I would probably make a guess that Microsoft Word is the most heavily used piece of software used by teachers yet, from my experience, very few schools give their teachers much training in how to use the application. Given its use in helping teachers and education leaders prepare worksheets, booklets, newsletters and reports, it is probably worth spending a little time going through some key basics that I think will help educators be a little more productive in their use of Word.

Inserting Page Breaks
Have you ever hit enter/return several times in order to get your cursor to the top of the next page, so that you can start your next paragraph or write your next heading? Yep, most of us have been there at some stage. Well, I am pleased to tell you that you do not have to do this, just use a page break:

Inserting Section Breaks

Have you ever wanted to have some pages in your word document with a portrait orientation and some pages in landscape, so that you can fit in tables, graphs and pictures more appropriately? Well, you can easily do that with section breaks:

Contents and Headings

Ever worked on a major document with several sections and require a table of contents. A contents table can be set up really easily at the start of your work and at the end, when you have all your headings and pages in place, you can quickly update it with a few clicks:

Compressing images

When we add lots of images to a Word document it can blow out the file size. It is possible to use the compress image feature in Word to reduce the size of individual images and in turn lower the overall size of the document. Here’s how:

Watermarks

Ever wanted to put ‘confidential’ or ‘draft’ across a document? This is how you do it: