From James Marshall,
Your Guide to Word Processing.
FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!

Word is a powerful program with a lot of commands, options, and automated features. But Word was designed to allow users to customize what is displayed and how it responds to your input.

By customizing Word, you’ll improve your productivity – and avoid a lot of frustration.

The following tips will show you how to customize the Word window to suit your needs.


Displaying the Styles Area
The Styles area will help you apply formatting consistently by displaying the styles applied to each paragraph. Find out how to turn on the Styles Area.

Eliminating Document Buttons
If a cluttered taskbar is slowing you down, you can opt to eliminate all the extra buttons and have Word display only one button in the taskbar.

Change the Office Assistant
If you like the animated office assistant, but you’re getting a little tired of Clippit, Microsoft has included a whole gallery of assistants for you to choose from.

Turn off the Office Assistant
Some users find the animated office assistants less amusing than downright annoying. If you’re one of those people, you can turn this feature off.

Turning on/off Word's Task Pane
The Task Pane provides quick access to certain commands, but many users may find that they would prefer to free up the screen space. Find out how to turn it on or off and choose whether you want it to open with Word.

Show or Hide Text Boundaries
If you've ever wanted to the editable area in your Microsoft Word documents and don't like using the rulers to estimate it, there is a very simple solution. The option to show or hide text boundaries will eliminate the guess work.