Improve your Efficiency - Making Word Processing documents and Spreadsheets

Improve your Efficiency - Making Word Processing documents and Spreadsheets

Learning these will save thousands of hours over the course of your lifetime. Well worth the investment!


Working Efficiently

You should try and create documents in this order:
  1. Create your content - as much as possible (write your words)
  2. Add your Images (to make it pretty)
  3. Format your document (to format it on the page(s) how you want)

You should learn how to use

Tabs (tab key) - not spaces (spacebar)
Ruler Bar - Setting tabs, setting left and right margins for paragraphs
Page Breaks - Putting new pages onto new pages
View Formatting Marks - understanding how formatting works
Styles - Create a style once, and use many places. Modify the style once and it updates your entire document with a single change

Don'ts - You're doing it wrong

  1. Use the spacebar to format - aka push text right - Use margins, and left and right intent tools
  2. Use the <Enter> key to push text down onto new pages - Use Page Breaks

Reference Material

Here's an article talking about using the tools of your word processor for formatting documents: