For a business owner, there are few things more frustrating or time consuming than trying to format a document to look the way you want. Whether it’s a sales proposal for a potential customer, an internal document describing a business process or an end of month sales report, Microsoft Word has the potential to be your best friend, or your worst enemy.
We know that any time invested into learning Word would improve our output, but who has time to read through a 390 page MS Word 2007 for Dummies book, anyway? Instead, as business owners, we force ourselves to muddle through it, rarely happy with the mediocre results or the time wasted in the process.
When I first started using Microsoft Word, I had my share of frustrations with this so-called ‘productivity’ application. But I hoped that if I invested the time trying to understand it, it would reward me with professional looking documents in return.
So it was in 1997 that I began my ‘marriage counseling’ with Microsoft Word. Many dollars were spend on various books, included my favourite: “Men are from Mars, Women are from MS Word.”
In 2008, after a rocky start with Word version 2007, I am happy to report that while it hasn’t been twelve years of marital bliss, my relationship with the various versions of the world’s most popular word processing application is back on track.
The goal of this tutorial is not to serve as a comprehensive instruction manual to Microsoft Word. Part of what we want to do here at TechSMB is save business owner’s time and enhance productivity. These tutorials are going to do both – providing you with brief but specific how-to scenarios that will give your written communications that extra “pop” that your clients, colleagues and suppliers will appreciate.
We begin with MS Word Part I: Fix Those Ugly Tables.
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Using Word can certainly be frustrating – especially with all of the ’special behaviour’ it exhibits in certain places (we used to call them bugs). I’d like to seriously recommend some of the tutorials from the site: Shauna Kelly’s ‘Making the Most of Word in your Business’ site.
I’ve used these in the past with older versions of word to get me out of some tight spots with consistently formatting headings, for example. I’m looking forward to some of your tips and tricks also, Ben! Now can someone tell me why we have to use Word still, at all?