When you create a document, do you include a cover page? Formal header and footer? Appendices? This sounds pretty standard, right? However, do you actually need to include all of these things in EVERY document? Probably not.

I’m not advocating lowering the standards of your work products. The point I’m trying to make is that before you create a document, you should determine what you need to include based on what you are trying to accomplish. Why does it matter? What harm could a few extra pages do? Here are some of the possible consequences:

• Miss your deadline - If you get caught up too much in extra sections when you don’t need to, it is easy to miss your deadline. Before you know it, your work is due and all you have is a table of contents and a cover page.

• Your point is missed - By including unnecessary sections in your document, you may make your main point unclear to your audience. This basically defeats the purpose of writing the document in the first place.

• Forget important content - This is another pitfall; You might forget important content that you didn’t have time to focus on because of these unnecessary additions. You need to make sure all of your base content is there and then worry about the extras.

Now that we’ve established the consequences, how do you go about avoiding them? This is a tough question as the answer is very dependent on your situation. However, here are some questions to ask yourself when creating your document:

• Who is your audience? - This can be the deal breaker. Are you writing for a co-worker or for a client? In general, you want to keep it very formal when writing for a client. If it’s a co-worker, you might not have to get so formal. This isn’t always the case, but it’s definitely something to consider.

• Is it really necessary? - This is a question you should ask yourself before you include a section (such as an appendix). A good example of this would be a table of contents. If you’re writing a two page document, do you really need a table of contents? Most likely not. If you can’t answer a definitive “Yes” to this question, you’re probably better off leaving this section out.

• Does it make your point clearer? - Another big concern of yours should be to make sure that everything that you add to your document makes your point clearer. Using the table of contents example above, if you add it, will it make your document easier to navigate? If you add an appendix, does it make your information easier to understand? These are the questions you should be asking.

Remember this: How much you should have in your documents is highly situational. Sometimes you may need to put in what you think are unnecessary sections just because that’s how your company does it (if you disagree, you should suggest a change). However, when you have a choice, try to keep the above tips in mind.

Determining how to break your document into sections can be a very tough task. On the one hand, you don’t want to create too many small sections. At the same time, you don’t want to have one big run-on section. This brings us to the pivotal question: Where do you draw the line?

The following is a list of three ways that you can tell if you have too many or too few sections:

• You have a Section 1.2.3.4.5.6 - We’ve all seen documents with way too many sections in it. This makes the document very hard to read as you have to keep skipping around all the time to gather all of the information you need. In general, I never go past the fourth level when breaking down my documents (ex. Section 1.1.2.3), and I don’t even use the fourth level very often. As a rule of thumb, you will usually end up having more sections in longer documents than in shorter ones.

• You have one Section - This is the opposite of the first point. Instead of having too many sections, you have too few. Unless your document is only a few pages long, you most likely will need to break it down into more than one big section. Just like with a run-on sentence, a run-on section will quickly lose the reader in a sea of information. This doesn’t mean you have to go hog-wild (as demonstrated in the first point), but for a medium sized document you probably want to go to the second level (ex. Section 1.1).

• You get lost reading it - Huge point here. After you are finished with what you think is a solid draft of your document, you should read it the entire way through (better yet, have someone unfamiliar with the document do it). This way, you can make sure that it is both informative and easy to read. If you are having trouble reading it, think of the problems the audience will have. If you find yourself in this situation, take another look at how you’ve broken down the information in your document. You may be able to fix it by simply restructuring the number/content of some of the sections.

It’s not always easy to get a good section layout for a document. However, as long as you put some time into planning the layout, you’ll end up with a quality product.

Inserting a table into your Microsoft Word document is pretty easy. However, getting it to look and act exactly how you want can be challenging. In light of this, I’m going to share five common practices I use to make my life easier when I’m designing tables.

• Use the TAB key - Need to insert a new row at the end of your table? Don’t bother clicking through the menus, simply press TAB in the last cell in the last row of your existing table and a new row will be added.
• Add multiple rows - Another shortcut for adding more than one row to your table, simply highlight cells in more than one row and insert a row as you normally would. This will insert a number of blank rows equal to the number of rows you highlighted. For instance, if I highlight the first cell in two rows of my table, then click Table -> Insert -> Rows Above, then two blank rows will be inserted above the first row with a highlighted cell. This will also work for columns.
• Easily make your table fit - This is a problem that I’ve run into multiple times: Making my table fit onto a page. Even if it’s landscape, I still may have a problem. I usually see this when I’m porting over tables from Excel. If you work in Print Layout View like me, then resizing this table can be difficult. However, if you just switch to Normal view, you can view the whole table and easily manipulate its size.
• Make your tables consistent - This is more of a design tip for your document. Making your tables consistent in your document adds a professional touch. Once you create a table, use it as a base for your other tables (read: cut and paste) if you can. Not only does this save you time by having the table pre-formatted, but it also saves you time because you don’t have to design a new table layout each time. By adding or subtracting a few columns, your table is quickly done.
• Use Auto-Numbers in your table - If you are creating any kind of table where each row has a unique number (like steps), then make sure to use the Auto-Number function for these cells (the little “1..2..3″ icon). This way, when you add a new row, that cell will automatically be populated for you. Also, the other numbers will adjust themselves if you make changes in the middle of your table.

The Word Count dialog is very useful when dealing with a document that has specific length limitations. An example of this would be a document where you could only use a certain number of words. Conveniently, it is also extremely simple to use.

To open the Word Count dialog, follow the steps below:

1. Click on Tools.
2. Click on Word Count…

This dialog will then open:

The following is the breakdown for this dialog:

• Pages - This is the number of pages in your document.

• Words - This is the number of words in your document.

• Characters (no spaces) - This is the number of individual characters in the document not including “white” (blank) spaces.

• Characters (with spaces) - This is the number of individual characters in the document including “white” (blank) spaces.

• Paragraphs - This is the number of paragraphs in your document.

• Lines - This is the number of lines in your documents, which takes into account blank lines as well.

• Include footnotes and endnotes checkbox - If this is enabled, any text designated as footnotes or endnotes will be figured into the above counts.

• Show Toolbar button - This is a very handy feature. Once clicked, the following dialog will appear:

  

  This dialog allows you to have the statistics from the Word Count dialog update dynamically without having to open and close that dialog. It becomes active when you click Cancel on the main dialog.

  The drop-down allows you to select which stat you want to see. If you change something in the document, you can click on Recount and the stat will be updated. Also, if you make a change in your document and click on a different stat, all of the stats will update.

  You can customize this dialog by clicking on the down arrow in the upper right corner of the dialog. This is similar to customizing any other toolbar. Most likely, you will not need to do this.

The Word Count dialog is quick and easy to use. I find myself using the dynamic version discussed above (via the Show Toolbar button) quite a bit, which is what I recommend you use if you need to use these functions.

Navigating through a large document can be very time consuming. Sure, you can use the Table of Contents when you’re at the beginning of the document, but what happens when you’re in the middle of the document? Going back to the beginning of the document to use the Table of Contents gets old fast, as does trying to scroll through the document to find the section you want to navigate to. This is where the Document Map View comes in handy.

The Document Map View is much like the Table of Contents. The difference is that it appears as a side bar to the left of the body of your document, so it is always there no matter where in your document you currently are. It will display links to all of the sections that have a standard, built-in heading style (i.e. Heading 1, 2, etc.). All you have to do is click on a link, and you will go to that heading.

For example, say I have the document below:

Here’s the breakdown:

• Section 1.0 is heading style Heading 1.
• Section 1.1 is heading style Heading 2.
• Section 2.0 is heading style Heading 1.

To access the Document Map View of this structure, I would perform the following steps:

1. Click on View.
2. Click on Document Map.

For the above example, this is would be the result:

The left hand pane is the Document Map View. To disable it, just repeat the above steps for enabling it.

This will save you a lot of time when navigating a document, and make reading/editing your documents much easier.

I’m putting this article in the Microsoft Word category, but you can generally use these keyboard shortcuts in the other Microsoft Office applications as well as in Microsoft Windows itself.

The following is a list of keyboard shortcuts that I use everyday and that save me a lot of time compared to using the standard methods that perform the same functions.

Terminology

For this article, I will be using the abbreviation CTRL to represent the Control key. Any other letter will represent the key for that letter. For example, A would represent the A key. The + sign will mean “in conjunction with”. For example, the shortcut combination CTRL + A would represent holding down the Control key and then hitting the A key.

Common Shortcuts

• CTRL + A - This will highlight everything within the current active window. For example, say you want to cut and paste everything out of a Microsoft Word document into another document. You can use this method to quickly select the entire contents of the document without having to highlight then scroll through it or use page down. To undo the highlight, simply click anywhere in the document.

• CTRL + C - This will Copy the currently selected text and put it on the clipboard.

• CTRL + X - This will Cut the currently selected text and put it on the clipboard.

• CTRL + V - This will Paste the text that is currently on the clipboard into your document.

• CTRL + B - This will Bold the currently selected text in your document.

• CTRL + U - This will Underline the currently selected text in your document.

• CTRL + I - This will Italicize the currently selected text in your document.

• CTRL + S - This will Save your current document. If your document does not have a name yet, it will bring up the Save As dialog.

These are the most common ones that I use, but you should look for the keyboard shortcuts for functions that you might use everyday. They are always faster than having to go through a bunch of different menus, and a little time saved here and there will save you a lot of time in the long run, especially if you are working on multiple documents every day.

Trying to make the format of different parts of your Microsoft Word document consistent can be very frustrating and time consuming, no matter what kind of document you are working on. However, there is a tool that you may or may not know about that will make this once awful process painless. I’m talking about the Format Painter.

The Format Painter is located in the top toolbar as shown below:

It should be part of the Standard Toolbar so you should have it by default. If not, you can add it by following these steps:

1. Click on View.
2. Select Toolbars.
3. Select Standard.

Now, how do we use it? Using the Format Painter is extremely simple. Let’s say I’m making a document with multiple sections labeled “Section 1″, “Section 2″, etc. This is shown below:

Using numbered sections is pretty standard for most of the documents I create at my work, so I see this often. This looks ok, however I want to make Section 2.1 become Section 3.0. You guessed it, this is where the Format Painter comes into play. In the below example, it actually would be easier to just Decrease Indent on that line, but if this were a real document it probably would have lots of formatting around it from other sections, and this might screw up the Bullets and Numbering for these sections (trust me, it happens all the time, especially in large documents with many sub-sections).

To accomplish this, I first highlight the line that contains the format I want to use. This is shown below:

Then, I click on the Format Painter icon. The Format Painter now has the format I want loaded. To complete the formatting, I highlight the section I want to format, keeping the left mouse button held down. Once all of the section I want to format is highlighted, I release the mouse. The result is shown below:

My formatting is now complete. This is a really simple tool to use, and will cut down drastically on the time it takes you to get the format of your document perfect. The above example is just one application of the Format Painter; it can be used to copy almost any kind of format, with just as much ease.

If you have ever used Microsoft Word, there is a 99% chance that you have had to use the Bullets and Numbering function. I have had to put together numerous reports, etc. that use many numbered and bulleted lists, and it has been my experience that they can be pretty tricky to get just right.  Knowing this, I thought it might be useful if I shared some helpful tips that I have found along the way.

Probably one of the biggest problems people have using Bullets and Numbering is getting the indenting right.  This can be one of the most frustrating things to format when your working on a document.  Scenario: You have created a list; however you want to indent a bullet point in the middle of the list.  How do you do this?  There are a number of ways to indent, the ones that I use are the following:

• Use the Tab Key to indent the selected line.  This should indent the selected line and change the bullet point to whatever style is set for the secondary line of bullet points (you can customize this, but usually I leave this on the default setting).
• You can right click on the bullet point you want to indent and select Increase Indent.  This should achieve the same result as using the Tab key.

To decrease the indent on a line, you can either use the Backspace key or right click on the bullet point of the line you want to decrease the indent on and select Decrease Indent.  

Another problem occurs as you’re making your list, and you want to be able to make indented sub-lists (indented bullet points) but then create a point on the level of your main list.  This is the scenario: You start making your list, then you get to a point that you want to make a sub-list.  However, once you indent the point, the next point is indented as well.  One way to handle this is to just decrease that indent of the desired point as described above.  The way I do it is to keep a point at the end of the list that I call “Filler”.  That way, I can just press enter on that point and create new point on the level that I want.  It saves a little bit of time, but it adds up if you are doing a lot of lists.

This little tip you probably know already, but if you want to indent your entire list without having any of the format change, all you have to do is put your cursor on the first line in the list and hit Tab.  This time Backspace will not help you out to decrease the indent of your list, so have your Undo button ready to fly (which it does more often than not for me) as it will actually erase your point.

These are just some basic tips for using the Bullets and Numbering functionality in Microsoft Word, look for future articles on Advanced Bullets and Numbering.