Whatever your needs regarding Microsoft Word, whether you’re new and need the basics, you’re an expert and hunger for advanced tips, or you seek help in preparing for Microsoft Office User Specialist (MOUS) certification to enhance your career, you’ve come to the right place. (Just for good measure, you’ll find tidbits sprinkled here and there to help you with other Microsoft products.)

Scroll this page, or click a following link to jump to a specific topic. Note: Temporary announcements (such as dates of online sessions and issues of the All About Microsoft Word™ newsletter) generally appear on the site’s Today’s Tidbits page rather than here.

Word Tips Galore!

Here are tips to improve your Word skills. Most are applicable to Word 95 and later. Some tips are created expressly for this site. Others were culled from our community’s former email discussion group. (Note: Occasionally browse for “UPDATED” next to older listings below, too.)

If you have a tip that might help others, please submit it. If selected for publication, you’ll receive a little fame when your tip appears here. You don’t need to be an “expert” to submit tips. A simple Word feature or trick that you use every day and think nothing about may be a real treat for others, since perhaps eighty percent of Word features are known to only twenty percent of users. To submit a tip, contact me.

Occasionally, third parties contribute helpful information that doesn’t quite fit “tip” format. So also see the next section of this page, Speaker’s Corner. Finally, don’t miss the free chapters from my Mastering Word 2000 Premium Edition!

Speaker’s Corner

Participants in the All About Microsoft Word™ community from time to time contribute interesting material that isn’t a good fit for other areas of our Web site. But like Speaker’s Corner in London, we try to give them space to express their ideas. So, following are a sampling of participant contributions. If you have ideas for submissions of your own, let me know.

Online Word Resources

The following third-party Word resources will grow as you, I, and others contribute recommendations. If any link changes or to recommend a resource, please contact me.

If none of the following URLs is applicable or all else fails, use the excellent search engine found on Microsoft’s home page: http://www.microsoft.com

For general information, try Microsoft’s main Word page: http://www.microsoft.com/office/word/default.htm?RLD=246

Mac users, explore the Mac Word home page on Microsoft’s site: http://support.microsoft.com/support/default.asp?PR=wrm6&RLD=246

My favorite source for answers related to virtually any problems associated with Microsoft products is the Knowledge Base: http://search.support.microsoft.com/kb/c.asp But if you, like I, sometimes find it challenging to ask the right question to reach the answer, try BkAlzert.com, a free, third-party solution. In essence, each day it grabs and emails you the new and updated Knowledge Base articles for just the Microsoft products that you select. http://www.kbalertz.com

Newsgroup junkies: Point your newsgroup reader (such as Microsoft Outlook Express) to msnews.microsoft.com and select one or more newsgroups stylized as microsoft.public.word.*.

If you can’t find the answer to almost any question about Word on our own or Microsoft’s Web site, you’ll probably find it at the site of MVPs.org, an independent site run by several folks associated with the Microsoft Valuable Professionals program.

OneOnOne’s free Qwik & Dirty Task Guides for Word (and Excel) show you at a glance how to execute multistep tasks by scrolling through the actual screen sequences. They use realistic examples to show you not-so-obvious capabilities.Visit http://www.oootraining.com/QwikAndDirty/jwolsen.html today.

Books About Microsoft Word

I’ve contracted as an author for four books about Microsoft Word, two of which are described below. Their approaches are quite different, so check out whether one or both may be right for you.

Expert Guide to Microsoft Word Tips

I’ve gathered hundreds of Word tips over the years and selected the best of the best for this ebook collection–a bargain at $19.95. The book provides you with several advantages beyond monster Word books:

• It’s concise, answering the key questions about Word, typically in about a page.
• It’s an ebook, so you can open it in one window while working side by side with a window running Word and follow the tips step by step.
• It’s carefully organized, both by table of contents category and via hyperlinks, so you can find exactly what you need with just a mouse click or two.
• Even if you’ve faithfully followed every tip in my books and magazine stories about Word and on this Web site, you’ll find that the tips have been updated expressly for this book.
• It’s dirt cheap by today’s book standards.
• Your purchase helps to support the All About Microsoft Word™ community by helping to offset my costs in continuing such services.

To learn more about this book or to order, visit the publisher’s Web page for this book.

Mastering Word 2000 Premium Edition

This definitive, 1000+ page printed book is so thorough, guiding you from your current level of knowledge about Word (even if you’re entirely new to the product) to everything you’ll ever likely need to know, that it requires a Web page of its own just to describe it. (Click the link below.)

Inside Borders, the house magazine of the Borders book chain, highlighted this book and said, “This book teaches you all you need to know to get the most out of this powerful program.” Separately, they ran an interview with me about this book. Did I really say, “Word 2000 demystifies the Tower of Babel of word processing formats?”

The bad news is that this book is now out of print, so you’ll need to chase down a copy online. The good news is that, as time permits, I post chapters of the book online. Learn more about the book and free stuff from it.