The door to Word’s graphical closet is found on the Insert tab. The command buttons nestled in the Illustrations group place various graphical goobers into the text. Here’s how the process works for pictures and graphical images: Click the mouse at the spot in the text where you desire the image to appear.

With few exceptions, time travelers are the only ones who bother asking for the current year. Otherwise, people merely want to know the month and day or just the day of the week. Word understands those people (but not time travelers), so it offers a slate of tools and tricks to insert date-and-time information into a document.

Word lets you add dynamic elements to a document. Unlike the text you normally compose, dynamic text changes to reflect a number of factors. To add these dynamic elements to a document, you use a Word feature called fields. Word's dynamic field feature Word’s dynamic field feature is part of the Quick Parts tools.

The first novel I wrote (and never published, of course) was several hundred pages long. It was saved as a single document. Word documents can be any length, but putting everything into one document can be impractical. Editing, copying and pasting, searching and replacing, and all other word processing operations become less efficient the larger the document grows.

Good writers use an outline to organize their thoughts. Back in the old days, an outline would dwell on a stack of 3-by-5 cards. Today, an outline is a Word document, which makes it easier to not confuse your outline with grandma’s recipes.Word’s Outline view presents a document in a unique way. It takes advantage of Word’s heading styles to help you group and organize thoughts, ideas, or plotlines in a hierarchical fashion.

All good writers should enjoy feedback. Still, I’d like to know what’s been done to my text, not only to see the effect but also to learn something. Word’s revision-tracking tools make such a review possible. How to compare two versions of a Microsoft Word document You have the original copy of your document — the stuff you wrote.

Most document changes are made sequentially: You write something, save, and then someone else works on the document. If that chaos isn’t enough for you, Word allows you to invite people to edit a document while you’re working on it. This collaboration feature is called Sharing, probably because a better name wasn’t available or Microsoft was pressed for time.