3 Little-Known Features in Word to Help You Work Better
2 minute read
Here are some little-known features in Microsoft word that will help save you time. We’re all busy people, and it’s time we started applying the “work smarter, not harder” philosophy whenever we can.
Outline view
If you’ve ever worked on a large document with a lot of text, then you’re familiar with how time-consuming organizing and shuffling text around can be. Outline view helps you get organized and see the larger structure of your document in a single view, rather than having to continually scroll back and forth. To enable outline view, click on View, and select Outline. Now, you’ll be in a new view where you can quickly and easily adjust the overall composition of your document. You can filter your view by heading level, and if you want to move a large section of text, you can just drag and drop the heading to another part of the document. The text nested under that heading will move with it.
Randomly position text around the page
Say you’re brainstorming and want to randomly position some text around the page to group related ideas. All you have to do is double click anywhere on the page and type, and you can place text wherever you want.
Hide text
This is great for hiding the answers on quizzes or creating two different versions of a document by simply hiding certain text as required. It’s also great for hiding confidential information if you don’t want a printed version to contain certain identifying information you might have in the original file. To hide text, just select the text you want to hide, then simply right-click the text and choose Font. Here you will see a check box labeled “Hidden.” If you check that, your text will be hidden from view. To reveal hidden text, select your entire document and then hit Command+D on Mac or Ctrl+D on Windows to open the font dialogue box. Make sure the hidden box is unchecked, and then hidden text will reveal itself.
