Category Archives: Customization

Editors are often afraid to work on big documents in Microsoft Word. I routinely work on documents larger than 300 pages, so I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. I do believe in having plenty of RAM (random access memory) on a computer (at least 256 megabytes), so that helps. Also, most of […]

In the 1996 film Jerry McGuire, Tom Cruise shouts “Show me the money!” I know the feeling, but right now I want Microsoft Word to show me the *menu*–all of it! In Word’s default state, many menu items are hidden until you click the little arrows at the bottom of a menu. For example, if […]

Don’t you love Word’s shortcut menus? You know–the ones you get when you click the right mouse button. (If you’re a Mac user, you can access the shortcut menus by holding down the Control key while pressing the mouse button.) But did you know can customize the shortcut menus, putting the features you use most […]

I work a lot with styles in Microsoft Word, and I like being able to look up at the drop-down style list on the formatting toolbar to see the name of the current paragraph style. I also like giving my styles long, descriptive names, such as Normal Text 2, Normal Text 2 No Indent, Normal […]

Microsoft Word comes with lots of features, many of which do not appear on menus or toolbars unless you put them there. Some of these features aren’t even documented. Nevertheless, some of them are very useful for editing, writing, typesetting, and other publishing tasks. From time to time I’ll write about these features in Editorium […]