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Ten Top Word Tips

Cruise through your work with these ten timesaving Microsoft Word tips.

Jim Welp

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Helpful servant that it is, Microsoft Word offers a jillion ways to improve your productivity and streamline routine tasks. And yet these tools are often as hard to find as buried treasure. So let's go digging. Here are ten ways to automate, reduce, or eliminate the drudgery of word processing with Word 97, 2000, and 2002.

10. Save Early, Save Often

Are you the saving kind? If not, you'll be glad to know Word will automatically save your documents in the background while you work--at an interval you specify. To set this interval, choose Tools, Options and click the Save tab. Make sure the 'Save AutoRecover info every' option is checked, and in the 'minutes' text box, type a number--or use the up/down arrows--to get to the frequency you want. I still compulsively click the Save icon or hit Ctrl-S after practically every sentence (due to a traumatic, weather-related experience I won't go into here), but it's still nice to know AutoRecover is on my team.

Bonus tip: If you have multiple Word documents open and you have a premonition that lightning is going to strike before the next AutoRecover, hold down the Shift key and click the File menu. The Save command changes to Save All, which will save all open Word documents in one fell swoop.

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