As much as I like to buy new gadgets and gizmos, sometimes the wiser course of action is not to buy some new tool or application but rather to invest a little time in understanding an application I already own and use; to wit, (now seriously, when is the last time you read “to wit” in a blog? Just defrayed my law school education by another nickel) Microsoft Word.
Rick Georges of FutureLawyer wrote a post pointing toward an article from PC Magazine a few months back detailing “Eight Handy Tools in Microsoft Word“. Not all of the tools will be of interest to lawyers, but there are 6 in there that are pretty handy:
- Shrink document by one page — get rid of that final page that has only your signature on it in one easy step.
- Calculate in tables — Word’s tables can perform basic calculations, meaning this can take the place of the way most lawyers use Excel.
- Merge to email — send a Word document easily to a group of email addressees.
- Compare two documents — one easy step to make sure no accidental or sneaky (lawyers? sneaky? no way.) changes have been made between versions of a document.
- Document inspector – Word 2007 only; a very basic metadata scrubber, but better than nothing.
- Built in translator — instantly translate portions of or entire documents between languages.
Check it out. You own it already anyway, may as well learn how to use it.
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