The master document holds links to sets of other Word files. These sub-document contents are not inserted in the master document as such. Rather, the master document creates links to the various sub-documents. You are able to make changes to the sub-documents separately while all of these changes are added to the master document as a default. This works well for integrating separate Word documents of related subject matter. By creating a table of contents and an index in the master document, you end up with an integrated document.

Also, when several different people are writing a single document on separate computers, the master document offers the perfect solution to deliver various sections of the document to the individuals working on the project.
This article demonstrates the basics of creating a master word document as well as sub-documents. Begin creating the master document by opening a new blank document.

Title it as a master document and then save it. You can include the file name and then append with “Master Document”. Next, go to the View tab above the Ribbon and select Outline, found in the Document Views section. This opens a Navigation panel to the left of the blank document. Here you can start to enter the various headings for the document.

In the Outline Tools section in the Outlining tab, utilize the dropdown menu of Level styles and then use the green arrows to alter the headings.

After entering all of the desired headings, click Show Document. You can find this in the Master Document section in the Outlining tab.

There are several different options to access in the Master Document section. Select the entire outline and click Create in the Ribbon. It will look something like the screenshot below. Each one is a separate file attached to the master document. If you have the documents on the desktop, they are automatically added as sub-documents.

Click Collapse Subdocuments to see the links to each subdocument. Ctrl+Left-click on the link and it will open the title to the document just as you placed it in the master document outline. You can then add the content from scratch or, if the document is already created, simply cut and paste.

Do this for each subdocument heading and link and you have created a master document. This is simply the basic approach. There are options to create chapters under the headings, a table of contents or an index. Word will automatically insert a continuous section break within the master document. These section breaks will be inserted before and after each subdocument. There are a variety of different options for master documents in Word 2010. This demonstration relates more to existing documents in a simple master document format. The rest of the features are a different subject. You can always explore the user manual or look out for future articles.

You may actually like the fact that the sentences don’t seem to be crammed together with the Word 2007/2010 default. Even so, this will give you the option of changing that if you need to.

Word 2007 default spacing:

To change the line spacing for an entire document, go to the Styles section of the Home Ribbon and click Change Styles and select Style Set.

Hover the pointer over each of the styles in the dropdown menu, the document will shift to that style and you can select the one you need. In the following screenshot, Word 2003 was selected and we can see how it changed the spacing.

And if you select the Manuscript style, you get a totally different spacing format.

This is certainly more versatile than simply choosing between 1.0, 1.15, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5 and 3.0. All you have to do is hover any of the options and select the optimal format for your document.

If you want to select one of the style sets as a default every time you open a new document, go to Change Styles and select Set as Default.

This may seem obvious and simple, but it is surprising how many users are unaware of this useful option. It is easy to switch between defaults and even return to the original default setting. If you were pleased with the default setting in Word 2003, set that as the default. The same goes for any of the styles. You get the point.

It is also possible to change the line spacing in specific parts of a document. Simply highlight the portion of text in the document to change. Go to the Ribbon and in the Paragraph group, click the Line and Paragraph Spacing button.

Next, choose the spacing you want for that section of the document. This feature also has the live preview option to hover over the different spacing options and see how the section will look. By selecting Line Spacing Options, there are further tweaks to implement.

Word 2007 and 2010 offer a plethora of different formatting options. Use them to create any desired document format. All of the tweaks are in the Ribbon.

Start with a blank Word document. Place your title at the top. Generally you will want to center it. Click Insert then Shapes on the Ribbon and select a shape in the Flowchart section of the shape menu. Word 2010 users switch to Insert and select a shape from the Shapes menu under Illustrations.

You then use the plus-shaped cursor to position and choose the size of the shape. It will be apparent how it looks once you let go of the mouse button. You can alter the position by left clicking the shape and moving it.

There are numerous options for linking the shapes on the flow chart. In this demonstration, an arrow will be used. You want to get the basic design established before concerning yourself with graphic effects.

Here is where you can choose the arrow. You can create a new shape to link the arrow to or you can copy the shape you started with. Here the shape is copied.

Just copy and paste and drag the shape to the desired position. Familiarize yourself with the different shapes and position adjustments. All you have to do is select shapes, size and position them, copy them if needed and link them together. Take 20 minutes or so and just play around until you feel comfortable with it. Now it is time to start adding text. Right click a given box and select Add Text then start typing. Adjust the font if necessary.

When the chart is outlined and the text is added, you can begin working with some graphic effects to make the flowchart attractive. Go to the format tab on the Ribbon. Word 2010 users only need to select a shape to automatically get the Format tab in their software.

Click on the shape in the flowchart and then select a color from the Format color chart, click on the color and the shape takes on that color.

Shadow and 3D effects can be added. From the Format tab on the Ribbon, find the 3D effects and click on a shape then click on “3D effects” and select effects from the dropdown menu. Click on the effect and the shape takes on that effect.

Use the Format tab to add shadow effects and change shapes and other effects. You can also use Smart Art. These are pre-designed graphic layouts that allow you to insert professional looking content without being a graphic designer. Select Smart Art from the Insert tab on the Ribbon and pick a design.

Here is what you can come up with after entering the text and changing the colors on the template design.

There is much more that you can do. This gives a basic idea of the procedure for those with no experience making flowcharts in Microsoft Word. You will be a pro in no time.

One of the things that irritated me for quite some time was the default save folder for pictures. Word always defaulted to saving the picture in the My Pictures folder under the currently logged in user’s user directory. I need to add that I’m using Word 2010 under Windows 7, and that it may be different on other systems.

This meant a lot of switching as I was using a different default folder for pictures and image editing.

I first tried to find a way to change the default save picture folder in Word 2010, but failed to find a suitable setting. The only setting available was to change the default document folder, but that had no influence on the picture saving in Word.

You find that setting under File > Options > Save.

I knew that it was possible in previous versions of Word to change additional default directories, including the directory where the pictures were saved in.

The reason for those missing options is the new library feature of Windows 7. Microsoft has moved the default save folder settings to each individual library. Here is how you make use of that new feature to change your default file save as locations under Windows 7.

Open Windows Explorer and click on the Libraries folder in the sidebar. It should look like this.

You will only see libraries for Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos by default, but can add your own folders as a library.

Right-click a library and select Properties from the options. In my case, I had to right-click the pictures library. You will see a listing of all folders making up that library. One of the folders has a check mark next to it. This indicates the default save location for files of that type.

To change that location do the following. If the new default folder is already listed select it, and click the Set save location button. If it is not listed yet click the Include a folder button and add the new folder to the library. Select that folder afterwards and click set save location to make it the default file saving location. The check mark should now be visible next to that folder.

If you go back to Word you will notice that the new save location will be suggested whenever you save pictures in the program.

You can use the same technique to change the default save locations for documents, videos and music.

You can alternatively use the Windows 7 Libraries Management Tool or the Win7 Library Tool to make those changes.

I’m not sure how this is handled under Vista or Windows XP. If you use Word 2010, or another Office program and run Vista or XP let me know.

Like most other things in life, someone tried to answer that question with a formula, or algorithm. Microsoft Word offers readability statistics, but only if the feature is activated by the user. It is turned off by default.

Here is a quick guide on how to enable the readability statistics in Microsoft Word. Please note that I’m using Microsoft Word 2010, and that the setting may be at a different location in previous versions of Word.

Click on File and then Options. This should open the Options window where the majority of configuration changes can be made. Locate Proofing on the left side and click on it.

Place a checkmark into the box next to show readability statistics and click the OK button afterwards. This enables the feature. You won’t realize directly that it has been activated. That’s because it is linked to proof reading, which was already indicated by its location under proofing in the options.

The easiest way to bring up the readability statistics is to press F7 to run the spell checker on the open document, or by clicking on the Review tab and then on the Spelling and Grammar button.

The readability statistics display counts of words, characters, paragraphs and sentences, information about sentence, word and character averages and readability statistics

The Readability section displays the percentage of passive sentences, the Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.

Flesch Reading Ease scores can be interpreted in the following way:

• 90.0–100.0: Easily understandable by an average 11-year-old student
• 60.0–70.0: Easily understandable by 13- to 15-year-old students
• 0.0–30.0: Best understood by university graduates

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level transforms the Flesch Reading Ease score to a United States grade. A grade level of 9.9 as shown on the screenshot above is expected to be understandable by average 9th to 10th grade students.

If you are a Word user, are you using the Readability Statistics?

Microsoft is not offering a free download of Microsoft Word, or any other Office application like Excel or PowerPoint. The closes to using Word for free is to use Office Starter which offers Word and Excel free of charge. But there is a drawback to this: Office Starter is not available for download. It is distributed by select OEMs on PCs and notebooks. If you purchase a PC and find it installed you can use Word and Excel for free, if not you cannot.

Wordpad

But what are the alternatives? Windows itself comes with Wordpad, a free software capable of reading and editing Word text documents. Wordpad supports both old Office document formats such as doc but also the XML based Office document formats such as docx.

Microsoft Word Viewer

Word Viewer can only display Word documents. It basically is Word without the editing functionality. Users can view and print documents but that’s basically it. Unless there is some obscure file format that is supported by Word Viewer and not by Wordpad, your best bet is probably Wordpad, considering that it is already installed on most Windows systems.

Office Trials

Here is an interesting alternative, as it offers a time-limited free version of Office. Microsoft is offering trials of Office on their website. Users can download those trial versions and install them on their computer systems. The trials are time-limited, which means that they will stop working eventually, unless the user decides to buy the document suite.

Interested users can download trial versions of all Office 2010 editions directly from the Microsoft website. All editions include Microsoft Word and Excel at the least. It may not work forever but this is probably the closest to a free Microsoft Word download you can get. The third party tool Office Trial Extender can be used to extend the trial period of Office for up to five times.

Docs.com

The Internet offers several interesting options for users who need document editing functionality. It may not be for everyone, especially in cases where Internet connections are not available or unreliable, but most users can use free accounts to edit their Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents online.

Docs.com is the official Microsoft platform on the Internet. They have partnered up with Facebook to offer users options to work with Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents online. It is possible to create new documents, upload existing files and share them with friends and colleagues.

Open Office

When it comes to Microsoft Office alternatives, Open Office is usually the software suite that most users will think off. Open Office basically offers a free Open Source alternative to Microsoft Office. It offers a similar functionality, and comes with Word, Excel and PowerPoint replacements that can read, save and edit the document formats of Office 2010.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a free service by Google, that offers document management capabilities on the web. It basically allows Google account owners to upload documents from their computer to store, work and share them online. The service supports all Microsoft Office formats

Zoho Docs

Zoho Docs is another online document management service. It offers free basic access with one Gigabyte storage for users who want to edit their documents online.

To get back to the original question of this article: There is no such thing as a free download of Microsoft Word or any other Microsoft Office component for that matter. There are however valid alternatives available both online and offline that most computer users can use instead of Microsoft Office.

The remaining option is a file recovery software to recover the text. Damaged docx2txt is one of those programs. The recovery application can be downloaded from the developer’s website. The website is offering an online recovery option as well but most users will probably prefer the offline recovery solution especially when privacy is an issue.

The free portable program will launch a new command window which in turn will load the application’s interface. There are only three controls offered by the program. The user can load corrupt Word documents if they are available in the docx format from the file menu. The recovery program tries to recover the text of the Word document loaded by the user. The contents recovered are instantly displayed in the program’s interface from where they can be copied and pasted or saved from the File menu.

The recovery software is limited to docx documents which is somewhat disappointing but it works nicely for corrupted docx documents. The program can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It is compatible with most Windows operating systems and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.

Update: The website is no longer available. You can try Microsoft’s official guides on how to recover data from corrupt or no longer opening Word documents. The guides are available on this web page.

Microsoft’s reaction is a Word patch that is being delivered to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office users in the United States. The patch has been made available to Microsoft partners and original equipment manufacturers since October 2009 as a Microsoft Office Supplement Release. It is assumed that Microsoft will add the patch to Windows Update and Microsoft Update so that users in the United States will be supplied with the patch as well.

But what exactly is removed from Microsoft Word? Once the patch is delivered Word will not be able to handle custom XML elements in supported files, a feature that is not used by the majority of Word users as its usually used with server based processing of Word documents. In short: The patch will not affect the majority of end users at all. And if they are using custom xml they can still prevent the patch from being downloaded and installed on their computer system so that the functionality remains.

Here is a tip on how to get the same result in Microsoft Word. The easiest way to make Word jump to the last cursor position in Microsoft Word documents is to use the keyboard shortcut [Shift F5].

Pressing [Shift F5] in a recently launched Word document will place the cursor at the position of the last change in the document. Word will only record changes to the document this way. Simply placing the Word cursor in the Word document is not enough to make [Shift F5] jump to that position.

The other requirement is that the document needs to be saved in doc format. Word cannot perform the jump to the last cursor position if a txt or rtf document is loaded into the text editor. This little keyboard shortcut can be very useful in large Word documents that are edited over time.

The Word 2007 Redaction Tool has been designed as an add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 to redact text and images in documents before they are shared with other users. The add-in will add a Redact group in the Review tab which can be used to control the process.

To redact text a user would select the text that should be redacted. The next step would be to click on the Mark option in the Redact group in the Word Review tab. This will mark the text by highlighting it. It is also possible to use the Find and Mark command to automatically highlight all instances of a phrase in the Word document. It is possible to review the document at any time before redacting the highlighted text by selecting the Redact Option under the Mark group in the Review tab.

The whitespace character length of each word is altered by 10% (in either direction) to make it harder to guess the correct words. The developer recommends to inspect the metadata of the document to ensure that these do not contain information that could leak the redacted information.

The Word 2007 Redaction Tool can be downloaded from the profile page at Codeplex. It requires the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and the VSTO 3.0 Runtime Service Pack 1 which will be automatically installed should they be missing on the computer system.

That’s where the Word Document Hyperlink Checker comes into play. The Microsoft Word add-in can check all hyperlinks for validity in a Word document.

The hyperlink checker add-on supports Microsoft Word 2007, 2003, XP and 2000. It will automatically place a new menu entry in the Word interface that can be used to open the hyperlink checker interface.

It will display all hyperlinks that have been added to the Word document after clicking on the Show All button. A click on the Suspicious button will display suspicious and broken links which are the links that need to be tested by the user.

The add-in unfortunately lacks a few features that would make it more comfortable working with it including the ability to click on a link to check it in the default web browser, to edit links in the link checker interface or to place the cursor at the position of the selected link.

Another shortcoming is that the add-in will not recognize plain urls as hyperlinks. Only links that have been created using the hyperlink option will be recognized as links.

The Document Hyperlink Checker is still a helpful program for Microsoft Word especially for testing the hyperlinks in large documents. The Word add-in can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

This does mean that an account at Microsoft Office Live Workspace is required before the add-in can be used. The service is free on the other hand and it takes only a few seconds to signup for it. Windows Live account users can use their account to signup for Microsoft Office Live Workspace. The service is currently in beta and provides access to 5 Gigabytes of storage space for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents that can also be edited on the website.

Office 2007 users find the option to upload their documents to the Microsoft Office Live Workspace and to open documents from the online storage space under the Microsoft Office button in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Office 2003 and XP users get a new Office Live toolbar that provides access to three buttons that offer the functionality to open documents that are stored at Microsoft Office Live Workspace, save documents so that they are stored online and to open the Office Live Workspace website.

The Office Live Add-in itself is compatible with Microsoft Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP.

It does so by automatically creating a copy of the document whenever it is saved either by the user or by the software. The functionality becomes available immediately after installation of the Word add-in. Checking the Show / Hide History box will display a sidebar menu with all document revisions of the active document. A double-click on any of the documents will load it in a new Microsoft Word window.

A click on the Settings button opens the configuration menu where the maximum number of document revisions and the language can be configured. The default number of document revisions is unlimited but can be changed if size is of importance to the user.

AutoHistory (via Killertechtips) requires the installation of Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office system before it can be used and installed.

The Word add-in could come in handy for users who regularly work with Microsoft Word documents.

Not all pages have been updated in Google Docs with the information about the added Excel 2007 xlsx support. The upload page for example is not listing the new format as supported. The two other Microsoft Office 2007 file formats, that is Word 2007 with docx and PowerPoint 2007 with pptx, are not yet supported but it is very likely that the Google Docs team will add support for those file formats eventually.

The data transfer of the xlsx files produces good but not excellent results. The color highlighting of a test Excel 2007 file was for example not displayed on the Google Docs page of the document. The main information on the other hand were all displayed the way they looked in the real Office Excel document.

Doc Scrubber is a Microsoft Word metadata scrubber which can be used to analyze and scrub Word documents. The software program is compatible with Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000 or Windows XP. It has been designed with simplicity in mind. It basically is managed by the two buttons Analyze and Scrub.

Analyze lets the user analyze one specific Word document to see if and which information it reveals in the metadata. The Scrub button is where the real action takes place. It can be used to scrub a single document, all Word documents in a folder or selected documents of folder.

By default a new document will be created after the scrubbing with the metadata removed which is another option that can be changed in the program’s settings. The user is given the choice to remove only the metadata that he selects.

A total of 13 different settings can be removed from the selected Word documents including subject, keywords, comments and several dates including creation and last saved data. Three of those 13 options can reset data back to their default values. This includes setting the template back to normal.dot, the revision count to 1 and the total editing time to 0.

The very same menu contains two options to replace the author and company to values specified by the user.

The Office add in basically adds two new context menu entries to the right-click menu of those Microsoft Office programs which when selected will load the default Internet browser and perform the selected action. This can obviously only work if the user has selected text or data in the document at hand. The selected text can span across multiple lines or cells.

Clicksolve integrates itself automatically into the products meaning that the user does not have to load it from a menu. It runs out of the box after installation.

Another interesting feature of the Microsoft Office Add in is the ability to choose the default search engine for searching and mapping from a list of available ones.

The default setting makes use of the default search engine in the preferred web browser. The user can change that setting to one or multiple search engines and mapping services. Choosing multiple services will perform a search on all selected ones if a search is initiated by the user. ClickSolve will automatically open each search in a new tab in the default web browser.

Repair My Word is a standalone application for Microsoft Windows operating systems that can recover corrupt word files by loading,repairing and saving them int he software program itself. According to the developers homepage the program is compatible with Microsoft Word 6.0, Word 95, 97, 2000, XP, and Word 2003.

The corrupt word file has to be loaded into the program with the Repair / Open button. This opens a file browser that can be used to pick the word document. Repair My Word will try to load the file and display a preview of it in its program interface. This can be used to check the contents of the Word document before it is being saved.

Repair my Word can try to repair documents with the following error messages (and others):

• The document name or path is not valid. Try these suggestions. Check the file permissions for the document or drive. Use the File Open dialog box to locate the document.
• Word cannot open the document.
• Word cannot open the document: user does not have access privileges.
• When you attempt to open a Microsoft Word 97 document into Microsoft Word version 6.x or 7.x, the document contains garbage characters.

A great addition would be the option to load folders into the application or let it scan the computer to find documents on its own.

Hidden data can have severe consequences for the sender or his company. Sendshield provides examples of companies who forgot to remove hidden data and the consequences that it had. You find examples for companies like Google, Merck, Microsoft (oh the irony) and the United Nations.

Sendshield acts as a proxy that analyzes every Office document, Word, Excel or Powerpoint, that is attached in Microsoft Outlook. It warns the user that the document contains hidden data and provides a convenient way to remove the data.

A red warning sign and a line appear beneath the attachments of that email which opens a new window that is displaying in depth information about the hidden data in the document(s). The user has the option to remove the data on a individual entry basis or all at once.

This process does not change the original document in any way which is a benefit of using Sendshield instead of manually editing the document.

The so called Article Authoring Add-in is a Microsoft Word 2007 add-in that is currently supplied as a beta version on the official Microsoft homepage. The add-in enhanced the authoring of scientific and technical articles by providing the ability to read and write files from Word 2007 into the XML format used by the National Library of Medicine for archiving articles in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature and PubMed Central.

Information on the Microsoft website is sparse but from the information provided it looks like a niche add-in targeting “the staff of scientific and technical journals, Information Repositories, and early adopters within the scholarly authoring community, as well as developers of publishing solutions and workflows”.

It takes so long because every document has to be right-clicked and edited on its own. Mass editing some of the settings would be nice and that is exactly what the Word Document Property Tool [download, via Lifehacker] offers.

It can scan directories and – optionally – subdirectories for Word documents with the file extension .doc. Wildcards – ? and * – can be used to find all or only specific documents. Once the folders are scanned all documents found are displayed in a list and each can be edited accordingly.

Editable are the following six variables: Title, Subject, Author, Manager, Company and Keywords. Please note that each document has to be edited on its own, it’s still much faster than the manual way of editing the information. You only need to enter the information once and can simply edit settings with two clicks.

This looks to be very helpful if for instance the manager or company changes. It’s also great for adding keywords to documents.