it is not necessary to resort to any external text generator, or perform any type of search on the Internet. Word has a trick for us. Two options of generate some paragraphs of blind text, dummy text or filler text (the famous text Lorem Ipsum that we have seen so many times).
All you have to do is follow the following steps:
- First of all, we open the Microsoft Word program.
- Next, we place the cursor at the point in the document where we want to add the text.
- There we wrote this: =lorem().
- To finish, press Enter.
FOR select the size of this test text You have to enter a series of values inside the parentheses. If we leave that space blank, the Word code will add three paragraphs of three lines each by default. To change this setting, you must enter numerical values. An example: if we write =lorem(4,6) A text of four paragraphs of six lines each will be generated.
Trick 2: Know the number of words and letters in your text
Another of the Word tricks that will help us the most is the one that allows us to know how many words, letters and characters our text contains. This is important because many times we have to write a text with a minimum or maximum length. This is useful both to check the size of a finished text and to check the progress of the text we are working on.
To access this information you only have to take two steps:
- First, let's go to Review menu.
- There we select the “Count words” option.
It is also possible to perform this query through a keyboard shortcut, specifically the key combination Ctrl + Shif + G. Whether using one method or the other, the result is the same: a small window will be displayed with information regarding the number of words and characters (counting spaces or not) of our text, as well as other data such as the number of pages or paragraphs.
Trick 3: Date and time updated automatically
Many users already know how to insert a date and time into a document. It doesn't have much complication, just go to the tab "Insert", open the Text menu and click on the option "Date and Time". With this, a fixed date and time is added with the format we want. However, if what we want is for this data to be updated, this is the trick we should use:
- To start, let's go to the tab "Insert".
- Then we select the Text menu.
- Next, we go to the option "Date and Time".
- There, after choosing the desired format, we select the box "Update automatically".
By doing this, the date and time will be updated every time someone opens the document. As simple as that.
Tip 4: Print more than one page per sheet
This is a simple trick that also has interesting practical applications. For example, it can be very useful when we want to do a quick review of a long document. This task will always be faster and easier if we can view several pages on a single printed sheet.
So what do you have to do to print more than one page per sheet? We just have to go to the print option on the command ribbon (the Ctrl + P key combination also works) and go to the box marked “Pages per sheet”. In it we select the number of pages we want to print on each sheet.
This trick will not only help us save time and be more efficient, but also to save paper (and money), which also has its importance.
Tip 5: Increase or decrease the font size of a word or phrase
To finish, we analyze one of the simplest and most practical Word tricks to give our texts the shape and meaning we are looking for: how to increase or decrease font size, whether it be a single specific word or an entire phrase.
Most of the time, it is necessary to modify the uniformity of the text to structure it into titles, subtitles, sections, etc. Lists are used to list elements, bold to highlight certain fragments, etc. And in many cases, this modeling is based on retouching the font size of one or several words. Something that is actually very simple to do:
- The first thing to do is select text whose size you want to change: one or more words, an entire paragraph, etc.
- Then, in the Word tools ribbon, we go to the group "Start".
- There we choose the group of commands "Source".
- In the drop-down button, we choose "Size".
- Finally, we must locate the font size we want to use and click on it.
These are just five practical tricks that will be really useful when working with Word documents. Obviously, there are many more that we can use, some of which we have already talked about before on this blog: how to number pages, how to put a caption, how to adjust margins and many others.