The four dates you can embed in your Word documents

One of the most fun discoveries that new Microsoft Word users make is the self updating date. If you’ve already uncovered this, you know exactly what I’m talking about: you click a couple of times, and suddenly you’ve got today’s date embedded in your document, and it will update itself every time you open the document. But what if what you want isn’t necessarily today’s date? What if you need the document to reflect the date it was last saved, or printed, or created? The good news is, you can get any of those with a couple more mouse clicks and a little know-how.

“Where did that line come from (and how do I get rid of it)?”

Have you ever typed a few dashes in between paragraphs (like as a placeholder or something), hit enter, and somehow wound up with a line all the way across the page that you can’t get rid of, no matter how many times you hit the Delete key?

Infuriating, isn’t it? But I’m here to tell you: It’s both fixable and preventable. (Yay!) Here’s how.

The 6 Best Reasons to Use Styles

Once you get past the beginner level in Word, it’s tough to know what skills to master next. Here’s my suggestion: Styles. For my money, Styles can give you the most leverage over your documents, save you editing time, and let you do all sorts of editing magic you didn’t even imagine possible. Click below for my list of the 6 best reasons you should start using Styles … NOW.

Formatting Autocorrect Entries

If you’ve been working with legal briefs lately, you’ve probably typed “id.” more times than you can count. Here, I show you a trick that one of your fellow readers told me about: having AutoCorrect turn “id.” into its underlined form automagically. Click the link below or the title above to see the full illustrated tutorial.

Make up for your bad typing with AutoCorrect

I’ll admit it: I am not a world-class typist. I can do about 85-90 on a good-to-average day, but years of working with word processors has made my error rate a little dodgy.

And I’ve noticed, over the years, that no matter how much typing practice I get, there are a few words I misspell (really, mistype — I actually do know how to spell them!) frequently. That annoys me. A lot.

But taking the advice of my fellow blogger Vivian Manning, I’m going to stop obsessing about typos and let the computer do more of the work for me. Because if the machines can do more work, why not let them? And because not many people know how to get Microsoft Word to correct their common typos, I’m going to show you how. (Because I want you to do less busywork, too!)

Click the link below to learn how.

Reader Question: How to automatically number your discovery requests … in 5 keystrokes

If your law firm does litigation work, you’ve probably prepared lots of discovery. And you may have wondered if there’s any way you can avoid typing the phrase “Interrogatory No. X” in Microsoft Word over and over again and get that X to be an automatically incrementing number. If so, the answer is, yes, you can!

Click through for a complete tutorial on how to use field codes in Microsoft Word to automatically number interrogatories, requests for production, requests for admission, or other legal discovery.

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