Don’t be afraid to make adjustments to Microsoft Office

One of the things that I am constantly doing is making adjustments to my computer to make work better and have available all of the application tools that I use day in, day out. This involves loading the right software on a system that I am going to use as well as adjusting that software when necessary to the way I need to use it.

I love Microsoft’s Word application but its default settings are not even close to the setting I like to use. So there are several things that I quickly change as soon as I do a new installation. Margins and line spacing are the first things that I have to adjust. Notice the Arrow pointing diagonally to the bottom right of the PAGE Layout-Page Setup section. It is surrounded by the red box in the picture to the left. Click on this icon to display the Page Setup Dialog box shown to the left.

Once you have made your adjustment that you want to keep and use in most of your documents, click on the SAVE AS DEFAULT button located to the left bottom of the dialog box. This will save the settings as your default for all new pages. I normally set my margins to a 1/2 inch all the way around and my line spacing to 1 and 0 points between paragraphs. I need all the paper real estate that I can get.

To do this go to the Paragraph section on ribbon bar and notice this section also has the same style arrow at the bottom right of the section that will open the Paragraph Setting Dialog Box.

You will want to make your adjustments in this dialog box just as you did in the Page Setup dialog box and when everything is set the way you want it, click on the Set as Default button as well. This will save these paragraph settings changes to the normal.dotm file for all future word documents.

I also make some slight adjustments in the Word Options – Advanced section found under the Files Tab. This gives me the ability to fine tune my program responses to fit the way I work like changing the Insert Key to insert the clipboard contents at the cursor, and changing the default formatting of a pasted image to wrap text to allow me control of image placement on a document.

I also change my default directory for my group templates to the network location that I store them to make it easier to use preformatted documents for the different kinds of documents that I need through out the day.

I hope this has been helpful to you and has provided some ideas that you can use to help make your Office Word use more productive. Let me know how you have changed your settings that make the product more useful to you.