Monday, February 26,  2001		Article

Add value to Microsoft Word
By Vipul Verma

MICROSOFT Office (MS Office) covers a wide range of programs like Word, Excel, Access, Power Point etc., which offers a lot of resources to the users of this program. There is a lot of information about MS Office, which goes beyond the normal usage and can add a lot of value in day-to-day working in MS Office.

Normally, a person hardly ever opens sub-menus like options and customise etc. present under the different menu items of the menu bar. These sub-menus are at times helpful. For example, the office programs like Excel, Word, Power Point etc. create a small list of recently opened files on the File menu. Thus, if you wish to reopen these files, then you need not go through the normal procedure of opening a file as you can simply click on the file name and open it. These short cuts to recently opened files are useful and handy. However, as per default settings only last four files are displayed in the files menu and the previous ones are deleted automatically. If you find this function useful, you can simply increase the number of recently used files to 9 from the default limit of 4. The procedure for doing it is easy. For example, if you wish to increase the number of files last viewed in Microsoft Word, simply click on the Tools menu on the menu bar. This will open a drop-down menu. Select the options command and then the general tab.

In the recently used file list, change the number from 4 to 9. Click on the OK button to close the dialog box. Now whenever you open the MS Word again, this feature is activated and the next 5 files you open in Word will also be displayed along with the 4 previous used. This feature can also be used in MS Excel.

There are some other useful tips for working in MS Word, which can help you work better and efficiently. Thus, if you wish to fit your entire text document on one page in order to see how it would look in print, you can do so by shrinking the whole document on a single page. The procedure for doing so is as follows. Under the file menu, click the print preview icon. Now, look for shrink-to-fit button present on the tools bar and click this button. On pressing this button you will find that your page is resized and the data gets shrunk to fit in the single page. It is important here to note that if your text is large and runs in more than one page, then this command will reduce the font used in your document to fit it into one page. Therefore it will not be advisable to shrink large documents in one page as the reduced font size could make it difficult to read.

But this function may prove useful for persons, who have to print a draft output of their work in large quantities as shrinking the document will save precious printing ink and paper. It could be a good idea for people who write letters using MS Word and check the print out for necessary corrections.

We have learnt that shrinking the document reduces the size of the font. If you wish to change the font size, you normally do it by defining a font size for either the selected text or for the whole document. However, using a simple tip you can change the font size easily. To increase or decrease the font size, simply select the text of which you wish to increase the font size. Press Control +]. Each time you press this key combination, the font size gets increased by one point. Similarly for decreasing the font size, press the key combination of Control+[.

By pressing this key combination you can reduce the font size by one each time. If you wish to increase the font size by two points rather than one, you can do so by pressing the key combination Ctrl+ Shift +. If you wish to decrease the font size by 2 points at a time, then it can be done by pressing the key combination of Ctrl + Shift +.