Word has dozens of tools to make the editing process as easy as possible. Understanding and taking advantage of Word's tools is a major time saver in preparing your documents. Learn about the various tools Word offers with the following articles.

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Tools' topic. Click the article''s title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

   Auto Creation of an Acronym List
If you use a lot of acronyms in your documents, you may want a quick way to compile those acronyms and their definitions into an appendix. This tip provides several different approaches you can use to creating just such a helpful addition to your document.

   Changing the Document Inspector's Comment Name
The Document Inspector can be a great tool when you want to prepare your document to be shared with others and you want to preserve a bit of anonymity in the markup in the document. If you want to use a different name than the default comment name used by Document Inspector, it will require a bit more work than you may expect.

   Comparing Document Versions
Do you need to compare two versions of a document to each other? Word provides a tool that can make this easy, as described in this tip.

   Correcting Student Papers
If you are a teacher, you may be looking for ways you can use Word's features to correct papers your students send to you electronically. Word provides a wealth of features that can be used toward this end.

   Creating a List of Cross-References
Cross-referencing has long been a capability in Word documents. You can easily add and remove cross-references but getting an analysis of them (even a simple list) has not been an easy task. This tip discusses two ways you might be able to generate a list of your cross-references.

   Creating a Lorem Ipsum Tool
When editing, you may need random placeholder text inserted in your document. Word provides a couple of ways you can do that, all triggered by pressing Enter. If you want to use those random-text tools in a macro, you probably want a way for your macro to simulate pressing Enter. Here's how to do it, along with some other ideas for inserting random text.

   Creating a Master Document Using Existing Subdocuments
If you decide to create a master document, it is easy to do by just adding one or more subdocuments to an existing document. This tip shows how you can use the outlining capabilities of Word to accomplish the task.

   Creating a Transcription
In many offices, it is necessary to covert audio files (such as meeting recordings) into text. Some versions of Word have a built-in way to do this, as described in this trip.

   Creating Many Index Entries at Once
Word makes it fairly easy to create an index. It is creating the index entries that can be tedious, especially if you have a lot of them to create. This tip looks at two ways to make shorter work of creating a lot of index entries.

   Creating Multiple Highlighter Tools
Some people, while developing documents, like to use the Highlighter tool quite a bit. It can quickly get monotonous, however, to use the drop-down list next to the tool to select different colors. Here's a way you can make those highlighter colors easier to access.

   Cross-Reference to a Line Number
Word allows you to add line numbers within a document. However, it does not allow you to reference those line numbers elsewhere in the document. This tip explains why that is the case, by design.

   Crosschecking Citations and References
Word allows you to enter citations and references within your document. If you need to develop these types of documents, then checking the citations and references can be time consuming. Here are some ideas to make the work easier.

   Displaying Quick Document Statistics
Need to see how many pages, words, paragraphs, or lines are in your document? Word makes it easy to retrieve such information.

   Displaying the Navigation Pane
One of the viewing modes you can use for a document involves the use of the Navigation pane. This shows a quick outline of your document and allows you to easily navigate from one section to another.

   Embedding an Excel Chart in a Word Document
Word and Excel usually work pretty well together. This means that you can easily paste charts from Excel into your Word documents. Here's how to go about doing the pasting.

   Enforcing a Do-Not-Use Word List
Got a list of words you don't want to appear in your documents? There are a number of ways that you can make sure they don't, and the method you choose depends on personal preference and the nature of the words.

   Finding Related Words
One part of the grammar tools provided with Word is a thesaurus that helps you find all sorts of word variations. One type of variation is a "related" word, which means a word that is similar to the word you are examining. This tip provides information on how to access those related words.

   Generating a Count of Word Occurrences
Do you need to know the frequency with which certain words occur in your documents? There is no built-in way to derive this information in Word, but you can use the techniques in this tip to get just what you need.

   Generating a List of Unique Words
Need to grab a list of unique words appearing in a document? You can tap the power of VBA's Words collection to perform the task quickly.

   Hyphenating a Selection
Word provides a hyphenation tool that can help you hyphenate words within a document. If you want to apply hyphenation to only a part of your document, here are some ways you can do it.

   Ignoring Hyphens in Word Counts
When you instruct Word to tell you how many words are in a document, it treats hyphenated words or phrases as if they are a single word. This tip examines why this is so and provides a way that you can force Word to give you a word count that "ignores" the hyphens.

   Ignoring Punctuation in Names
If you have a word that includes punctuation as part of the word itself, then you may be frustrated by how Word treats that word when checking spelling and grammar. Here's how you can get Word to ignore the punctuation.

   Looking Up Antonyms
Antonyms are words that have opposite meanings. The grammar tools available in Word can suggest antonyms for some words. If antonyms are available, you can use them by following the techniques in this tip.

   Mass Search and Replace
If you need to change information in dozens or even hundreds of documents, the task can seem insurmountable. Here's a way you can let a macro do the work of making changes in any number of documents you may have.

   Moving Master and Subdocuments
If you need to move master documents or subdocuments from one place to another on your computer, you have to keep in mind the relative positioning of the documents to each other. If you don't, you could end up with unusable documents.

   Returning to the Source of a Cross-Reference
If you add cross-references to your document, you may want a way for the reader to follow the reference and then return to the original location of the cross-reference. This tip provides three distinct ways that you can accomplish this task.

   Setting a Default for the Object Browser
Does it bother you that when you press Ctrl+Page Up or Ctrl+Page Down you aren't always taken to the top of the previous or next pages? Believe it or not, this is normal behavior, as the shortcuts represent ways to search for items using the Object Browser. This tip explains how to eliminate this behavior so the shortcuts always go the previous or next pages.

   Tools to Boost Motivation and Productivity
Sometimes a writer needs motivation to keep ploughing ahead in their craft. Word doesn't really include any tools to help in this area, but there may be some add-ins available to extend what Word doesn't provide.

   Translating Text
Word includes several different tools you can use to improve your writing. One such tool is the translation tool. Here's the skinny on how to use it.

   Turning Off Hyphenation for Individual Words
Word does a semi-decent job when it comes to automatically hyphenating your documents. It even lets you exclude certain paragraphs from the hyphenation process. Turning off hyphenation for individual words is not a task that Word allows you to perform, however.

   Understanding Master and Subdocuments
Most people use Word to create regular documents that you edit, view, and print. The program also allows you to create a special type of document relationship that involves master documents and subdocuments. This tip explains what these types of documents are and how they relate to each other.

   Word Count for a Section
Dynamic word counts for your entire document are easy to get when you use using fields. There is no built-in method to get a dynamic word count of just a section of your document. This tip discusses the lacking feature and provides ways you can get the desired information.

   Word Count in Multiple Selections
Getting a word count for an entire document is easy. What you may not know is that some versions of Word can also provide word counts for different selections of text, as well.

   Word Count is Zero
If you use the Word Count tool and are surprised that it returns a count of 0, it could be because of what you selected prior to using the tool. Here's the low-down on why you might get this erroneous result.

   Word Counts for a Group of Documents
Getting a word count for a single document is easy. Getting an aggregate word count for a large number of documents can be a challenge, as discussed in this tip.