To take advantage of some of the more advanced features of Word, you require the use of fields. Table of contents, cross references, captions, formulas etc. all use fields to provide automation to the document.

When a document changes these fields need to be updated. This can be done by pressing the F9 key, or by right-clicking on the required field and choosing Update Field.

If the document changes regularly, or is large and time consuming to keep track of the many fields used, it could be a good idea to set Word to automatically update the fields on opening the document.

The following post explains how to create a macro that is run on opening a word document.  The result is that all document fields are automatically updated upon opening the document.

Mail Merge is, in my opinion, one of the best features of Microsoft Word. It is a hugely popular and powerful tool.

This post will walk through generating a mail merge to produce labels from data stored in an Excel spreadsheet.

Ever wondered how you can view your PowerPoint speaker notes during a presentation without your audience seeing. Maybe if you could check your email while the audience watch a video embedded in your presentation. This is all made possible with Presenter View in PowerPoint.

Presenter View enables you to view your speaker notes on screen while the audience view the presentation on a different screen or projector. Presenter View also gives you easy access to useful slide show tools to navigate slides, pause the presentation and view the time taken so far.

In Presenter View you can;

When working on a large document it can become difficult to quickly locate and select the objects that you wish to make changes to. Fortunately Word provides some useful tools to enable you to select the next object such as a section, comment or table.

By using some of Word’s funky tools for navigating large documents by object, you can say goodbye to old clunky ways of finding the next object in the document such as the Page Down key or the scroll bar.

When using Track Changes in Word, balloons are used to mark formatting changes and comments. Balloons seem to have a mixed appeal and many people prefer the use of the inline mark up, or the Reviewing Pane.
Balloons appear on the right in what is known as the Markup Area by default.

However, these settings can be changed so that the balloons can be switched off, or modified to appear elsewhere.

Turn Off Balloons in Track Changes