Here are some of my favorite tips and tricks for Word 97/2000/2002(Office XP)/2003, organized into three sections: The basics, Advanced tips, and Things you don’t have to do.

1. Learn to use Undo – Make a mistake? Press [Ctrl]Z or choose Undo from the Edit menu right away. Keep pressing [Ctrl]Z to backtrack through and undo the most recent editing changes you’ve made.

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This is similar to the function performed by Google toolbar wherein you search for a topic, navigate to a matching page and clicking on the google toolbar highlight button adds a yellow highlight to all the instances of the search text that appear in the page.

Similarly in Word 2007 a feature called Reading Highlight does almost the same. Here’s how you use it:

1. Select Home -> Find to display the Find tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
2. Type the text you want to highlight in the Find What text box.
3. Click Reading Highlight and then click Highlight All. Word applies a highlight to every instance of the text in the document and tells you the number of items it highlighted.
4. To clear the highlights, click Reading Highlight and then click Clear Highlighting.

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Word 2002 and 2003 include a command on the Reviewing toolbar that deletes all the comments in a document. For users of earlier versions of Word, this hack does the same thing.

Comments let one or more reviewers comment on the text of a document without interfering with the content of the document. But once you finish editing or reviewing a document, getting rid of those comments can be a hassle.

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