But What if You Don’t Have the .PDF Printer Installed?

If you don’t have the .PDF printer installed or you don’t have Acrobat Standard or Pro, then here’s what you can do.

1. Select just the content of the page you want.
2. Hit CTRL+C to copy the content to the clipboard.
3. Create a new document in Word. (CTRL+N) and paste (CTRL+V) the content into the new document.
4. Now simply save the file as a .PDF:  File -> Save As -> and under the “Save as type” dropdow select .PDF -> adjust the filename as needed -> Save.

4* Note that if you don’t have the .PDF printer installed but you DO have Acrobat Standard or Pro installed, you can use the “Save As PDF” selection in the File tab.

1. Press CTRL+G.  This will bring up the Find and Replace dialogue box.

Notice on the tabs on the top:  “Find, Replace. and Go To”.  By pressing CTRL+G you are opening the Find and Replace dialogue box but having it open with the “Go To” tab already selected.  If you were to type CTRL+F you’d get the same dialogue box but it would open with the “Find” tab selected.

Type in the page number and press  “Go To”.

2.  The other way to navigate to a page in Microsoft Word 2010 is to use the item in the footer.  Head to the footer of the Word application window and you will see two page options (depending upon how you originally configured the footer):

If you click on either of the buttons/areas marked with “Page” in the picutre above, you will also be taken to the Find and Replace dialogue box with the Go To tab selected.  And if you don’t have these options in the footer, right-click in any of the grey area in the footer, and you will see a list open up:

I didn’t include the whole list here but if you scroll to the top you will see options for “Page Number” and “Formatted Page Number”.  You can left-click on these choices to have them appear in the footer (or re-click on them to remove them from the footer).

Now you know how to jump to a page in Word, but I still like the keyboard shortcut CTRL+G the best.

1. To spell-check and grammar check in Word 2010, first head to the “Review” tab in the main menu:

2. Next just click on the “Spelling & Grammar” button:

3.  The spelling and grammar check will begin and you should see a box like the one below as the spell checker finds something it wants to correct:

1. Navigate to the “Review” tab.

2. And click the “Word Count” button.

3. You will now get a display of the document’s word count, page count, and a whole list of other information.

To reset margins to Word 2010 default page margins:

1. Head to the navigation bar at the top of MS Word and click on the “Page Layout” tab.
2. Click on the “Margins” icon.  It should be around the third item from the left.
3. Scroll down on the list of margin options and left-click on “normal”.

Your margins should now be reset to the Word default margins.

To create custom margins in Word 2010 (and my heart goes out to anyone playing with margins in Word):

1. Head to the navigation bar at the top of MS Word and click on the “Page Layout” tab.
2. Click on the “Margins” icon.  It should be around the third item from the left.
3. Now click on the “Custom Margins…” option at the very bottom of the list.

You should now be able to enter your custom margin settings.

1. Place you cursor in a field in the column of the table where you want to add a column to the left or right.  In the two column table below, you’d put your cursor in right next to the “?” in the header column (left-click as if you were going to add some more text after the “?”).   You could also simply put the cursor in the white space in the cell underneath this header cell (again as if you were going to add text).

Two Column Table in Microsoft Word

2. From this cursor position, right click to see the context-sensitive menu and left click or hover your cursor over the “Insert” option on this menu. You will see a list of table-related choices appear.



3.  Now place your cursor over the function you want (in this case it will be “Insert Column to the right”) and left-click.  You should now see your new column appear to the right.  Note that if you wanted to add a new column to the left you could have simply clicked the left option above.

Three Column Table in Microsoft Word 2010

So here’s how to add a “Page X of Y” section to your header of footer in Word 2010.  It’s a pain in the neck but it gets the job done until I find a faster way.

1. Navigate to your header or footer area.   To quickly access your header area, head to the very top part of your document and double-left-click.  The “header” label should appear.

2. Let’s assume you want some plain text on the top left, and the page numbers it on the top right.   So within your header type your page text. In this example I typed “HelpSpa.com is a great resource.”

We’re going to align “Page X of Y” to the right side of the page, so make sure your cursor is located right after your left-side text is complete, as in the picture above.

3. Now, still within the “Header & Footer Tools Design” tab, click “Insert Alignment Tab”, and then click “right in the menu that appears”.  Then click ok.

4. Now that the cursor has moved to the right, let’s start typing your Page X of Y text.  First type “Page”.

5. Now’s where it gets annoying.  Head to the Insert menu (e.g. File, Home, Insert, Page Layout, etc) and then find the “Quick Parts” icon at the top right of the menu.  Click the “field” option.

6. You will now be presented with a list of Word 2010 fields.  Navigate down and find the “Page” field and click it (or just press ok with it selected).

You should now see “Page 1″ in your document.

7. Go ahead and type “of” so your document now says “Page 1 of”.

8.  Now all we have left to do is add the “Y”, the total number of pages in the document, to the numbering.  So navigate back to the field list (see Step 5), and this time click on the “NumPages” field and press OK.  You should now see the total number of pages appear next to the word “of”.  In my case I have a two page document so I see the number “2″ automatically added.

…and you’re done.  Previous versions of Microsoft Word had autotext that made this a heck of a lot easier.  But until I can find a quicker way to set this up, the above is my current method of adding “Page X of Y” to the header of a Word 2010 document.

In Word 2010:

1. Navigate to the “View” menu tab and check the ruler box:

2. Once you click the ruler box and enable the ruler, you will then see the familiar Word ruler with the sliding tabs for adjusting the margins (note the tab circled in red):

3. To adjust the margins of a paragraph that’ s out of alignment, simply left- click on the first word in the paragraph to position the cursor.  Then navigate up (just move the mouse — don’t click-drag) to the margin tab (circled in red above), and while holding down the left mouse button, select the bottom portion of the tab (the rectangle underneath the two triangles) and drag the margin to the right (or left if you need to).  As you move the slider you will see a dotted-line as a guide.  Note that if you select just the top or bottom triangles by accident, only parts of the paragraph will move.  If this happens, simply undo the action and try again (you can undo by pressing CTRL+Z or by pressing the undo button — the right curling blue arrow at the top left of the Word 2010 interface, directly above the File menu).

You wills see that .doc files for Microsoft Word are now .docx.  And you will find that Excel files are no longer .xls, but are now .xlsx.

Office File Compatibility Problem

Generally speaking, a problem arises when someone who is using an older version of Office (Word, Excel, etc) tries to open and work with a file from a newer version of  Word.  The older versions of Word such as Word 2000 or Word XP/2002, cannot read the new .docx format.   So you will try to open a .docx from Word 2010 in Word 2003 and you will not be able to do so.

Fortunately there is a solution for this office document conversion problem.  Microsoft has released the “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats” which can be downloaded from Microsoft here.  Note that you should read the directions before you install this pack, as some users must install certain office upgrades first.

So for those of you holding out and not upgrading to a newer version of office (and as a user of Office 2010  sometimes I do envy you, this update pack should solve the “office file compatibility problem”

The steps are different that you are used to in previous versions of Word, but Word 2010 makes it easy to put page numbers in different locations in your document, and also lets you add some nice formatting to page numbers, as well.  So in this article we’ll quickly go through how to add page numbers in Word 2010.

1. First navigate to the “Insert” menu at the top of the screen:

2. Once you are in the Insert menu, navigate over to the right side of the menu bar and left-click on the “Page Numbers” option.  A drop-down menu will appear that gives you page numbering options.

3.  .  Select the position you want (the “Bottom of Page” option is selected in the above image) and a list of options will appear to the left of your selection.  Here is where you can choose the formatting you want for your page numbers.   I prefer the default bottom, centered number for my pagination, but you can browse through the templates that Word 2010 provides (here I’ve selected “BoldNumbers 2″ which gives you a centered, “Page X of Y” format).

Finally, you can also customize the formatting of your page numbers further using the “Format Page Numbers” option in the initial drop down menu (see Step 2).  Using this feature will allow the simple customization of the page numbers (e.g if you wanted to use Roman Numerals or letters instead of standard numbers),  the ability to change where the page numbering starts, as well as the ability to use chapter page numbering,