Customizing MS Word

Microsoft Word, the tool you'll likely be using most to edit and proofread, has capabilities that most users aren't even aware exist. The nice thing about this fact is that, while these capabilities will in some cases cut your editing and proofreading time in half, you don't need a lot of computer know-how to use these features.

MS Word: Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar

Using the Quick Access Toolbar can save you a lot of time. It's the little toolbar with icons at the very top left of the screen. Use this toolbar for actions you perform frequently (save, undo, spell check) or ones that are hard to find because there are a number of menus to click through (left to right text). Just click the down arrow at the right end of the toolbar, and a menu will appear. There are many options to choose from. Scroll through, and if you find something you use frequently, click it and then click Add. It will appear in your toolbar. Here are just a few ideas for useful buttons:

• Spelling and Grammar

• Macros

• Insert

• Comment

• Left To Right Text

• Track Changes

• Show Text Formatting

• Insert Symbol

Some editors like to have this toolbar even closer to their document. If you want to try this, just click the arrow on the right of the toolbar, and scroll down to Show Below the Ribbon. There! You can always change it back if you prefer it not to be so close, just click Show Above the Ribbon. The following screen capture shows where the Quick Access Toolbar is located. Look for the red arrow.

MS Word: Power Find and Replace

Using advanced Find and Replace techniques can save you a lot of time and ensure consistency across your document. What's more, Find and Replace has a hotkey (Ctrl+H). Let's say you realize part way through a document that the author is using a word incorrectly—say, principal for principle. Spell check won't catch this, but as soon as you realize it's happening, you can do a Find and Replace. Find principal and replace with principle. Be careful about using Replace All, as it will replace all instances of principal, even the correct ones.

As another example, imagine you have a document in American English, and the author uses punctuation both inside and outside the quotation marks. As soon as you realize this, you can find quotation marks followed by commas (",) and replace them with commas followed by quotation marks (,") and find quotation marks followed by periods (".) and replace them with periods followed by quotation marks (."). Again, make sure you do not use Replace All.

But Find and Replace can do so much more! You can use it to find and change formatting options. Imagine the author is writing about the book Perfume and has bolded all instances of the title in the text when it should be in italics. Click Replace. In the Find what box, type "Perfume." Now go to the bottom left and click More. Now go down to the bottom and click Format. Go to Font and select Bold. Now, in the Replace with box, type Perfume, and then go to Format, Font, and click Italic. In this case, as it's a title, you'll want to check the Match case box, so you don't replace a possible instance of the word perfume being used. Find next, and manually replace all instances! Done!

You can also use Find and Replace for special characters. Let's say an author has used double hyphens throughout the document when they should have used em dashes; instead of manually replacing each instance, you can find double hyphens (--) and replace them with em dashes (—). To insert the em dash in the Replace with box, click inside the box and then go down to More and click Special. A list of special characters will appear. Click the em dash, and then Replace All. Done! Do some experimenting with the special characters and formatting, and next time you need to change something complicated in your document, consider this option. It saves time and ensures all problem instances are caught.

MS Word: Hotkeys and Keyboard Shortcuts

Hotkeys refer to letters you press with the Alt key to get to menu items. So, if you press Alt in Word, you'll see that letters appear in the ribbon under the different tabs. If you press one of these letters, it'll take you to the tab, where the commands also have letters next to them, which you can press to execute these commands. But how is this useful? It saves time, of course! Imagine you're editing and you want to insert a page break. You have to stop editing, take your hand off the keyboard and move it to the mouse, navigate to the Insert tab, and then click Page Break, or you could just press Ctrl+Enter, which is much easier, and you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard. If you learn the hotkeys for Word, you can save some time. (We'll give you an even faster way to make page breaks next.)

A Few Helpful Shortcuts

If you've ever pressed Ctrl+C, you've used a shortcut! There are many other useful, native shortcuts, many of which you probably already know:

Ctrl+

• S – save

• Z – undo

• Y – redo

• O – open

• P – print

• F – find

• X – cut

• C – copy

• V – paste

• B – bold

• U – underline

• I – italics

• H – find and replace

• Spacebar – clear formatting

• A – select all

• - (on the number pad) – en dash

• enter – insert page break

Ctrl+Alt+

• T – insert trademark symbol

• C – insert copyright symbol

• - (on the number pad) – em dash

• F – insert footnote

• D – insert endnote

• M – insert comment

Memorizing these (or printing them out!) can save you a lot of clicking around. In addition to the ones mentioned above, there are hundreds of others out there; just do an internet search for keyboard shortcuts and find the ones you might use.

Highlighting Text

Two other helpful keyboard shortcuts are Ctrl+Shift+Home and Ctrl+Shift+End. These tell you how far you are in the document. Imagine you're working away on a document and you want to know, quickly, how much you've already edited. Just leave your cursor where you are and push Ctrl+Shift+Home. This highlights all the text before the cursor (and you can view the word count in the bottom ribbon). To see how much you have left, use Ctrl+Shift+End. This highlights everything after the cursor (and you can see the word count as well). Pressing any of the arrow keys takes you back to the cursor. This gives you a better idea of how far you have come and how much further you have to go than just the page number.

MS Word: Advanced Dictionary Usage

The spell checker in Word isn't perfect; there are many words it simply doesn't know. This can be a problem when editing any document, but it's an even bigger problem when editing a technical or academic document. Your document may be filled with red squiggly lines before you even start! But what if these words are not spelled incorrectly at all? There are a couple of different ways to handle this problem.

There are free, commercially available open source dictionaries (and paid dictionaries) out there for various fields (e.g., the medical, legal, and engineering fields). If you edit a lot of medical documents, for example, it may be worth downloading and installing a medical dictionary addon for Word, or you can subscribe to and download a dictionary that Word uses when running spell check. These types of dictionaries contain specialized terms and save time because you don't have to research the spelling for terms Word incorrectly identifies as incorrectly spelled. (That's a lot of "incorrectlies"!)

How to Install a Custom Dictionary

We mentioned free, open source dictionaries, so we'll follow up and show you exactly how to install one. To add any custom dictionary with a .dic file extension to Word, you can follow the directions provided here. Different versions of Word may vary slightly.

After you have downloaded your custom dictionary, you'll need to move it to the correct folder before adding it to Word. Copy your custom dictionary file ending in .dic to the folder with the following title:

• C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\UProof

It should look something like this:

The red arrow is pointing to the .dic file we are using for this example. After transferring the file to the correct folder, you need to tell Word to access that dictionary when checking the spelling of a document.

Go to the File tab and click Options. A new window will open. Click Proofing. Look at the red arrow in the following image.

Click Custom Dictionaries (follow the red arrow). A new window will pop up.

Click Add (follow the red arrow). A window leading to the file folder containing your .dic file will open.

Select the dictionary of your choice. Click Open.

Check to make sure your new custom dictionary has been added, and that's it!

Adding to the Already Existing Custom Dictionary

If you would rather customize the existing dictionary than install a new one, you can do that too. This process is slow going, but it eventually results in a dictionary that recognizes the correct spelling of technical terms or whatever nonstandard words you save there. To do this, when you run a spell check on your document, click Add to Dictionary in the spell check window after you have researched a term and are positive it's correct. You can also right click the word as you are editing and choose Add to Dictionary. After it's added to the dictionary, Word will no longer identify it as incorrect. Over time, your dictionary grows, and eventually, there should be fewer and fewer squiggly lines.

Accidental Additions

Have you ever clicked Add to Dictionary, just to realize that the spelling was actually incorrect? It's a bad feeling—now every time you edit you'll have to remember that it's hematoxylin, not hemotoxylin, as Word won't catch this incorrect spelling because hemotoxylin was added to the dictionary. Rats! Don't worry; there's a pretty easy fix for this. Just go to Options and click Proofing. Click the Custom Dictionaries button. You've done all these steps before, so you shouldn't have any problems getting to this point. You should see your custom dictionary there, as well as any others you may have installed. When you have highlighted the dictionary you wish to edit, click Edit Word List, and your word list will appear. Find the offending word, highlight it, and click Delete. Easy! Now you can forget about hemotoxylin.

Difficulties Adding Words

Have you ever attempted to add a word to the default dictionary in Word, only for the Add to Dictionary option to be grayed out? Let's say you were editing a paper, and you wanted to add the word "tronics" to your dictionary because it is frequently used in many of the documents you've been editing lately. (Editor's note: We are fully aware that "tronics" isn't a word. It's just an example. You can breathe easy.)

It's quite frustrating, but there's a surprisingly simple fix. Click the File tab and click Options. This will bring up a new window. Select Proofing in the left hand column and then click the button that says Custom Dictionary. Your screen will now look something like the picture below. Look at the purple arrows. In this case, the document is set to Canadian English, but the dictionaries are all set to US English. These languages need to agree. The best way to do this is to remove all restrictions on the default dictionaries in Word. Click the drop-down menu and select All Languages for each dictionary you have installed. This way, no matter the original language of the document, you'll be able to add words to your custom dictionary. (Note: This process may vary in some versions of Word.)

MS Word: The AutoText Gallery

Do you use the AutoText Gallery? You really should. Most editors save and reuse frequently used comments. For example, how many times have you typed out, "Please check that I have not changed your intended meaning" or "The first use of an acronym should have the words spelled out, with the acronym in parentheses after the word. Please spell this out"? Or maybe you have certain clients that you find you're pointing out the same issues to. Some editors save their comments in separate Word files, but if you do this, you should consider putting them in the AutoText Gallery.

To save text here, first go to the Quick Access Toolbar and click the down arrow. Click More Commands. Where it says Choose Commands From, choose All Commands. Scroll down to AutoText and click Add. Click OK. Now the AutoText icon should show up in your toolbar. To save text, just highlight text in your document (or in the comment balloon), and click the AutoText icon and select Save to AutoText Gallery. A popup will appear where you can add a title and description. The next time you want to use that comment, just click the icon and select it; it will be inserted at your cursor.

Stickies for Other Programs

While this is a unit about MS Word, we wanted to make a quick note about ready-made comments for other programs. If you are editing in a program that doesn't have the option of making a catalog of frequently used comments, use a sticky note program. Type all of your comments on individual notes, and copy and paste them into the program you are using as needed. For example, if you are using Adobe Reader, you can copy and paste frequently used notes from your sticky note program into the comment boxes you generate in Adobe Reader. You can download any number of free sticky note programs from the Internet.

MS Word: Miscellaneous

There are a few other tips about Word that can help you to be a faster, better editor.

Selecting text: There are a couple things here. Double click on a word to select it, Ctrl+mouse click to select the sentence, and triple click to select the paragraph. Ctrl+A will select all the text. If your cursor is in the left margin, click to select a row, double click to select a paragraph, and triple click to select all.

Navigation pane: Use it! It saves scrolling endlessly through a document looking for something specific. If you use Word's built-in styles, you can browse the headings (in the first tab); if you click on one, your cursor will go to that section. This can also help you identify when your headings are incorrect (e.g., Heading 3 should be Heading 4), and you can easily fix this right in the Just right click the heading and either promote or demote it. It's also great for content reorganization. If you want to move a later section up, click and drag it to wherever it should go. The entire section is moved to the new location in the document. In the second tab, you can browse by sight. This is helpful if you have a graphics-heavy document. Scroll until you find the page you want, click it, and you're there. In the third pane, you can search for text. Just type in whatever you'd like to find; all instances will be highlighted in the document. Press up and down to find what you're looking for.

Show formatting: It is sometimes difficult to determine what's wrong with a document's formatting, even when something is obviously wrong. Maybe the author typed in hard returns at the end of each line; this is easy to see with the formatting marks turned on. Just go to the Home tab and click the Show/Hide Formatting button (it looks like a paragraph mark). Most editors don't like actually editing with the formatting marks turned on because it can be too distracting, but it is a good tool for getting a look at what's happening behind the scenes.

Splitting the screen: Sometimes you need to view different parts of a document at the same time—say, to compare the in-text citations to the reference list. Press Ctrl+Alt+S. A split will appear on your screen. You can have the top part for scrolling through the text and the bottom half for comparing to the references. If you need to compare two different files, open the files and click Arrange All on the View tab. If you click View Side by Side, you can click Synchronous Scrolling, which allows you to scroll through both at the same time, without clicking back and forth.

Go to box: If you want to find a certain location, especially in a long document, using this box is an option. Click the Page: X of Y on the bottom ribbon. It will open a box where you can type in different page numbers, sections, or graphics, wherever you want to go. The navigation pane is better if Word's heading styles are used, but if they aren't, this box is a good navigation option.

Inserting symbols: Editors often work on documents with mathematical and scientific symbols. You should create keyboard shortcuts for the most frequently used ones, as previously discussed. This avoids having to click to Insert Symbol, and then scrolling and scrolling to find the one you want. You could also memorize the character code (e.g., Alt+0215 gives you a multiplication sign [×]), but this is tough, especially if you don't use them too often. Create shortcuts for the ten symbols you use the most. Another good tip relates to diacritics. If you need an é for café or résumé, it's actually pretty easy. Just click Ctrl+' and then whatever letter you want the accent on.

Format Painter: This can be really useful if you just want to format text in the same way as another bit of text. Maybe something odd happened in the pasting or you don't want to hunt around to find out the size, font, and spacing of the desired format. Just highlight the text with the formatting you want, click Format Painter (the little brush on the Home tab), and then highlight the text you want to format. It's done!

AutoRecover settings: Even though everyone knows to save constantly, it doesn't always happen. You get caught up editing, and suddenly Word crashes, the power goes out, or your dog steps on your power bar, and your work since you last saved (or since AutoRecover did) is lost. The default setting is that AutoRecover saves every ten minutes, but a lot of editing, and even more proofreading, can happen in ten minutes. What if you just got that difficult paragraph hammered out? It's frustrating to lose any work at all. You can set your AutoRecover to save more frequently. Go to Options, Save, and Save AutoRecover information every [insert number of minutes here] minutes. You can make it as short as two minutes, which could save you redoing work in the future and reduce the fury that comes with computer crashes.

Change Case button: When editing, it is sometimes necessary to change the case of text, which can often be time consuming if done by hand. The Change Case button does this automatically, so it's quite the time saver. The button is found under the Home tab in Word; it appears as an "Aa" with a little down arrow beside it. It can be used to change the text between a number of different cases, including sentence case, lowercase, uppercase, and title case.

Avoiding messy tracked changes: It can sometimes be important to avoid messy-looking tracked changes, as this can be confusing to a client who is trying to evaluate or study the changes that have been made in a document. It helps to look at the tracked changes with this in mind. A couple key points: First, it helps to remember that Word tracks changes a little differently depending on how the changes are made. If you use a "delete" or "backspace" button to remove the first letter of a word, for example, the Word program tracks a single letter deletion and a single letter addition. However, if you highlight the letter and type in a new letter, the program replaces the entire word. It helps to be consistent with how this is done, and it can be clearer to highlight and replace text if multiple letters are going to be edited. Second, if you make a change and then decide against that change, it is helpful to use the "Undo Typing" button or shortcut, as this returns the text to its original state without leaving any tracked changes. If, however, you deleted something and then added it back to the document by typing it in, both the deletion and the addition appear in the tracked changes. This can confuse a client, as changes are shown despite the original word being maintained.

Switching between footnotes and endnotes: Sometimes a client wants to switch their footnotes to endnotes or vice versa, which seems like a terrible pain for the editor. However, if the client has created the endnotes or footnotes using the appropriate Word function, the notes can easily be changed from one to the other. Click on the drop-down arrow in the footnotes section in Word; in the box that appears, the two options (footnotes and endnotes) will be shown, with the current selection marked. To make a change, click the desired option and then click "Convert." Another box will open to confirm the type of switch being completed; click the desired switch (e.g., "Convert all footnotes to endnotes") and then "OK." Voila! The notes have been converted.

Last Updated: 10/01/2022