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This is about a few tip and tricks of searching information, editing and processing documents that I learned in the last stages of my first job. MS Word¹ has many features that make handling several hundred pages lot easier than possible with the most commonly used features and menus. Special keywords add a whole lot of functionality to Google searches. A concise collection of these is contained in this presentation. More elaborate explanations and some additonal points appear below.

Paste Special

Copy-and-paste is one of the most common tasks involved in producing a large document, and though it has a bad name, not every instance of it is illegitimate. You can be copying your own text, Excel charts, pictures or tables. In some cases, it may benefit to do more than simply paste. Enter 'Paste Special', often available on right-click and always on the Edit Menu. For instance, copy a chart in Excel and choose Paste Special - a dialog box shows up. If you choose to retain the "link", your chart will get updated automatically everytime you change the data in the Excel file, even if the document is closed and MS Word is not running. Printouts will reflect the latest version. To share the final electronic file, you can always remove the link and retain only the chart. Another use of this feature is given below.

Styles

Styles are at the basis of most automated tasks in Word. So the earlier you use them in the writing process, your life is that much easier near the end. They allow multiple time-saving tricks. All instances of a style throughout the document can be selected, and hence, cut and pasted, together, no matter how far apart they are.

In one large document I once edited, I created a new style and called it ‘Recommendation’. Every few pages, there were 2 or 3 lines of recommended policy. With this style in place, I could select them all in one click and paste them in a new document, rather than reading through the 500 page document every time and individually fetching them. If I modified the style at a later stage, all recommendations changed to reflect the new formatting, again without me moving through all the pages.

Heading styles are what generate TOCs. Changing a heading changes the TOC, when you refresh it.

Cross-references

While there are many things you can reference, I find referencing parts of text very useful. In cases when I have a portion of text that I wish to repeat at another place in the document, I do not just copy and paste it there, I cross-reference it. This way, when I change the first instance, all the other references to it change simultaneously. In case of simple text, this can also be achieved by pasting as a link using 'Paste Special'. Commonly, this can be used to repeat topical sentences, bullet items or tables verbatim in summary or concluding chapters.

Sections

Sections allow you to use different formats of page numbers such as i, 1, TOC-i, A-i. This is possible with the use of varying headers and footers for every section. This way, you can have the Chapter heading as part of the header and so forth. If each logical Chapter (separated by the Heading 1 style) is also a physical Section, this can be automated by the use of Insert-Field command. Select StyleRef as the field to inser into the Header. The Insert-Field menus has many other options you can explore.

Outline View

You only see the headings, only the level you want. If you demote or promote some heading to ‘Heading 2’, its formatting changes to match that style. You can move the heading forward or backward and the entire text below it (until before the next heading) moves with it.

You can select one or more headings and designate them as a ‘subdocument’. Elaborate uses of this feature appear in the Word Help article on the topic. Or you could read KB 894497online. In a nutshell, entire sections of your document can be locked or exported as a separate Word file. This way, you can finalize parts of your document and avoid the risk of tampering with them, importing or moving them as you please.

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1 Article applies to MS Word 97 through 2002. Features may be available in Word 2007, but in a different location.

I understand this may not be clear enough for someone using these features the first time. The hope is that once the direction is known, curiousity will lead the rest of the way. All said, the untlimate aim is to save time. Sometimes, that means avoiding spending more than a reasonable amount on learning new ways of doing things that work out just fine the old way too. My advice - only the truly savy trust technology and reap its rewards.