8 Little-known Features of Microsoft Word

Doesn’t matter if Microsoft hasn’t managed to impress us with its mobile operating system, or that its new Windows 8 didn’t become a grand success. There is one product where Microsoft can still spot the cat’s meow, and that is their productivity suite, Office. We tattered hidden features of its alternatives (LibreOffice and Google Drive), but now is the time to unravel some little known features of the app that about 1 billion of you use, Microsoft Word.

Edit PDF files

One of the newest update to Word 2013 is the addition of support for PDF files. Now, not only you can view PDF files with Word, but you can also edit them. And, once you are done with the editing, you can also save your file as PDF, as well.

Swiftly move a paragraph

If you have got a very long document to edit and while reviewing you want to quickly move a section from one place to the other, Microsoft Word has a very elusive way to do it. Get your cursor inside any paragraph, hold Shift + Alt combination, and press up or down key.

Get the dictionary

Microsoft Office features an app store from which you can add myriad of useful tools to strengthen the functionality of your Office suite. One such app is Merriam-Webster dictionary. Once integrated with Word, these tools will let you look out for meaning of words from within the Word processor.

Research using Encyclopedia Britannica

Britannica Researcher offers over 80,000 articles that you can use to check your facts, get into details and as a reference for your writing, your papers and articles. The app isn’t free, you will have to pay about $5 to use it. Notably, this app or any other tool that you install from the app store will work only when you are connected to the internet and you will be required to sign in to install these apps.

Retrieve texts from images

Pull out your phone, take pictures of any text content – a newspaper or even a notice posted on your noticeboard, and then use OmiPage File Converter to retrieve the text from that image. This tool uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to figure the text. This could come real handy at times when you are too bored to write down pages from a book and other similar things. However, bear in mind that the exactness of the retrieved texts depend upon the clarity of the snapped images.

Press F4 to repeat your last action

If you were pasting some information to your document, pressing F4 will ensure its continuation. If you were deleting some data, by pressing F4, sensing your pattern, it will also start deleting data in similar fashion. This feature can come in handy while putting headers, or any other kind of codes into your document, if you have to do it a number of times, that is.

Go to last cursor position

Whenever you save and close a document, at the time of reopening it, the cursor is placed at the beginning of that document rather than being at the place it was last at. This sure is little annoying. If you want to place your cursor right where you left it, hit Shift + F5.

Save all the documents at once

If you are editing many documents at the same time, it is little time taking to pull all the documents one by one and save and close them. To fix it, in the previous versions of Word, you can press Shift and go to File tab from Menu bar and click on Save all. You won’t see that option until you have pressed a Shift key. Notably, this feature is nowhere to be found in Word 2013.