The Most Common Mistakes Made By Microsoft Word Users
Everybody knows Microsoft Word. It’s on almost every PC in the world and fair few Macs as well. However, a lot of users have picked up bad habits, things that detract from the usefulness of the document being created. This article looks at the most common basic errors among Microsoft users.
* Are you ever guilty of pressing the Return key at the top of a document to move the cursor down, perhaps when creating a document to be printed on your company stationery? If so, this means that you are creating a document with unwanted characters at the start. Much better to click on File – Page Setup and change the top margin (in Word 2003) or click on Custom Margins in the Page Layout tab of the Word 2007 ribbon.
* The habit of putting two spaces after a period goes back to the days of typewriters and monospace (fixed-width) typefaces like Courier where having two spaces after a period made the end of each sentence easier to detect when reading. Since modern computer-generated typefaces are proportionally spaced, the extra space is superfluous and should not be used.
* The habit of pressing the Return key twice at the end of each paragraph is not a good idea because it creates a sea of extra white space on the printed page. Only one return should used to end the paragraph. Extra space can then be added using the paragraph spacing commands. To find these options, in Word 2003 or earlier, choose Paragraph from the format menu. In Word 2007, click on the Page Layout tab.
* Casual users who have never attended any Microsoft Word training courses are often at a loss as to how tabs work. At worst, they use the space bar to attempt to align elements on the page. This never works and when the document is printed the columns do not align properly. The Tab key should be used instead of the space bar.
* Word, like most text handling software has default tab stops. So, a lot of users align their columns by pressing the tab key repeatedly if necessary to move to closest default tab. This leads to inconsistency in the number of tab characters between columns and should be avoided. It’s much better to click on the Word ruler to set up your own tabs just where you need them.
* A lot of newbie Word users will always format their documents, even long ones, either manually or by using the Format Painter. The best way to format text in long documents is to use Microsoft styles. Each style has multiple attributes associated with it which are applied automatically to any text formatted with that style. In addition, if the attributes of a style are changed, all text in that style is updated throughout the document.
* Word AutoCorrect and other text optimisation features can sometimes seem a bit too much to some users but many people do nothing to adjust the way these features work. In Word 2007, the AutoCorrect and other settings can be changed at any time by clicking on the Office Button and choosing Word Options. The equivalent in Word 2003 and earlier is Tools – Options.
