Microsoft Word is the world’s most widely used word processor, and for good reason — it handles everything from a one-page letter to a hundred-page report with footnotes, tables of contents and tracked changes. Whether you’re a home user writing the occasional document or a small business team producing proposals, contracts and reports every week, knowing Word properly saves time and produces better results. This section covers every common Word task in plain English, from the basics of formatting to fixing problems and using AI to work faster.
Getting Started with Word
If you’re new to Word or want to build better habits from the start, these guides cover the core features that most people never fully learn. Styles and formatting in particular are worth understanding properly — getting this right from the beginning saves hours of manual reformatting later.
- How to Use Styles and Formatting in Word
- How to Use Find and Replace in Word
- How to Add Headers and Footers in Word
Working with Documents
These guides cover the features you’ll use most often when collaborating on documents, creating large structured files or sending personalised letters at scale. Track changes is essential for anyone who reviews or receives documents from others, and mail merge is a huge time-saver for anyone sending letters or emails to a list of contacts.
- How to Use Track Changes in Word
- How to Compare Two Documents in Word
- How to Do a Mail Merge in Word
- How to Create a Table of Contents in Word
Protecting and Converting Documents
When you’re sharing a document with someone outside your organisation, or sending a final version that shouldn’t be edited, you’ll want to know how to lock it down or convert it to PDF. These two guides are short and practical — both tasks take only a few steps once you know where to look.
Fixing Word Problems
Word doesn’t always behave as expected. These guides cover the most common problems people search for — unsaved documents, spell check that stops working, Word freezing and files that won’t open. If Word is causing you problems right now, start here.
- How to Recover an Unsaved Word Document
- Word Spell Check Not Working — How to Fix It
- Word Not Responding — How to Fix a Frozen Document
- Word Won’t Open — How to Fix It
Using AI with Word
AI tools have made several common Word tasks significantly faster. You can now summarise a long document in seconds, get your writing proofread and improved without manual effort, and use Copilot to draft or rewrite content directly inside Word. These guides explain what’s available, what each tool actually costs and how to use them effectively.
- How to Use Microsoft Copilot in Word
- How to Use ChatGPT to Write and Edit Word Documents
- How to Use AI to Summarise a Word Document
- How to Use AI to Proofread and Improve Your Writing in Word
More Microsoft Guides
Word is part of the wider Microsoft 365 suite. If you work with spreadsheets, you’ll find the same level of practical detail in our Microsoft Excel guides, covering everything from VLOOKUP to pivot tables. We also cover Microsoft Teams for meetings and collaboration, and Outlook for email and calendar management — all in the same plain-English format as the guides in this section.
