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Microsoft Word has a little feature called 'Track changes', which allows for collaborating with colleagues on documents. When enabled it will keep a running history of changes made to a document, kind of like a built-in version control. Add to that the ability to accept/reject changes, highlight text and add comments and you've got quite a nice little document collaboration package.

An important fact that you need to remember, however, is that this history lives with the document. This is an obvious necessity when you start passing it around to various colleagues as part of your work/review process. However, it is surprisingly easy to forget that this change history and comments still live in the document when you've got the feature turned off. And if you're not careful you may be setting yourself up for some embarrassing moments (or worse) if you send this marked-up document out to a customer or client.

So you have a document that you need to send to more than a couple of people. Maybe hundreds, or even thousand of people. Or you want to print the labels for your holiday greeting cards, so that you don't have to put pen to paper to get all of the addresses on the envelopes. Getting married? When we did, we put the names and addresses of all of the invited guests into an Excel spreadsheet, along with phone numbers, the RSVP, dinner dish selection, and after the wedding the gift received. Invitations and thank you cards went out using the same mail merge, from Excel to the label sheets using Word for the layout. It may sound complicated, but it really is a great time saver once you've figured out how to set it up. It takes a few steps to walk through the wizard, and the first time you do it you'll need to pay attention, but it really is easy!

In a recent article we looked at how to create your own custom template to use in Microsoft Word. One of the things I find very handy is to print the name of the file in the footer of my Word documents. How many times have you looked at a letter, fax, or any kind of printed document and found yourself thinking "I wish I could remember what I called this file, it sure would make it easier to find". You can set up Word to automatically print that information in the footer of every document you save, and it's easy!

Word templates, often mentioned yet seldom utilized, a true time saving weapon that every computer warrior needs to have in their arsenal. You have to think about 'time saving' exercises within the context of the task itself. If you have a task on which you spend, say, 1 hour per year, it hardly seems worthwhile to invest in a time saving exercise for that task that will itself take several hours to undertake. On the other hand, there are some tasks which we do repetitively and consistently, on which a time saving exercise can be incredibly worthwhile, even if you need to invest some time initially to set them up. If you can save even a few seconds on these types of tasks every time they are undertaken you may finally be able to have enough time to kick back and enjoy that Starbucks Marble Mocha Macchiato you've been thirsting for. Word templates are just such a time saving weapon, and the good news is that they take hardly any investment in time to get set up in the first place.

First and foremost, you have to remember that Word is a word processor, which means that it was designed to create documents primarily made up of text. It was not designed as a page layout program, where you are trying to create image-intensive documents like brochures or flyers. Microsoft would like you to use Publisher for that, unfortunately that never really caught on and most people don't even know they have it. Anybody having anything to do with the publishing business wouldn't be caught dead using Publisher (myself included), preferring to stick with Quark, PageMaker or InDesign. There are two problems with page layout programs - the good ones are expensive, and they all have a pretty steep learning curve (even the cheap or free ones are hard to use). So most times we attempt to do this with Word, because that is what we know and it is what we have. Also, many times all we really want to do is to place an image on the document and get it to stick where we want it, and get the text to wrap around it in a certain way. The good news is that this is now a fairly simple exercise, using the Advanced Layout options available for images in Word.

So, I'm doing some work on my laptop the other night and E looks over my shoulder and says 'Hey, I've got a question for you. I was working in Word today and I must have typed the same word over and over 40 times. Isn't there a way to create a shortcut key or something where I can type in 2 or 3 letters and have the word fill in automatically?'. So I say 'Well, actually, yes, there is'.