10 Hidden Features in Microsoft Word (You’ll Wish You Knew Sooner)

How many of these did you know about already? 🤔

▼ Time Stamps: ▼
0:00 - Intro
0:36 - Lorem Ipsum & Random Text Generators
1:11 - Hidden Text
1:34 - Spike Cut & Paste
1:58 - Vertical Selection
2:27 - Shrink One Page
3:07 - Custom Ribbon Tabs
4:21 - Document Inspector
5:08 - Advanced Autocorrect
5:54 - Customize Status Bar
6:16 - Advanced Find
7:25 - Part 2: Features Few Know About
7:37 - Screenshots
8:04 - Change Case Button
8:27 - Read Aloud
8:46 - Show/Hide Button
9:15 - Compare Documents
9:43 - Quick Parts
10:36 - Building Blocks

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[ThioJoe]

In addition to suggestions for Excel, Powerpoint, and Google Docs, is there anything else you'd want to see a video about?

[natalieeuley]

I'm SO glad for the Quick Parts feature you showed. As a teacher I am constantly making the same kinds of diagrams, but there is no such thing as a default text box that is just the font with no border or background, so I have to recreate it every single time. This will be wonderful for reducing that repetition.

[jessjulliah]

The hidden text is really useful; if you create a "character style", you can easily apply it to answers, and print the document without (student version) or with (teacher key) version. However, note that end-of-paragraph marks should NOT be formatted this way, or the whole paragraph may disappear; put a few spaces at the end, deselect those, and select the desired answer, and press shortcut Ctrl-Shift-S to pull up the style menu, and type the beginning of the "answer-text" character style. Boom - there you go!
All the other tips are really good, but hidden text is my favorite.

[NormAtWork]

I'm an administrative assistant and I use Word extensively every day. I would say that along with Acrobat Reader Pro, it's the software I use the most. I knew about most of the features, but I did learn a few things: the lorem ipsum trick, shrink one page and screenshots were new to me (though I have gotten so used to print screen and crop that I may continue to do so). Will re-watch to make sure I caught everything. Keep up the good work!
BTW, Lorem ipsum is typically a corrupted version of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC text by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical and improper Latin.

[Carhill]

8:05 - You can also quickly change case with Shift + F3.
Toggles between upper, lower, and title case.
Found this one out eons ago and it has served me well.

[Lofote]

Selecting multiple (seperated) parts is also a great feature. Just hold the CTRL key while you select some thing with the mouse and then another thing with the mouse.

[hwojfdb]

When you click the pilcrow symbol in the paragraph tools (what you refer to as show/hide formatting marks) you commented that the symbol appearing in the document indicates a new line. Strictly speaking, you get a new line by holding down the shift key while pressing Enter, simply pressing the enter key creates a new paragraph and that new paragraph adopts all the fonts, spacing and other paragraph formatting of the paragraph you were just in. While the pilcrow symbol shows up on the screen as a single character, when you copy and paste it makes a big difference whether or not that character is part of the copied text since it holds all the formatting instructions. As an experiment, toggle the formatting marks to 'on', triple click inside a paragraph to select the entire paragraph and then copy and paste the block somewhere else in Word. Repeat on the same paragraph but before the copy, hold down shift and press the left arrow to de-select the pilcrow mark. Now if you copy and paste you will not be dragging the formatting along. Recent versions of Word have made it easier to opt how you paste so it isn't as critical that you see the formatting marks all the time but I still find it helpful to see what is going on when Word seems to be stubborn about formatting issues, particularly when the paragraph includes numbering.

[Tyranitar]

yes i would like a video on excel! Would help for all my math/science assignments!

[jukpaa]

Good stuff, few items I learned and I've considered myself a Word Pro since 1990s. One thing I've found extremely useful is Reveal Formatting - Shift-F1 and its counterparts ctrl-space to clear character formatting and ctrl-q to clear paragraph formatting.

[Hodenkat]

I'm not in a position where I'm creating documents all-day every-day, but there were a few examples here I thought were useful in my day-to-day use of Word. The alt+select is great, and the "fit to page" also could be useful to me. Thanks for the great tips!

[andrewlockwood]

One of the useful tools when applying formatting is to use the copy format button. Little known is that you can double-click the copy format button and then it remains sticky and you can apply the copied format to multiple successive selections. Hit escape to un-stick it. Saves a LOT of time when you have lots of finicky formatting to apply. Enjoy! 😊

[cuteswan]

*Always* great to see these hints & tricks videos. I always end up using some of them all the time or installing recommended tools. This channel is where I heard about Notepad++ and it's awesome, and Ctrl-F3/Ctrl-Shift-F3 will make my life a heck of a lot easier. (Apparently it's called "Spike" / "Insert Spike" in Office 2000.)

In Office 2000 I once fat-fingered the keyboard and Word said, "Okay, I'll disable Autosave for the rest of this session" and I've never found it again since. Back in the late '90s there was a menu item in Microsoft Word make a list of _all_ available functions in a new document, but I can't find a version of that to look up the first hotkey.

[andypuempel]

One of the best collection of tips that I have ever seen for MS Word. Great pace too. Nicely done and thanks for sharing, Joe.

[TheOnlyName]

Super helpful, thank you!! So much to play with packed into one video. These are definitely my favorite videos of yours.

[mmazvis]

I love the quick access feature, especially since all quick access icons up top has shortcuts to them. For example, at 4:17, Autosave toggle would be Alt->1, Save Alt->2 and Shrink to fit that was inserted Alt->3
And you can customize their order, to make it as you want it.

[lpconserv]

Very much appreciated content!!! I suffer from lack of knowledge on this very topic. Saved this link, and will keep it on my desktop until I start to have it soak in and use more of these helpful tips...👍

[nordbymikael]

Wow, I will definitely use the screenshot function and the custom formatting function! This will become a huge timesaver for me, because I study IT and I do often need a specific document formatting or to insert screenshots from virtual machines.

Thank you!

[wot_hog]

Two useful customizations I created are: in a ribbon tab I created called "My Buttons" I added a Sort button to sort data by various criteria (Just like in Excel—huge time saver), a Page Break Before button, and the Convert Table to Text and Convert Text to Table buttons, which save a lot of time hunting and pecking around.
You can also create Symbol shortcuts for symbols you use often (like the Euro symbol or British Pound, or other special characters) that will appear automatically when I type CTRL + ####, where the # are whatever numbers you designated. Alternatively, you can memorize the ALT codes for them, like ALT + 0215 for the times symbol (×), a pet peeve for me when lazy people use the ordinary "x" instead, or ALT + 0176 for the degrees symbol (°).

[bassanup]

I had some idea of how powerful MS Word is, but this is just next level

[xperryment]

Wow a very informative channel that is all about "Tech Tips" unlike the other popular one that is more on hardware consumerism.