We’re working on project that involves creating custom forms in Word. Since we like to help educate our clients on this stuff in addition to just doing the work, I ended up passing on a couple of cool Word tips. I figured other folks might like them too.
Our client is working with really large documents (50-100) pages and was complaining that scrolling through pages and pages of text was tedious. So, here’s a useful built-in feature. The key is that you need to use Word’s built-in heading styles to format your headings (choose Heading 1, Heading 2 and so on from the Styles drop-down). Then if you are using Word 97 or higher, you can jump to any section of the document by choosing View|Document Map. A navigational bar comes up on the side listing all the headings. You just double-click an entry and Word jumps you there.
People who are working on large documents often need to have them reviewed by a number of people. Although you can use Word’s revision marks, sometimes you just want to ask a question of the author or the next person in the review cycle. You can add comments anywhere in a document with Word’s built-in "comment" feature. Choose Insert|Comment and Word opens a little window. Type in your text and click Close. Word highlights the area in yellow. To read the comment, you just hover over the yellow text and the comment pops up like a post-it note. To edit the comment, you right click and choose Edit Comment.
Sometimes people want to keep parts of a document from being changed by others. You can use a Word feature called "protecting" a document to prevent modifications. This feature is mostly designed for forms, where you want someone to fill in boxes, but not modify the descriptive text around it. You can either protect an entire document or break the document up into sections and protect just part of it. To insert a section break, choose Insert|Break and choose one of the options under Section. To protect the section, choose Tools|Protect Document. Then click the Forms radio button and you can choose which sections of the document to protect and optionally include a password.