Microsoft Word: Business Writing 4; Time Saving Tips for Reports or Books

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Author: Carol Bentley

If you are writing a report, manual, reference document or even a book, you may want to create a table of contents. You can do this automatically and update it at the press of a key in Word.

To start with you must use heading styles for your section titles; use these 3 shortcuts to apply headings styles as you type:

Ctrl + Alt + 1 ……Heading Style 1

Ctrl + Alt + 2 ……Heading Style 2

Ctrl + Alt + 3 ……Heading Style 3

Create a Table of Contents for your report or book: position the cursor where you want the contents to be listed.

From the menu: Insert (then in XP on Reference) Indexes and Tables, and then on the Table of Contents tab.

Choose the Format you prefer and click on OK.

Update your Table of Contents after making changes to your document:

Select the Table of Contents and press [F9] .

To Update the Table of Contents in your document, automatically, before printing..

Select the checkbox for Update fields choice on the Print tab in the Options dialogue box (from the Tools menu). The table will be updated before a print / preview instruction is carried out.

Finding Alternative Words, Dictionary Language, Spell Check & Hyphenation

Thinking of different words when writing can sometimes be difficult. Word can help when you keep coming up with the same word. Just use the thesaurus to find an alternative:

Press Shift & [F7] to open the Thesaurus dialogue box. (In XP alternate (right) click and choose Synonyms).

Spelling Problems? Do you sometimes look at a word you've typed, you're convinced you've spelt it correctly, but Word thinks differently and underlines it in a red wavy line? Check you are using the correct dictionary for the language you are working in.

If you are not sure if your system is set for the correct language, open the spell check dialogue box (Press [F7] ) and examine the title bar for the language being used.

Set the dictionary for the language to be used in your documents, e.g. the dictionary being used may be a different variation of English, e.g. US instead of UK or vice versa:

Select the whole document - press Ctrl + A,

From the menu: Tools, Language, Set Language and select the language version to use. Click the Default button to set it for future documents.

You can quickly start checking your document for spelling mistakes - Press [F7]

Alternatively Double-Click the open book icon at the bottom of the document window to check the next mispelt word in your document.

Hyphenation in a Sales Letter Tools, Select Language, Hyphenation.

Set the hyphenation zone to its lowest, 0.25 cm, and click on Manual.

You will be asked to decide on the hyphenation of any words falling at the end of the line. By doing it manually you can prevent the words in your headline being split.

In the other articles in this mini-series I share another 17 tips:

* Preparing Word - How to Stop Word being 'bossy' and taking over your document.

* Keyboard shortcuts (some well known, others not so well known) to save you time.

* 8 tips on how to get your page looking exactly as you want it to

* More on Paragraph numbering and spacing (Including how to stop your numbers and bullets disappearing when you want a line gap between paragraphs!)

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