Take the stress out of formatting and make Word work how you want it to, as well as reducing the risk of losing work if your system crashes due to a power failure.

Watermarks. If you want to insert words such as Draft across every page, go to the Format menu| Background, Printed Watermark and complete the dialogue box as appropriate. For example, to put Draft diagonally across each page of the document, click on the Text watermark button. Type Draft in the Text box and select a font and size by opening the dropdown menu. In Layout click on the Diagonal button and finally click Apply and OK.

Convert a table to text. Select the rows (or table) and go to Table menu, Convert, Convert Table to Text. In the dialogue box click on the button for the way you want to separate the text, eg with commas.

Changing the case of a letter. There is the obvious way of highlighting the text and from the Format menu pick Change Case. Alternatively, do Shift+F3 and the case will change. Keep pressing the combination and it toggles through the options such as all capital, sentence case, and so on.

Formatting how you want it (AutoCorrect). Sometimes Word has a mind of its own. You find that letters are automatically capitilised, even though you wanted to keep them in lower case; the first two letters are automatically set to uppercase followed by lower case (Tn) rather than (TN). To take control, go to Tools, AutoCorrect and from the AutoCorrect menu uncheck the appropriate boxes, eg, Correct two initial capital. In the AutoCorrect dialogue box, you can dictate how other formatting is produced such as fractions from 1/2 to ½ . Go to the AutoFormat As You Type tab and uncheck the relevant boxes, eg Fractions (1/2) with fractions character (½).

Automatic back-up Reduce the risk of losing valuable time and effort if the system crashes. Word does do an automatic back-up while you work. The default setting is about five minutes. For fast typers this could mean a page of work could be lost. You can take command. Go to Tools, Options, pick the Save tab in the Options dialogue and reduce the Save AutoRecover info every: to one or two minutes.

I am a belt-and-braces person who saves little and often and will also do a manual save by going to File, Save or typing Ctrl+S.

If you have several documents open and want to do a quick save across the lot, hold down the Shift key as you open the File menu and you will see Save All.

Word is full of these hidden treasures which you can use to make your life easier.

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