MS Word 2003 Main Menu Overview – Part III – Tools and Window

As it was mentioned, Microsoft Word, first introduced in the early 90-ies, currently is, without all doubt, the most popular text-editing program. The variety of fonts, styles, formatting options etc., is virtually impossible to cover. Although MS Office 2007 (which of course includes Word) has been already released, many find the Word 2003 version quite sufficient for everyday tasks. This article concentrates on the most useful features of the Tools menu and also discusses the Window menu options.

As it was mentioned, the main menu consists of several drop-down options:

• File
• Edit
• View
• Insert
• Format
• Tools
• Table
• Window
• Help

The first 6 menus were covered in previous articles – and now we discuss the Tools and Window parts.

Once your document is typed in (or copied and edited) and formatted – or even before that – you can take advantage of certain tools offered by MS Word. The spellchecker is one of the most important (by the way, automatic grammatical error detection can be turned on and off), and "Word count" is certainly very useful to estimate the length of your piece. You can make the computer loudly read out the document with the Speech feature. Auto-Summary is a helpful tool as well if you need to have an abstract of your paper for a conference, for example.

You can decide that your document is a "final version". Starting form this point, changes made to the text can be marked – just turn on the "Track Changes" option.

Document protection is also available in this menu and recording, editing and rerunning macros can really save you much time.

Applying predefined or user-defined templates is also a possibility.

In addition, you have the control of the Word Application and current document settings – using the Options and Customize features of the Tool menu.

Leaving the Table menu to the next article, we are going to discuss the relatively short Window menu part. The Window menu allows you to split your document into 2 windows making the editing easier sometimes. You can also compare 2 docs side-by-side – just scrolling down to see what is different about (possibly) 2 related files. The list of all open Word documents is located in the bottom of the Menu – you can access each by picking it from the list.