Use File>>Page Setup to alter the margins. The default is 1 inch margins for top and bottom and 1.25 inches for the left and right.

Use Mirror Margins if you are creating a bound book and want the facing pages to have equal margins.

Word has tab stops every .5 inches by default. You can view all the tabs from the ruler.

To change the tabs, open use the Format>>Tabs menu.

Alternately, you can change them by dragging the tab marks on the ruler.

Create a new document with tabs at 2.5", a right tab at 3.5" and a decimal tab at 5".

Press the tab key once and type the words left-aligned and Enter

Press tab twice and type centered and Enter.

Press tab three times and type right-aligned and Enter.

Press tab four times and type 103.99 and Enter.

Press tab four time again and type 1000.99 and Enter.

Line spacing controls how much visible white space is between each line.

You control the line spacing with the Format>>Paragraph command.

You can type in any value in the line spacing at box and add the abbreviations in--inches, cm--centimeters, pi--picas, pt--points, li--lines.

The default setting is points.

To quickly format a paragraph you can use the control key and a number.

Ctrl 1 is single spacing

Ctrl 2 is double

Ctrl 5 is one-and-a-half

Use the before and after box to define how much space is between each paragraph.

Activate the search function by using either the Edit>>Find command or by pressing Ctrl F.

Clicking the more button gives you choices to aid in your search.

Match Case

Find whole words

Use Wildcards

Sounds like

Find all word forms

Any single character ? s?t finds "sat" and "set."

Any string of characters * s*d finds "sad" and "started."

One of the specified characters [ ] w[io]n finds "win" and "won."

See help for more examples

These two features use what is called fuzzy logic to find words that are similar to the one you typed in.

Sounds like finds all words that sound like the word you typed in but may be spelled differently.

Word forms finds different noun forms or verb tenses.

You may also find the need to search for special characters or coding.

Coding like page breaks, paragraph marks, fonts, languages, styles, highlighting and many more. Especially helpful if you want to change the look of a large document.

Use the replace command in conjunction with search to go through a document and replace some or every occurrence of a certain word, code, or format.

Be careful when using replace all to be sure you want all of those occurrences to change.

Spelling and grammar help you to create better sentence structure and correct misspellings.

Spelling and grammar will provide you with alternatives to the problems it sees and offer to correct them.

You can change the options available for this feature in Tools>>Options>>Spelling and Grammar.

Word has a built in Thesaurus that provides you with alternatives to selected words.

The Thesaurus is located in the Tools>>Language>>Thesaurus.

Along with synonyms, Word also includes antonyms and a look up function for locating additional words.

Word provides a variety of ways to produce lists within your document.

Normal Bullets

Numbered Bullets

Custom Bullets

What is useful about using bulleted lists is that if you add or delete an item, the list is updated automatically.

Use the AutoText to store commonly used words and phrases that you can insert with a click of a mouse button.

AutoText is found under the Insert>>AutoText menu.

From this menu you can also create custom entries.

To make your AutoText entries easier to access, you can place them on one of your tools bars.

Choose View>>Toolbars>>Customize

Navigate to the AutoText entry.

Click on it and drag it out to your toolbar.

Comments are useful when you need to distribute a document to others for review but do not want them to directly modify the document.

To use the comment command go to Insert>>Comment.

In Word 97, it is also possible to record an audio comment.

You can lock your document so that no one but the author can modify it. This is particularly useful when asking for comments.

To lock a document choose File>>Save As>> and then click the options button and select a password for modifications and/or read--only.

You should always use document summaries as they will help you greatly find documents in the future.

You can set the document summary by choosing File>>Properties and filling out the relevant information.

Later, when you need to locate your document, but can’t remember the file name you can search through these summaries.

To search through the summaries you created for your documents, choose File>>Open and then click the Advanced button.

From the Property portion you can choose the field from the summary that you wish to search under.